Using ffmpeg to encode a high quality video

Question

I have a set of video frames saved as images in a directory  and I m trying to encode these to a good quality video  however every setting and every format I try produces very noticeable artifacts   The basic command is this   ffmpeg -r 25 -i  4d png myvideo mpg   and I ve tried the minrate and maxrate flags  Any of  mpg  avi  mov  flv  formats will do   Any suggestions for settings  Final file size is not an issue

User · Answer

Unless you do some kind of post-processing work  the video will never be better than the original frames  Also just like a flip-book  if you have a big  jump  between keyframes it will look funny  You generally need enough  tweens  in between the keyframes to give smooth animation  HTH

User · Answer

Make sure the PNGs are fully opaque before creating the video  e g  with imagemagick  give them a black background   convert 0 png -background black -flatten  matte 0 opaque png   From my tests  no bitrate or codec is sufficient to make the video look good if you feed ffmpeg PNGs with transparency

User · Answer

You need to specify the -vb option to increase the video bitrate  otherwise you get the default which produces smaller videos but with more artifacts     Try something like this   ffmpeg -r 25 -i  4d png -vb 20M myvideo mpg

User · Answer

A couple of things    You need to set the video bitrate   I have never used minrate and maxrate so I don t know how exactly they work  but by setting the bitrate using the -b switch  I am able to get high quality video   You need to come up with a bitrate that offers a good tradeoff between compression and video quality   You may have to experiment with this because it all depends on the frame size  frame rate and the amount of motion in the content of your video   Keep in mind that DVD tends to be around 4-5 Mbit s on average for 720x480  so I usually start from there and decide whether I need more or less and then just experiment   For example  you could add -b 5000k to the command line to get more or less DVD video bitrate  You need to specify a video codec   If you don t  ffmpeg will default to MPEG-1 which is quite old and does not provide near the amount of compression as MPEG-4 or H 264   If your ffmpeg version is built with libx264 support  you can specify -vcodec libx264 as part of the command line   Otherwise -vcodec mpeg4 will also do a better job than MPEG-1  but not as well as x264  There are a lot of other advanced options that will help you squeeze out the best quality at the lowest bitrates   Take a look here for some examples

[video] Using ffmpeg to encode a high quality video

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