Update: HuffYUV 2.1

[Dr Mordrid]

Thanks to Prospero who first posted this in another thread....

HuffYUV has been updated to version 2.1. It now has some quality settings for both YUY2 and RGB captures and seems a bit faster. Heck, even the low quality settings look pretty darned good.

Have fun.

http://www.math.berkeley.edu/~benrg/...v.html#Changes

Dr. Mordrid


[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 21 July 2000).]

[Prospero]

Most of the authors of various filters plugins ect...., post revision announcements to alt.rec.video. I just happened to see the post earlier.

[Dr Mordrid]

I saw that about 10 minutes after reading your post.

On to the update: I noted that even at the low quality setting at 704x480 the quality was quite high. Also the RGB and RGBA configurations should be helpful to some.

What's also handy is using the HuffYUV or YUY2 files as source for MPEG encoding. MPEG encoders prefer YUV inputs for compression. This way it doesn't have to convert the video to YCbCr before compressing it. Skipping this step speeds up the encoding process. For example, the same 25 seconds of video encoded with Tsunami MPEG:

MJPeg 704x480 to NTSC VCD: 5 min 6 sec

HuffYUV 704x480 to NTSC VCD: 3 min 48 sec

Interesting, no?

HuffYUV is turning into quite a handy option to have in the toolbox.

Dr. Mordrid

[Wiken]

Dr Mordrid: hey hey, i said the other day that i had problems editing those huffyuv files in adobe premiere (that means i could easily open them and play them in the source window, but when i try drag them to the second window i got this damn error)

This was with the latest version of huffyuv 2.1

in 1.3.1 this works find for me so i would appreciate if you could try and see if you have any problems with that, on the latest version =)

[Walrus]

Dr Mordid, I'm not quite sure what you mean by low quality setting. Do you mean you're converting from RGB to YUV? That is the only lossy setting in HuffYUV, and if that's the case, colorspace conversions should result in extremly little if any quality degredations. If you aren't doing colorspace conversions, transcoding with this should have the resulting file being the same (on decompression) as the original.

[Dr Mordrid]

Walrus:

The quality setting in 2.1 is listed as the "YUY2 Compression Method". As far as RGB goes that is the worst way to use HuffYUV for most cards. This is because most of them input video as YUV/YUY2 and then transcode it to RGB.

Feeding HuffYUV an RGB input would mean two transcodings (YUY2->RGB->HuffYUV) during the capture instead of just one (YUY2->HuffYUV) thus slowing down the process and increasing the processor overhead.

Wilken:

I'm getting a crash in Premiere too. The HuffYUV 2.1 files work perfectly with MSPro6 and since I most always edit with it I hadn't seen this with 2.1. After all I just installed it yesterday

As most MURCer's know I only use Premiere with the RT-2000 or under duress

FYI: the crash is caused by a stack fault with Kernel32.dll. I'll pass the Dr. Watson report on to the proper authorities.

Dr. Mordrid



[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 21 July 2000).]

[Walrus]

Dr Mordid:
That's what I thought. The quality settings of YUY2 compression just specifies how aggressive HuffYUV will be in trying to losslessly compress more efficiently. It does not in any way affect the quality of the output result. It's kind of like using maximum compression setting in Zip compression. The data streams decompress the same either way.
You should probably use the YUY2 compression setting that gives you the best compression and that still can capture in full res without dropping frames.

[Dr Mordrid]

I was just tesing all the settings as a matter of routine to see what would happen. We betas are like that 'ya know

Anyhow it looks like this is yet another example of how Premiere can be tripped up by the least little thing. One more reason to apply my minimal-use policy

Dr. Mordrid


[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 21 July 2000).]

[Walrus]

Dr. Mordid: Yeah, I do understand. However, as I archive video in huffyuv for the very reason that it's lossless, I just became a bit paranoid when you mentioned "low quality" setting. I was worried that you had discovered something that I didn't know about it being lossy.