H.264 vs PhotoJPEG !

AndrVlad

May '13

H.264 or Photo JPEG is very much abstract question which does not have generic answer.



What bitrate? What is content of video to compress? What is quality and preparation, is there any natural noise from camera sensor(if you are lucky to shot in RAW) or artificially added noise? What is output size limitation? What is playback system performance, etc …



So I will not say black or white - yes or no - Photo JPEG or H.264. Just will mention few observations from my experience here.

1. If you try to compress clean video into H.264 you’ll get too much banding - you’ll need to prepare by adding some noise/grain first wich force H.264 codec to keep more details and have less banding. Same for Photo JPEG, but less noise may be added.
   
   
2. If you have very dynamic and a lot of changes frame by frame - Photo JPEG is better solution.
   
   
3. If you have static footage (like 90-95% of footage here btw) with not so many changes frame to frame - H.264 with proper preparation will look better with smaler size.
   
   
4. H.264 have color change issue (but easy to correct) .
   
   
5. Size does matter! If you encode 1 minute of surce Full HD video into H.264 and have less than 250-300 mb as result(quality 100%, multipass compression) then there is big probability you’l have banding or artifacts. Much better result if you have about 500-600 mb per minute as result. For photo JPEG usually at least 500 mb per minute of FullHD is OK, but around 1gb per 1min looks better.
   So if we are not talking abstract in real Videohive life H.264 (based on 1gb upload limit) in many cases is the only solution.
   
   
6. If you encode H.264 from Camera into H.264 or Photo JPEG after some correction (color, etc) then its much better to clean reslted video by “remove grain” or by other technics first and then add some little noise before encoding. Otherwise encoding H.264 from camera into H.264 or even Photo Jpeg degrade video.
   
   
7. Quicktime Pro is much better encoding into H.264 vs. Adobe AE/Premier since Quicktime Pro able to do multipass compression.
   
   
   
   So as conclusion what codec I like more? - It depends.