Serious Quality Degradation

Question

Hi all,
Well, there it is.  Screen caps (mag 2x) of what goes into Premiere, and below, what comes out... using the highest Windows Media 9 settings.  I get a similar result with H264
The source is a screen capture of software... and that .avi looks great.  It's the kind of thing you do when you want to make a tutorial video.
I'm stumped.
I see all kinds of good quality stuff out there, so somehow people are producing great quality output.
I'm using two pass, Maximum Render Quality, Decoder Complexity: Auto, Maximum Average Video Bitrate.
Disheartening
Am I asking too much?  I sure hope I'm doing something stupid...
Any suggestions appreciated.
Thank you!

Answer 1

Glad to help
When you're going to the web, you're pretty much unshackled from anything remotely resembling broadcast specs. You can use any frame size and frame rate you want. However, there are some general guidelines you can follow to get the best results.
If I'm doing something that is only going to the web, I'll often use a sequence preset that matches the dimensions of the file I want to export to. And, since I'm usually working with a mix of assets, I typically work with the lowest common denominator. In your case, that's the DV footage. It's non-square, as we've established, meaning that the pixels are actually wider than tall--but computers like square pixels, so let's come up with a number to use.
The one thing we know is that our height--480 pixels--is constant, so we need to establish the width. Widescreen aspect ratio is typically expressed as 16:9--that is, 16 units wide by 9 units tall, when you're talking about square pixels. There's lots of ways to arrive at the math, but for fun, let's try algebra!
16/9 = x/480
(16 * 480)/9 = x
7680/9 = x
853.3333 = x
So, that means that our square pixel DV widescreen sequence would be 853.3333 x 480. Sweet! But wait...
Fractional pixels really don't jive with video dimensions, so we're OK if we just round that number off. 853 pixels would be closest, but video dimensions really prefer even numbers. So, we could round down to 852 or up to 854, and we'd be OK--you'll see people using all three of these dimensions for such widescreen projects. Personally, I don't use any of them, and go a slightly different route...
A lot of video codecs--particularly those used for web deployment--work best when the dimensions are evenly divisible by 16. This is usually called "mod16," and is important because the codecs are usually tuned to work most effectively when blocks of video can be divided into 16x16 blocks, then 8x8 blocks, and then 4x4 blocks (there are rectangular blocks, too, like 8x16). If a dimension is divisible by 16, it's divisible by 8 and 4 as well, meaning that the codec can be most efficient.
With that in mind, I try to find the closest dimension that is mod16. In the case of square pixel DV widescreen, that's 848x480:
848/16 = 53
480/16 - 30
Nice, round, evenly divisible dimensions. You lose a few pixels on the side, but that's not a big deal. You can export directly to those dimensions then (or smaller, if you need to), and you're maximizing your encoder's efficiency.
Now, in real world practice, you probably get a only the tiniest fraction of an efficiency increase, but--it doesn't hurt to try. You've got a few numbers you can play with, and the general formula to cook up your own.
Hope that helps