@bramezan
Modern graphics cards have special modules built in that do video encoding, and they do it much much faster than CPU driven solutions like x264. If you have an Nvidia card, you aren't using all your CPU cores because you are using your graphics card instead. In 4.2.3, when you selected ffmpeg as your encoder, it was always using x264 regardless of your video card. In 5.3, we use your GPU if possible. Hence the speed difference in the two versions. Have you observed a quality difference between the two versions?
Yes I have noticed a big difference in video quality between 4.2.3 and 5.3. The export quality of 4.2.3 is way better.
I currently have a ticket opened and I've uploaded samples that even they see the difference.
Is there any news on a fix for this yet? I really want to use the virb software to edit my videos, but as already mentioned when it exports the video the bitrate is too low and youtube destroys the quality when its uploaded.
I dont see how i can keep using the software because of this, i want all of my videos to go on youtube and its pointless putting hd content on when the quality is so poor after uploading
Hello matroX,
For reasons I have not been able to discover, some machines do not utilize their full multithreading potential when exporting video. This appears to be quite rare, I've never actually witnessed a machine do this, but I have heard irritated reports from others on the forums. One of our testers has a 32 core AMD thread ripper and export used all 32 cores at 100%. The "ffmpeg" encoder option does indeed utilize x264 (unless you have a semi recent Nvidia card, then it will use ffmpeg's nvenc implementation). This is something I would love to fix if I can figure out how.
The encoder options are indeed for amateurs, which is by design. VirbEdit is not intended to be a pro or even semi pro software suite. Its target market is people who know almost nothing about video editing, and just want to quickly put together a video. It would be fairly straight forward to have a UI like Handbrake where we let you pick your rate control, specific bit rate or CRF, tune and presets etc. But there is really no desire to do so because that many options will overwhelm all but a small percentage of our users.
As for the quality of the output video, thats a subject on the forefront of everyone's mind, and we regularly make changes to try to improve things. There are a number of factors at play there. One of the most unfortunate is that when you add gauges to a video the over all encoding quality drops pretty significantly. We've found that Youtube suffers from the same problem. When you upload to Youtube, when it re encodes, the same video will end up looking much worse with gauges than the same video without them.
The encoder options are indeed for amateurs, which is by design. VirbEdit is not intended to be a pro or even semi pro software suite. Its target market is people who know almost nothing about video editing, and just want to quickly put together a video. It would be fairly straight forward to have a UI like Handbrake where we let you pick your rate control, specific bit rate or CRF, tune and presets etc. But there is really no desire to do so because that many options will overwhelm all but a small percentage of our users.
As for the quality of the output video, thats a subject on the forefront of everyone's mind, and we regularly make changes to try to improve things. There are a number of factors at play there. One of the most unfortunate is that when you add gauges to a video the over all encoding quality drops pretty significantly. We've found that Youtube suffers from the same problem. When you upload to Youtube, when it re encodes, the same video will end up looking much worse with gauges than the same video without them.
Purdington, can you please confirm that in Virb Edit 5.3 the encoder quality settings do _anything_? Similar to bramezan, I see two things: no visible difference in image quality between any of the export quality settings, and no meaningful difference in file size or bitrate (all within 1% of nominal regardless of how I mess with the export settings).
Since the wordy aspect of this discussion is largely going nowhere regardless of how much it's at the forefront of everyone's minds, here's some actual sample images to try and help things along. On the left is an exported 1080p hyperframe (at any quality setting, they all look terrible), in MPC-HC. At the right is the source in Virb Edit preview, prior to rendering out. It looks relatively sharp in Virb Edit, and just gets absolutely trashed on output.
What's going on here? I picked up a Virb 360 earlier in the week when I read that the firmware had been upgraded to support RAW 5.7K capture, which should make hyperframe/overcapture a somewhat reasonable enterprise when exporting to <=1080p. Then I discover that the software is just awful, and it makes me want to send the whole thing back.
Garmin, you make awesome hardware and then cripple the snot out of it with software that doesn't compare. How can we help you to make this experience more consistent? Can we sign up as beta testers to provide more feedback during the development effort?
