Video render / output tips from Pitivi wanted!

[cdaringe]

Hey everybody,

I am using ffmpeg for screen capture and loading my captures into Pitivi for easy cutting & sound tweaks.

My screen capture command is as follows, and gets me beautiful video:

ffmpeg -f alsa -ac 2 -i hw:0,0 -f x11grab -r 20 -s 1360x768+0+0 -i :0.0 -acodec pcm_s16le -vcodec libx264 -vpre lossless_ultrafast -threads 0 -y TITLE_OF_VIDEO.mkv

After splicing and adding new audio, I'd like to know some of the best setups for getting clear audio/video out as close to the native recordings' quality/resolution as possible. I'm messing with the parameters, and compression is making things ugly. How should I retain good, grain-free quality after changes in Pitivi? I intend to upload some videos on the yewtubes, and don't want recompression into their flv to make things any less clear. Perhaps Pitivi is the wrong choice in the first place? It'd be great if I could just splice and combine video, then overlay the audio tracks somehow?

Thoughts?

[theSuperman]

Did you ever figure out some good rendering settings? All my video outputs look horrible!

[cdaringe]

nah. I wish! I'd still care to know

[theSuperman]

Damn. I tried using Cinelerra (had to compile from source for 10.10) and it crashes all the time. Pitivi is so much easier to use. After experimenting, I finally came up with this:
-Container: MP4Muxer[mp4mux]
-Audio Codec: Ffmpeg ALAC (Apple lossless Audio Encoder) encoder [ffenc_alac]
-Video Codec: Ffmpeg MPEG-4 part 2 encoder[ffenc_mpeg4]
I changed the video codec bit rate to "10300000"
Of course, the video was quite large (1min30secs was 110megs), but it looked alright. I needed to upload to youtube, so I wanted pretty good quality.

[patocardo]

I've been trying all day long with different non-success results. Anyone knows what parameters do I need to join and render several videos downloaded from youtube?
Most of codecs just don't allow the program to start render, others change the speed of video in relation to audio, others suddenly stop rendering and others are not understandable by player. I still have a lot of containers and codecs to try, but I would like to avoid other day. Does anyone have done it successfully?

[manco]

Container: MP4Muxer[mp4mux]
Audio Codec: Ffmpeg ALAC (Apple lossless Audio Encoder) encoder [ffenc_alac]
Video Codec: Ffmpeg MPEG-4 part 2 encoder[ffenc_mpeg4]
I changed the video codec bit rate to "10300000"

Thanks a million! I had just about given up on PiTiVi until I came across this

[srihari29691]

changing the bitrate fixed things for me!
thanks a ton!

however, youtube supported formats says-

.MPEG4, 3GPP and MOV files - Typically supporting h264, mpeg4 video codecs, and AAC audio codec

but mine has LAME .mp3 audio codec...
I'm afraid the youtube audio quality wont come out well...

[cdaringe]

well make sure to let us all know!

[srihari29691]

it worked beautifully!
my youtube video came out in HD!

[deyanyosifov]

The solution of theSuperman did not work for me as for some reason PiTiVi would not save mp4 files correctly but I found out another set of settings that worked perfectly :
1. Container format: FFmpeg MPEG-1 System.
2. Video codec: FFmpeg MPEG-1. In the Advanced Tab one could increase the bitrate to 10300000 as theSuperman suggested and that produces fine results but the output file is very large. I found out another solution: Do not change the bitrate. Change Emoding pass/type to Constant Quantizer instead of Constant bitrate. Increase the Minimum Quantizer setting to 26 (the setting is located some way below in the list of options, its default value is 2).
3. Audio codec: LAME mp3.

That's it ! The output file had very good quality, was also large, but smaller than if increasing the bitrate. 4:01 minutes, 1920:1440 in 111 MiB. I haven't tried yet if selecting a somewhat smaller value for the constant quantizer will keep the same video quality at a smaller file size. I'll give it a try now. Anyway, maybe it is a good idea if PiTiVi could come with a higher default value for the constant quantizer so that new users do not become frustrated with the program at the very beginning.