My exports come out blurry even if I export in 4k

[Gio08]

Hello,

I've been at this for many hours now and I've tried a lot of export setting combinations. The result comes out blurry. You can see in the screenshot here, on the left is the original footage recorded in 4k and on the right is the exported version of it, as you can see it is a bit blurry & not as sharp as the one on the left.

I tried exporting in 4k as well as downscaled it to 1080p but same outcome. Here are my recent export settings:

I've tried VBR-2 pass, CBR, tried lower & higher bit rates, tried software encoding, hardware encoding, etc. I've also tried using 1080p sequence and used "set to frame size", still same outcome. I'm out of ideas on what else to try. Any help is greatly appreciated, thank you.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi Giorgi5DCA,

H.264 is a highly compressed codec, and results on video with fine lines (like in the screenshots you showed) might not come out well. Have you tried a 10-bit codec? Try a ProRes 422 export and see how that comes out. Let us know if it works.

Thanks,

Kevin

[Gio08]

Thank you. According to many tutorials H.264 is the way which is why I'm using it. I don't see ProRes 422 codec in the options during export.

So I just tried export in 4K using 100 target bit rate & VBR 1 and the quality came out really good, almost identical to the original footage. Certainly better than the 1080p one. It's strange, I thought that downscaling 4K to 1080P would result in better quality especially when zoomin in parts of the video.

[Jeff Bugbee]

What is your export profile and level set at? Can also try swapping to Software Encoding and see if that makes a difference? (Note: I'm not saying this is a solution, this it just a troubleshooting measure)

[Gio08]

Profile set to Main & Level 5.1, Tier set to High. I've tried Profile High, Level 5.2 & even H.265 codec, same outcome.

What I did notice is that when I did an xport in 4K using 100 target bit rate & VBR 1 the quality came out really good, almost identical to the original footage. Certainly better than the 1080p one. It's strange, I thought that downscaling 4K to 1080P would result in better quality especially when zoomin in parts of the video.

[Jeff Bugbee]

It's because you're doing a downscale that you're losing quality. I don't work with much 4k footage so I'm not positive on the perfect workflow, but I'd try exporting/rendering at the same resolution as your source, then taking the exported file and scale it to the output file you need.

[Gio08]

I did try the Software Encoding, did not make a difference in quality.

[Kevin-Monahan]

ProRes: It's under the QuickTime category.

Thanks,
Kevin