Better quality motion maps (Patreon)

I spent 8 hours yesterday night trying different compressions, with various bitrate and keyframe settings to find the best quality for my future releases. 

I realized that H.264 encoding made really strange and bad looking effects on some of the maps. 

Encoding?

It's much more complicated to reach high quality results in video format comparing to stills if I want to avoid vast file sizes.  

Data compression is the process of encoding information to reduce the number of bits as compared to the uncompressed version of the information.

During the creation I’m working in 3d, in 4K resolution, then I capture the scenes in 1920x1080 and continue video editing in the so called Apple Prores encoding environment. Usually there are no quality issues in this phase, but if the final video would be encoded in ProRes, the size of a one minute motion map would be more than 2GB!

About video compression in a nutshell

The compression process is reducing the disk space required to store the video information.  The technique of the compression for still images (like jpg compression) is reducing areas of similar color in the image. The main difference with video compression vs. still image compression is the reduction of "temporal redundancies." Temporal redundancies are the similarities between images. 

The majority of a scene in a motion map from image to image is the same information (fe. a grassy background). True video compression techniques, like MPEG4  & H.264, take advantage of this fact and only transmit the background periodically. The encoder split the video information to so called macro blocks, and only macro blocks which change are transmitted. As compression increases, the colors of each macro block become more averaged, making the pixels within macro blocks closer to the same color. As this effect increases, the borders of the macro blocks become more obvious, which cause choppy animation.  When the compressor is smoothing the edges between macro blocks, it can cause blurry look partially on the map. 

Finding the best balance between quality and size

H.264 is the most advanced codec that is in wide use today, so I'll continue using it. Yesterday I dug deep in the compressor and found the best settings on bitrate and intra frames with still having a managable file size. 

I'll do my best to reach the best possible quality available now in compressed video files. 

I wanted to thank you again for your continuous support during this process!