Diagonal artifacting

[movax]

Seems to be a problem with many of my videos, showing this diagonal distortion:



They look fine in QT player and in Finder preview, only Avenue seems to do this.

Happens with videos across different codecs, but some videos do it and others don't within the same codec. I saw this occasionally in 2.4, but a codec pack install fixed it. I really hope there's a solution besides transcoding everything yet again. Using OSX fully updated 10.6.4, resolume 3.3.1

Thanks for any information!

[edwin]

What resolution are you working with, odd sized resolution could cause these problems. Also DV encoded files give troubles.

[movax]

Hi, thanks for responding.

Odd resolution is what I thought too, but the resolutions are varied, some being standard sizes like 640x480. Some of the videos are of the MJPEG codec, and yes some seem to be the horrible DV codec.

Assuming there was going to be no known solution, I began to look at the DXV codec. I was able to convert one of the problematic videos using Compressor and got it working perfectly in Avenue. But I have a couple questions about DXV codec.

There seem to be no settings, or at least much fewer than many codecs. Does it use a smart algortihm to automatically configure itself? It generated files actually slightly smaller in most cases, with no noticeable quality loss. If you can just fire away, transcoding without many rounds of quality/filesize inspection then using DXV is a no-brainer.

Second, using Compressor it doesn't seem to want to output files at sizes other than 640x480 or 320x240. Is this something in DXV codec for optimization, or could this be an error in Compressor?

Thanks very much.

[Joris]

There seem to be no settings, or at least much fewer than many codecs. Does it use a smart algortihm to automatically configure itself? It generated files actually slightly smaller in most cases, with no noticeable quality loss. If you can just fire away, transcoding without many rounds of quality/filesize inspection then using DXV is a no-brainer.

Yup, that's what DXV was designed for. It's optimized for VJ'ing, without you having to worry about the settings.

Second, using Compressor it doesn't seem to want to output files at sizes other than 640x480 or 320x240. Is this something in DXV codec for optimization, or could this be an error in Compressor?

That sounds like a Compressor error. I just tried it myself, and it's working fine for me. Let us know if we can help you with anything to solve it.

Joris

[phreakhead]

Seems to be a problem with many of my videos, showing this diagonal distortion:
They look fine in QT player and in Finder preview, only Avenue seems to do this.

Yes! I have that exact same problem! It seems to happen with resolutions of 853x480 for me, using MJPEG A, no sound in MPEG Streamclip. The same clips encoded with same codec at 720x480 work fine.

The thing that bothers me is that this USED to work! I used all those clips in Avenue before I upgraded from OS X 10.4 to 10.6. I also updated my Avenue version at that time from 3.2.1 to 3.3.1, and later I noticed that the clips were just bands of smeared colors (found out during a live set! It was quite an unexpected addition - kind of worked for the music though...)

Please let me know if there's a fix!

[Joris]

This most likely has to do with the clip being encoded at a non-square pixel aspect ratio (happens quite often when it's coming from a dv, hdv or dvcprohd source). Encoding to square pixels should solve the issue.

If that's not it, or if you need help with it, be sure to send us the file so we can take a look!

Joris

[phreakhead]

Hmm, weird. I don't think I chose to use non-square pixels (pretty sure they were kept square because I wanted to preserve the 16:9 aspect ratio), but who knows what kind of magic goes on when you encode at weird resolutions like that. I tried to attach one of the videos but it is 20mb and the upload fails. How should I get this file to you?

[Joris]

Wetransfer.com allows up to 2GB files to be sent. You can send it over to support[at]resolume[dot]com...