My question is which codec within Vmix OR which external recorder that could plug in via either HDMI or SDI would give the cleanest and highest recordings possible.

My customers receive a USB of kids sports games from me. I currently record 720 50P as I am using a Canon XF305 which does not do 1080 50P.

So I record to Vmix MPEG2 1280X720 50P @ 50M and then make a final conversion in Grass Valley Edius making an MPEG4 @ 10M. THe result is pretty good but I can't help but think that if the original Vmix recording was a little cleaner then the final MPEG4 would be even better.

Here is a taste of where its at for us and Vmix. This recording was done at MPEG2 50M and then re encoded to a MPEG 4 @ 10M then popped on YouTube.

Note: I have tried recording MPEG4's in realtime within Vmix but found it's hard on the CPU and also the recording at 10M not very good. Perhaps this is because its doing it on the fly?

In comparision to the original camera recording I find it nessasary to record at 50M. The result is very good but still not as clean or sharp at the camera recordings. My understanding is that its not possible to match the camera recordings BUT maybe an external recorder will be the answer?

NOTE: I had my hands on a 1080 50P camera recently and in tests I have done on my TV in my lounge I could not get a 1080 50P MPEG4 file to play via my Dick Smith TV via USB.

I have produced about 1000 USB's this past 6 months and had very few customers saying they have playback issues so therefore at this stage I am thinking 720 50P is a safe bet.

Its interesting because I uped the bitrate on some files last week to 15M on the MPEG4 and both files reported playback issues from customers. I'm not sure if its the bitrate that was the issue OR the fact that at the time of doing the conversion I was also doing a large transfer from one hard drive to another?

Final question, does FFMPEG2 produce better results than the standard MPEG2 within Vmix?

All these variables!

Regards


Martin Duffy

We have always recorded to MPEG-2 at 1080p60 since the FFMPEG integration was added. We typically record at 25M and then upload directly to YouTube and then chop the ends of our sermons once on YouTube so that we don't lose any quality from exporting again from an editing program. I have found that MPEG-2 looks far better after uploading to YouTube than MP4. I was actually incredibly surprised at how terrible MP4 looked after uploading to YouTube vs MPEG-2 uploaded to YouTube. At similar bitrates, I found that MP4 tends to be far less sharp on YouTube and have more compression artifacts. Every time a video is re-encoded whether in vMix, a video editing program or by YouTube, you lose quality. So the more quality you can preserve at each encode or simply removing encodes if possible, the better the video will turn out.

The low CPU usage of MPEG-2 vs MP4 is very nice as well.

Below is a sample of a video we recorded at 1080p60 at 25M in MPEG-2 and uploaded directly to YouTube. This was shot on a Sony HDR-CX900 which run about $1250.

Our recordings typically land between 8gb-10gb.

There are two very different requirements here:

a) Best recording for quality (i.e for post production editing)
b) Best recording format for distribution (immediate availability for uploading to YouTube or putting on a USB flash drive)

It is important to note there is no one size fits all video format,
there are pros and cons to every recording format such as CPU, quality, file size, fault tolerance etc, these all need to be considered when choosing a format.

The help file has some basic info here:
http://www.vmix.com/help...edRecordingSettings.html

And I will provide some additional notes below:

1. For editing, I would now recommend AVI with the HQX codec, splitting the file every 20 minutes for fault tolerance.
The codec is free, uses low CPU usage and is available on Mac as well for FCPX editing

https://www.grassvalley.com/products/hqx_codec

2. For distribution and uploading I would recommend MP4 under Windows 10 using a 750 or higher Nvidia graphics card.
This will take advantage of hardware encoding on the Nvidia GPU which will provide very low CPU usage.

vMix 17 now has options for Main and High profile when usin the GPU which provided higher quality at the same bitrate.

Note that MP4 does not support interlaced, so if you are using an interlaced production (for sports) recording to 1280x720 50p or 59.94p
provides the best quality and compatibility for playback on various computers and devices.

For what it is worth I personally use MP4 with Hardware Encoding for my own productions as it is convenient and universally supported.