Arnaud, It does not by itself do any sharpening. There are many switches available to the user for the various H.264 attributes you may want, and one of them, I think, is sharpening. If you look on SourceForge for the documentation for x264 you will see the range of choices. Fortunately, for most purposes, you can ignore most of them, although the Apple products all have some restrictions on which of the H264 levels they will accept.
I suspect Quicktime was to blame for the shift to darker colors, not the H264 per se. Quicktime has never been consistent in the way it handles gamma. The Mac originally specified a gamma of 1.8 for correct luminescence display. The PC was always a gamma of 2.2. The Mac codecs produce different results depending on the code used on the input image. ProRes to ProRes works just fine, other pairings need to be tested. This will be true for other pairings as well, it is not just a H264 problem. I have seen problems as well outputting to the animation codec as well, in my case, it was shifting to lighter images. It is not clear to me if this is a function of Quicktime's handling of that codec data, or the codec itself. If you are using QT 7 on the Mac, you will see, in the preferences, a switch which turns on/off gamma handling to emulate Final Cut Pro. Enabling that switch solves most of the working problems for video production intermediate work, but doesn't help at all for end users, as you can't control what they have set. QT10 appears to be fudging the difference in that it tends to deliver at a gamma of 1.9-2.0, which is half way in between. QT10 movies are slightly lighter than the exact same file burned to blu-ray and played back in a good blu-ray player. In the end, you need to work backward from the delivery device to figure what work flow will give you the desired gamma. Sorry, Dave On Jul 16, 2012, at 4:58 PM, Arnaud Nicolet wrote: > Le 16 juil. 2012 à 22:29 Soir, David Vogt a écrit: > >> Gents, >> >> I haven't experimented programmatically with codecs, but have been in active >> video production for many years. Without doubt the delivery codec that has >> the best picture per GB is the H.264. It is processor intensive, both >> encoding and playback, but most modern machines have the horsepower. >> Blu-ray, Youtube and others have standardized on it. The fastest encoder is >> the x264, free from Sourceforge, for PC and Mac, and I think unix. > > Thanks for your advice. My opinion about the H.264 codec (for what I've used > it both with the iPhone's movies and programmatically) is that it adds some > sharpen effect and colours are also darker. I was unlucky? > _______________________________________________ > Mbsplugins_monkeybreadsoftware.info mailing list > [email protected] > https://ml01.ispgateway.de/mailman/listinfo/mbsplugins_monkeybreadsoftware.info _______________________________________________ Mbsplugins_monkeybreadsoftware.info mailing list [email protected] https://ml01.ispgateway.de/mailman/listinfo/mbsplugins_monkeybreadsoftware.info
