Video May Not Be as Clear as it Appears After Upload
by
Brett Bumeter
There are many points in creating and editing video for the web where by a video can get hossed up.
Hoss being a technical term from TV Western’s for the application of Murphy’s Law.
The points that affect the quality of a video include but are not limited to the following:
- The quality of the camera lens shooting the video
- The quality of the media recording the video in the camera
- The quality of the stream that sends the video out of the camera and into a streaming capture device
- The quality of the capture program that converts the stream into video
- The settings and codecs for 2,3,4 above
- Then there is the site where you upload the video too!
Those sites usually have a standard size that they prefer to display a video within.
If you make a large video (using simple numbers that are not used on actual uploads), that is 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels and a website uses a standard player of say 400 x 300, when you upload your video and play it in that size its going to get mixed down to a quality level for the width of 400 and the height is going to be disproportionately shrunk.
If a user plays that player and then expands it to full screen (even to a manually adjusted size of 1000 x 1000) the actual video will still have the quality of 400 x 300. So the expanded video will not appear pixelated.
Sometimes you can even hoss things up with conversions. When you edit the video and then render it new, you might change settings around or depending on your editing software you may bring the video in at one setting and accidentally mix it back out again at a different setting.
All of these things can create an end result where the video is not as sharp as what you see!
Here’s an example of a video that I screwed the pooch on about 6 ways to sunday:
My apologies for the auto play, blame CNN, look at the bright side at least its just sound and not some troll throwing marketing pens at you through your monitor.
