…So I have used shotcut before and in the past had a problem after editing and saving time and time again that the video starts looking blurry and pixilated. I want to prevent this from happening again…
The video I have is coming from a digital SD Canon camcorder (FS200)
I was setting the video resolution to 640x360 if the aspect ratio is 16:9 or setting the resolution to 640x480 if the aspect ratio is 4:3.
…so far, so good?
When exporting, there are four choices of lossless…
FFV1
H264
HuffYUV
Ut Video
I am not sure which is the best for what I have…???
In the Advanced mode what format should I set it on??
I had it set to MP4
What should I set the following choices to also??
Codec…
Rate Control?
GOP?
Would it help to save each clip separately when editing and then put them all together to make the movie and save that??
Pixelation normally happens when you scale up things too much.
For the size format you should stick with what you have, in other words: don’t scale the video up!
Look at the settings in your video mode, it should fit with the footage you have.
Its not soo much a matter of final output format.
If you choose e.g. Youtube settings you can leave it as is and you will have good results.
You can trim the quality with the quality settings in advanced mode. 55% (the default) will already be very good. If you set it to 60 or 70% the file size will increase more and more without getting a really better visual result. Everything above 50% is o.k. in my opinion.
There are also lessless codecs, coming on the same downside i.e. bigger (much bigger) file size.
I typically use mpg4 (h.264 codec) with standard settings, but you can play with the quality if you like.
If it’s only two or three, then the default export preset with quality bumped up to 76% (CRF 12) should be fine. The higher CRF is needed because the resolution is so low.
If there are many generations of reuse, then I would recommend trying FFV1 or Ut Video. FFV1 can make a smaller file, but first verify that the file will play back in real-time on your system in the next edit session. (It will probably be fine at these resolutions.) Ut Video is a much faster format to decode, but generally makes a larger file. There is always a trade-off.
…by generations, do you mean how many times am I editing and saving? So for instance, I would edit twenty different scenes from 20 different files and save it. The next day I would add and edit like twenty more scenes and save it to the same place. The more I kept doing that, I noticed the quality was diminishing. The actual footage is straight from the camera to the software (no between). It would like fine when seeing it through the camera and loading it (before editing) into shotcut…in this particular camera, every different scene is a different file…
.....with scaling, do you mean messing with the video as far as brightness or color? or like the ratio and size numbering?. Are the settings I was using ok? Anything I should not do that I have been doing? Should I use Ut Video or H.264?
@Ohnjay, there is something fundamentally wrong here.
Shotcut, like most video editing software, allows you to take a selection of different video clips and rearrange/ combine them into a new video clip. To export the new video clip, it has to re-encode all of the original material whether or not it has been altered by any editing functions. There will always be a small loss of quality when this happens.
That loss of quality will not change however many times you edit and save your project because it only applies when the final export of the finished video is executed.
Can you confirm your workflow?
It should be something like…
Import various clips into Shotcut
Apply filters/ transitions/ effects
Save Shotcut project file - project.mlt
Next day or whatever…
Open Shotcut project file- project.mlt
Add clips/ change edits/ apply filters etc.
Save Shotcut project file.
And so on and so on till it’s finished. at which point…
Save Shotcut project file
Export final video file.
Any exports of video files during that process should only be to check how things are looking without the stuttering etc. that complicated projects can cause when viewing the timeline. These video files - say for example day1edits.mp4- should not be then imported back into Shotcut as a starting point for the next days edits but from the description of your issues, I suspect that this may be what is happening.
If I you already know all this and I am on the wrong track please accept my apologies - just trying to help you get the results you want.