Freeze Frame comparison... trying to figure out which workflow is best

[Delta-9]

I am trying to determine which workflow is the best. I have made three different video clips from the same .m2t file. All three were created with Steve's hv20pulldown.exe software. Two of the lossless compression engines and the third used my newly created "xvid" compression settings which immediately dumped a finished (720 24p) avi file into my working directory.

The two lossless versions I then ran through Vegas and used xvid on them as well. The difference being the middle step for the lossless versions and the ending file size.

The xvid version didn't require a VERY large intermediate file and the manual final step, however the resulting video was 2x as big as the other two.

The "huffy and lag" versions each had a 1.5gb file created which I then brought into Vegas and outputted the final video. To my eye they all look the same, so I captured a freeze frame of the cat running away from the other cat after they were playing. Which of these three photos do you think looks the best. Take into consideration that this ~12 second video is 7.5mb for the "huffy and lag" and 15mb for the "xvid"

http://img371.imageshack.us/img371/8373/freezeframecomparisonyc9.png

I am leaning to the more manual process which yields the smaller filesize.

[um3k]

The lossless ones look way better than the xvid. HuffYUV and Lagarith should produce identical image quality (as they appear to here), seeing as they are lossless. Stick with lossless as much as you can. Especially in this case, since your xvid settings are creating a larger, worse looking file.

[Ian-T]

Delta-9, I agree with um3k. Both the lossless look better than the xvid. Though the xvid looks pretty dam good. What I did was took a snapshot of this page and put it in Microsoft Paint. Then I blew up the picture and what you look at is the block patterns. You can see that the HuffYUV and Lagarith look exactly alike (which is to be expected) and the xvid shows evidence of some (very very minute) macroblocking....if that's what you want to call it. I don't think it's way off though...but the difference is definately there.

[Ian-T]

Check this out:

http://img167.imageshack.us/my.php?image=comparisonmu8.png

Kind of gives you an idea of what I was saying.

[Delta-9]

Thanks for the input, Ian & u3mk! We are in agreement, I just wanted to see what other people's eyes thought. I had someone else look at it and he thought the carpeting looked crisper in the xvid frame than it did in the other two. I think it might, but the blocking that Ian shows is what I was focusing on.

The subject of this particular video were our two cats fighting with one another off to the left. The black and white cat then quickly ran away, which is the blur that you are looking at.

I guess I am going to have to pick up a nice big 500gb disk to use as scratch during my editing. Because the lossless versions do look much nicer and result in a smaller finished product.