Thomahawk
Mu-43 Regular
Hello all. This is my first post and I want to share some of my experience regarding clips editing. I use the Olympus EP-L5 at least as much for video shooting as for photography.
I am used to produce video in Final Cut Pro or FCPX, but I wanted to preserve all the original sharpness and color and not go through reencoding. Originally my plan was to cut the h.264 clips in QuickTime Movie Player or SimpleMoxieX, join several cutted clips and save them lossless without reencoding - to preserve 100% the original quality.
Unfortunately cutting and join the clips resulted often in display problems - flickering, distortions and the like - even when respecting keyframes for the cuts, like it is possible with SimpleMovieX. So, my lossless approach proved to be impossible and I acccepted the fact that I need to reencode.
Unfortunately again, that brought me into another problem. I used Final Cut Pro X and I was very disappointed how washed out the video looked compared to the original clips. All the crispy picture got lost. I went to the older Final Cut Express (which, by the way, was the only app able to safe all the already lossless cut clips I had stored and could not join together without display problems) and Final Cut Pro both gave a better result. The colors did not appear so much washed out anymore when I watched the reencoded videos. BUT... in direct comparation to the original clip, still the original was way better in color accuracy and color depth and also sharpness. To preserve the orginal sharpness, a quality setting was necessary which results in bigger MB clips than the original.
I must say it really disappoints me to see (once again) how sloppy Apple is nowadays. Whatever I tried, after exporting a reencoded .mov file with .h264, it never was so good as the original. Compressor gave me the opportunity to fine-tune contrast and color, but while the result looked okay (not identical but okay) to the original in Movie Player, VLC showed it completely different.
FINALLY I came across this article which solved this problem:
How to Fix the H.264 Gamma Shift Bug in Quicktime, FCP, & iMovie | Byteful Travel
Basically, the problem is how Apples H.264 export handles gamma inaccurately. Thanks to Mochizuki Takahashi, we have a solution now. He created another quickTime export component for h.264, which can be set to use gamma correctly. It is called x264Encoder. Exporting as QuickTime movie, reencoding using x264, the color results in absolute accuracy to the original.
BUT! I thought I could let my original clips from the camera and cut them in Final Cut Pro 6.0. Unfortunately the exported file shows the same flickering and distortions during some of the clips like I had before when cutting the clips in QuickTime. I even tried joining all clips in QT, cutting and instantly exporting with reencoding and got the same problem.
Strangly, Final Cut Express HD can cut and organize the files, even the ones I already cut before in QT Movie Player 7, and export reencode them perfectly without the flickering or distortion, but FCE HD is not able to preserve the original sharpness. Somehow I suppose it goes trough interlace and deinterlace or something like that, because it seems not to possess a 1080p setting, only 1080i.
Final Cut Pro X is the most bad of all regarding the washed out image. Even by exporting using compressor and setting up x264 there, the resulting video is far off the original colors.
So far I have not found a way to cut clips from the Olympus Pen E-PL5 without inacceptable loss of image quality. The most promising attempt was cutting in QuickTime Player 7 or SimpleMovieX and reencode each clip instantly, later join them all together, but the problem then was, each clip gets its own audio track and is not joined into one track, which makes it impossible to play in players like VLC and the like.
I am used to produce video in Final Cut Pro or FCPX, but I wanted to preserve all the original sharpness and color and not go through reencoding. Originally my plan was to cut the h.264 clips in QuickTime Movie Player or SimpleMoxieX, join several cutted clips and save them lossless without reencoding - to preserve 100% the original quality.
Unfortunately cutting and join the clips resulted often in display problems - flickering, distortions and the like - even when respecting keyframes for the cuts, like it is possible with SimpleMovieX. So, my lossless approach proved to be impossible and I acccepted the fact that I need to reencode.
Unfortunately again, that brought me into another problem. I used Final Cut Pro X and I was very disappointed how washed out the video looked compared to the original clips. All the crispy picture got lost. I went to the older Final Cut Express (which, by the way, was the only app able to safe all the already lossless cut clips I had stored and could not join together without display problems) and Final Cut Pro both gave a better result. The colors did not appear so much washed out anymore when I watched the reencoded videos. BUT... in direct comparation to the original clip, still the original was way better in color accuracy and color depth and also sharpness. To preserve the orginal sharpness, a quality setting was necessary which results in bigger MB clips than the original.
I must say it really disappoints me to see (once again) how sloppy Apple is nowadays. Whatever I tried, after exporting a reencoded .mov file with .h264, it never was so good as the original. Compressor gave me the opportunity to fine-tune contrast and color, but while the result looked okay (not identical but okay) to the original in Movie Player, VLC showed it completely different.
FINALLY I came across this article which solved this problem:
How to Fix the H.264 Gamma Shift Bug in Quicktime, FCP, & iMovie | Byteful Travel
Basically, the problem is how Apples H.264 export handles gamma inaccurately. Thanks to Mochizuki Takahashi, we have a solution now. He created another quickTime export component for h.264, which can be set to use gamma correctly. It is called x264Encoder. Exporting as QuickTime movie, reencoding using x264, the color results in absolute accuracy to the original.
BUT! I thought I could let my original clips from the camera and cut them in Final Cut Pro 6.0. Unfortunately the exported file shows the same flickering and distortions during some of the clips like I had before when cutting the clips in QuickTime. I even tried joining all clips in QT, cutting and instantly exporting with reencoding and got the same problem.
Strangly, Final Cut Express HD can cut and organize the files, even the ones I already cut before in QT Movie Player 7, and export reencode them perfectly without the flickering or distortion, but FCE HD is not able to preserve the original sharpness. Somehow I suppose it goes trough interlace and deinterlace or something like that, because it seems not to possess a 1080p setting, only 1080i.
Final Cut Pro X is the most bad of all regarding the washed out image. Even by exporting using compressor and setting up x264 there, the resulting video is far off the original colors.
So far I have not found a way to cut clips from the Olympus Pen E-PL5 without inacceptable loss of image quality. The most promising attempt was cutting in QuickTime Player 7 or SimpleMovieX and reencode each clip instantly, later join them all together, but the problem then was, each clip gets its own audio track and is not joined into one track, which makes it impossible to play in players like VLC and the like.
