My MP4 exports are ugly, they have a foggy haze.

[Steve.L]

Okay, this really bothers me now. I touched on this previously in this thread: Convert/Export Encoder Profile Configuring but I thought it more pointed for the title to address it directly:

Before, I thought it was just the size of the window I was viewing it in, or even worse, just my imagination. But now I've proven to myself: that my MP4 exports to NOT have the same quality of color (probably not video either) than the raw .bvr files viewed directly in BI. WHY IS THIS?

Here's the proof, this composite of screengrabs, on the left from BI while viewing as a .bvr, on the right from the resulting MP4...this is downright ugly, look at the white haze on the blue car, and on the dark purple tree, as if there's some sort of filter over it. Look at the darkness of the shadow on the white SUV across the street, and on the pavement itself, compared with the MP4. Any advice to "fix" this? Other than to use some sort of video editing to re-enrich the color back to what it should be?



Here are are my export settings.

 

[bp2008]

That exact problem is one of my pet peeves. My short answer is to suggest you try some other video player software, or look for any video output settings in the video player or in your graphics driver's software.

The long answer, the reason this is a problem is because of human incompetence.

For a very long time, most display devices could not be trusted to render the darkest darks and brightest whites correctly. So video producers started limiting the contrast of their content so it did not use the full dynamic range that was technically available, in order for details to be preserved on bad TVs. This comes with the downside of the video having noticeably worse contrast on good displays, like on the right side in your example.

So of course, TV makers responded by starting to increase the contrast of incoming video sources to make it look more like the left side again because that looks better.

Then the age of digital video and IP cameras came along and it is like the wild west, there are many different components in the video processing pipeline, from the image sensor to the camera's image processing algorithms, the camera's video encoder, the decoder(s) in your VMS software, possibly more image processing algorithms, before the video is scaled and finally encoded again and sent to your display device over the HDMI/DP/etc cable, then the display device decodes the signal and applies its own image processing and scaling and finally shows it to you.

Some components of the video processing pipeline may be trying to decrease the contrast for stupid legacy reasons while other components may try to increase the contrast for the same stupid legacy reasons. Many of the components are frankly doing it wrong, and there's rarely a setting you can find to change the behavior in any of the related systems. If you find one, it is rarely clear what the setting does exactly. As an example, Blue Iris has a setting that can influence this behavior, but it is only in Blue Iris Settings > Web Server > Advanced > Encoder options > Full range color. If you wanted to know what exactly that does, well hahaha good luck because there's no tooltip and it isn't mentioned in the help file. It is laughably narrow in its scope anyway, only affecting web server video encoding profiles.

In your example, the left image actually is suffering from some detail loss likely due to something increasing the contrast too far. It is particularly noticeable in the darker parts. The right side example is obviously lower contrast but it preserved those details. Some details may even have been lost already by an earlier part of the process, which you have no way of knowing short of building the entire system yourself (from the image sensor to the display device) and painstakingly analyzing the video data at every stage. It is a damned nightmare for anyone who cares about optimum image quality.

Don't even get me started on HDR and the awful way that current PC operating systems handle it.

 

[bp2008]

Oh, so Blue Iris's Full range color option is also available in the Encoder profiles if you choose to re-encode the video during export. I don't know if it works but it might cause the video to appear with better (or worse, lol) contrast in your video player of choice. Or it might not have any noticeable effect at all.

 

[Steve.L]

Thank you for the comprehensive reply. I am so relieved to hear that I am not alone in my displeasure with this condition, and that it wasn't some obscure setting or parameter that I may have overlooked. When you say the contrast in the image on the left is too strong, I tend to agree, as the blue on my Camry isn't actually that deep/rich.

Incidentally (as my original topic linked above alludes to), I dinked around a fair bit with encoder profiles (albeit not with "full range color") back then only to find no differences in output, so I gave up. It sounds like it would be futile waste any more time on it at this point, I just have to accept it. It makes me wonder if a lot of users just never noticed it, or didn't care to investigate.

 

[dok0619]

Thank you for the comprehensive reply. I am so relieved to hear that I am not alone in my displeasure with this condition, and that it wasn't some obscure setting or parameter that I may have overlooked. When you say the contrast in the image on the left is too strong, I tend to agree, as the blue on my Camry isn't actually that deep/rich.

Incidentally (as my original topic linked above alludes to), I dinked around a fair bit with encoder profiles (albeit not with "full range color") back then only to find no differences in output, so I gave up. It sounds like it would be futile waste any more time on it at this point, I just have to accept it. It makes me wonder if a lot of users just never noticed it, or didn't care to investigate.

Actually I exported my first clip ever today frim my new doorbell and posted because someone asked me to post a sample and I told him I didn't know if I didn't do it correctly because the clip quality didn't look as good as viewing in BI.....

 

[samplenhold]

I have never really noticed the difference you have documented here. But I never tried to compare the two.

I have had issues exporting video on occasion. I usually export in MP4 format. But sometimes the output MP4 file will not play on any of the several video apps on my computers. So I then export it in AVI format. It is a PITA but not enough for me to hunt it down.