AVCHD better than Prores?

in this video I will have a closer look on the quality differences of the recording formats AVCHD pro rs-422 and ProRes HQ i did this test primarily for myself because i wanted to find out which codec i want to use in future productions and i didn't find a lot of information on the web about the quality differences of pro res for two two and ProRes HQ most people say just use HQ it has a higher bitrate and 10-bit color depth so it's higher quality hence the name yet I have a Canon c100 as my main production camera which is an 8-bit only source and nobody could really tell me whether recording an HQ would give me any real benefit over using the lower bitrate pro res for two to mathematically recording an 8-bit source to a 10 bit codec does not increase the color quality of the footage the missing two bits at the end are filled up with zeros and it's just a waste of memory space I often work on several film projects simultaneously and I don't like the thought of wasting harddrive space by using an oversized codec for my source material however I thought the higher bitrate of ProRes HQ was only due to the higher color depth but as I found out that is not the case the first shoot with a Canon c100 and my new Pro res recorder a Thomas ninja star was with a friend of mine who is a magician and wanted to show off his new trick the Chinese mask change you can find a link in the description below I set the recorder according to my source stream 8-bit four to two progressive back at my computer at first glance the pro rs-422 material looked good as I expected but at a closer look I discovered this now let me be clear the art affecting we are looking at in this video is comparable minor and in the moving image it is hardly noticeable but as it is about the differences of the codecs we have two pixel peep a lot as the differences are very small still I was quite surprised and disappointed especially when I compared the pro rest of the AVC HD file that wasn't recorded internally I had a high expectations for the image quality of pro res because of the applause of many people on the internet and its status as an industry standard codec so before that I would never have thought that an AVC HD video could hold the details better than a pro res video that has a bitrate five times higher I'm not saying it's about codec but it has its limits due to its nature and that was a point of time when I wanted to know more about these limits so let's have a look together the differences we can see here are very dependent on the image content while ProRes is an intra frame codec AVC HD is inter frame meaning it is compressing in sequences of images I don't want to dig further into this now because this is not what the video is about you can find a lot of information about this online the essence of this fact however that is important for us now is that it is most difficult for an intra frame codec like ProRes to compress images with a lot of detail while it is most difficult for an interfering codec like AVC HD to compress motion the background in this shot is highly detailed but it does not move very much which is why the AVC HD fails better here and preserving the details in the background the pro res however shows that the advantages in the colored detail on the costume especially in the red channel the red ornaments degrade to washed-out blotches in the AVC HD this is clearly due to the higher color sampling of pro res 4 to 2 also when I looked at the close-up scenes with more motion the pro has had the edge over the AVC HD while there's quite a noticeable amount of so-called mosquito noise from the DCT compression around the edges of the ornaments the artifacts in the AVC HD video look worse still keep in mind that these artifacts are hardly visible in the moving image even on a big TV screen you won't see them with a naked eye but after that discovery I wanted to try out if the ProRes HQ would fare better with highly detailed images so on the second shoot I set the autonomous recorder to HQ and it really seems that ProRes HQ does not only use its higher bit rate for the 10-bit color quantization but also for a more gentle DCT compression that allows better detailed preservation in low contrast areas of the picture the amount of artifacts in a quite static but highly detailed image are on par with the AVC HD the interframe compression of the AVC HD code it acts like a denoiser which is why the AVC HD looks cleaner and more quiet here by the way the shots were made with a native ISO of the sensor ISO 850 in the moving parts of the image the Prois HQs the clear winner in terms of quality and I would have been really surprised if it had been otherwise but a collar detail and no interframe compression artifacts this quality comes at the expense of a bit raid that is more than seven times higher than the bit rate of AVCHD one hundred eighty four megabits a second I did some additional test shots to see a side-by-side comparison of all three codecs one of my favorite test shots is water or water reflections this is a tough one for interframe codecs to compress because the motion of the water is very quick and unpredictable artifacts are very noticeable and every frame both ProRes codec smoth the shot equally good with no apparent artifacting for another detail handling test I made this highly artistic a shot of the ground the differences are hard to see but the AVC HD appears slightly less saturated and attached softer than the pro res codecs in the pro res you can see tiny blueish and greenish color nuances in the gravel in the AVC HD with its photo zero color sampling these nuances disappear and the grave looks more uniform this is a highly detailed but static white shot this should be easy to do for AVCHD and a tough one for the ProRes codex zooming in on the rather dark and not so contrast the areas the differences are best visible once again the AVCHD looks better in this area than the progress four to two which appears noisy and does not have a lot of detail in the shadows in terms of color rendering they win once again against the AVCHD I also noticed some weird tiny color fringing and several shots which appear only in the ProRes and not in the AVC HD I'm not sure whether the AVC HD just blends these small artifacts with its photo zero color sampling or if there's some correction going on inside the camera which is not applied to the HDMI output signal I'm not sure how to interpret these colorful Naumann ons they appear quite often but then again they are so small that I tend not to bother about them another test I was very interested in is the low-light high ISO noise test noises similar to water very challenging for every codec to compress because it's a very fine and fast and in consistently moving pattern I normally shoot with a picture profile that is based on the wide dynamic range gamma and I used the internal noise reduction of the camera which is set to four for this test I shot the scene with and without internal noise reduction for AVC HD the test starts with a native ISO 850 this is ISO 6400 and this is 20,000 I so normally I would avoid to go higher by any means but for the sake of science let's crank it up to 80,000 I so the image is atrocious but we can see here how the Codex handled the noise as I said before the AVCHD interframe compression acts like a denoiser a bad one which is not always a good thing in these higher iso's it makes the noise blotch here and it also affects the actual image it gets soft and edges tend to move post-production Dinos I can handle clean noise much better than compressed blotchy noise I did some additional shots for further comparison and to be honest I didn't find any big differences in many shots often I found myself blowing up the images to 600% and pixel peeping like an idiot but the only differences I could discover where : winces on pixel level and sometimes some small motion add effects I don't really like to say it because I spent quite some money on the external recorder but the AVCHD actually does a very good job with its 24 megabits per second and in many cases it delivers I would say 98% of the image quality of ProRes so I hope this was enlightening for you I decided to use the pro as HQ codec for my serious productions and leave the pro s for 2 to 4 many jobs the internal AVC HD will also be a perfect choice as it as far as memory consuming but not that much inferior to the ProRes codec thanks for watching and see you again

Channel: kurtenbachfilm

Views: 108,406

Keywords: prores, 422, HQ, AVCHD, Codec, Canon C100, C100, Atomos, Ninja Star, Ninja

Id: E92jDQpou4Q

Length: 8min 34sec (514 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 28 2014