Why does VIRB Edit Export at Half Original Bit Rate?

RE: Why does VIRB Edit Export at Half Original Bit Rate?

aramezan — Mon, 28 May 2018 01:12:24 GMT

Tory, more details are helpful. What is the bitrate of your source files? What is the bitrate of the resulting exported video? What encoder/decoder setting are you using? What export quality are you choosing? Do you have a newer nvidia card? Im also assuming you are using virb edit 5.4.2

RE: Why does VIRB Edit Export at Half Original Bit Rate?

Former Member — Sat, 26 May 2018 13:20:24 GMT

RE: Why does VIRB Edit Export at Half Original Bit Rate?

aramezan — Sat, 26 May 2018 13:16:05 GMT

Purdington, sorry its taken some time for me to get back. I have downloaded the update and doing a lot of testing. So far everything is looking good. I'll definitely post back on monday with much more detailed info.

Just some quick notes. The quality does look way better. I am now happy with the quality. It seems "medium" setting is what "max" used to be, which is 40mbr for a 4K video. The "max" bitrate does seem really high now, probably too high, but thats ok because we now have the option to choose high or medium. At this point if I had any critiques, they would be very minor and just things to fine tune, but not really necessary to change quickly.

Thanks very much for working with us to get this fixed!!

RE: Why does VIRB Edit Export at Half Original Bit Rate?

Former Member — Thu, 24 May 2018 16:02:56 GMT

Windows VIRB Edit 5.4.2 is Live, and contains the fix for export quality. I'd love to hear your feedback
https://www8.garmin.com/support/down...ls.jsp?id=6591

RE: Why does VIRB Edit Export at Half Original Bit Rate?

aramezan — Sun, 20 May 2018 23:50:22 GMT

Purdington, I'm sure you been really busy and appreciate your efforts in fixing this problem. Haven't heard any updates on the discussion we've been having and just wanting to see where we are. I felt with our previous discussions you are really close to figuring this thing out. These discussions have been really good for us as it creates a better chance for us being happy with the new update when it comes out, instead of getting high hopes and being let down. And as slowly as new builds of virb edit are released, I want to make sure we nail this solution to the quality problem once and for all. Thanks!!

Also, if there is any testing that I can do on my end to help, please let me know.

RE: Why does VIRB Edit Export at Half Original Bit Rate?

Former Member — Mon, 14 May 2018 01:48:38 GMT

bramezan First, you'll have to export a video the normal way, through VirbEdit, but it doesn't need to finish. Just make sure it actually starts (ie progress bar moves at least once, or you see the VirbExport process in your task manager) before you cancel it.
When VirbEdit exports your video, one of the first things it does is writes out a little file at C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Local\Temp\Garmin\Virb\export_settings.xml
You can edit that file with any text editor. You should see a couple lines that look like this:

<FrameRateDenominator>1001</FrameRateDenominator>
<FrameRateNumerator>30000</FrameRateNumerator>

Frame rates are typically expressed as a ratio of two integers. You'll want the numerator to say 60000 if you want 60fps.
Once you've modified the file how you want to, save it and you'll have to run VirbExport from the command line with the full path to that xml file as an argument, like so:

VirbExport.exe "C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Local\Temp\Garmin\Virb\export_settings.xml"

That will kick off an export with the settings in the file, and it should produce a 60fps video. The system is designed to allow any frame rate, so you can put whatever you want in those fields, though I've found it doesn't work so good with 4k 300 fps...

Just thought I'd post back and let you know how it went. It export at 60 fps with a bitrate of 82. Video quality looked just as good as the source. Only problem I saw was I had to export twice as the first one would not open. That could have been something on my side but I will continue to test more. Thanks for the info you provided!!!

RE: Why does VIRB Edit Export at Half Original Bit Rate?

Former Member — Sat, 12 May 2018 00:44:36 GMT

Thanks ill give that a try

RE: Why does VIRB Edit Export at Half Original Bit Rate?

Former Member — Fri, 11 May 2018 23:16:33 GMT

bramezan First, you'll have to export a video the normal way, through VirbEdit, but it doesn't need to finish. Just make sure it actually starts (ie progress bar moves at least once, or you see the VirbExport process in your task manager) before you cancel it.
When VirbEdit exports your video, one of the first things it does is writes out a little file at C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Local\Temp\Garmin\Virb\export_settings.xml
You can edit that file with any text editor. You should see a couple lines that look like this:

<FrameRateDenominator>1001</FrameRateDenominator>
<FrameRateNumerator>30000</FrameRateNumerator>

Frame rates are typically expressed as a ratio of two integers. You'll want the numerator to say 60000 if you want 60fps.
Once you've modified the file how you want to, save it and you'll have to run VirbExport from the command line with the full path to that xml file as an argument, like so:

VirbExport.exe "C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Local\Temp\Garmin\Virb\export_settings.xml"

That will kick off an export with the settings in the file, and it should produce a 60fps video. The system is designed to allow any frame rate, so you can put whatever you want in those fields, though I've found it doesn't work so good with 4k 300 fps...

RE: Why does VIRB Edit Export at Half Original Bit Rate?

Former Member — Fri, 11 May 2018 16:45:01 GMT

"I believe the drastic reduction in bit rate was due to it reducing the fps from 60 to 30"--aramezan

We only allow exports with settings that match our cameras. Since Garmin doesn't make any cameras that record 4k 60, we don't support exports with those settings either. Of course, you are exporting a 4k 60 video from VirbEdit, which means....:eek:

:mad::mad::mad:

Actually, if you really want to, you can make it export a 4k 60 video, its just a bit of manual work. Let me know if you are curious.

I'm definitely curious!!!

RE: Why does VIRB Edit Export at Half Original Bit Rate?

Former Member — Fri, 11 May 2018 16:03:02 GMT

I mostly avoid getting too far into the weeds with the settings. I mostly set the 'preset' option and specify rate control (such as bit rate or crf). Now that you mention it though, I have been letting the nvidia encoder pick the bit rate and just supplying increasingly higher presets for higher quality settings. I'll specify a bit rate and see if that makes things look better. It sounds like it has for you.

RE: Why does VIRB Edit Export at Half Original Bit Rate?

aramezan — Thu, 10 May 2018 19:22:59 GMT

I think that quote was from bramezan, but that's ok as we get mistaking for each other in real life too :).

I'm interested to know what parameters virb edit passes ffmpeg when encoding. Ffmpeg has so many options as I'm sure you know. You can chose to encode by target bitrate, target quality, target filesize, encoding time, etc. I have taken a 4K source file (60Mbr) from ultra 30 and encoded it using ffmpeg command line with the commands below using the nvenc api. I am only able to see quality degradation compared to the source by lowering target bitrate down to 40Mbr.

ffmpeg -i 20180120_4K_Source.mp4 -c:v h264_nvenc -b:v 60M output.mp4

How are you determining the target bitrate of 40Mbr to pass to ffmpeg? My bet is, you aren't. You are using one of the other options where the encoder will determine bitrate for you and that maybe the bitrate determined is different between libx264 and nvenc for the same parameter passed. In your tests is the bitrate different for the degraded nvenc output and the new libx264 output you say looks good?

RE: Why does VIRB Edit Export at Half Original Bit Rate?

Former Member — Thu, 10 May 2018 18:21:54 GMT

@bramezan libx264's speed scales with the number of CPU cores you have.

I've noticed that the "Media Foundation" encoder setting seems to produce pretty good quality output, and also leverages your GPU. Has anyone had better luck trying that out?

RE: Why does VIRB Edit Export at Half Original Bit Rate?

Former Member — Thu, 10 May 2018 18:19:22 GMT

"I believe the drastic reduction in bit rate was due to it reducing the fps from 60 to 30"--aramezan

We only allow exports with settings that match our cameras. Since Garmin doesn't make any cameras that record 4k 60, we don't support exports with those settings either. Of course, you are exporting a 4k 60 video from VirbEdit, which means....:eek:

:mad::mad::mad:

Actually, if you really want to, you can make it export a 4k 60 video, its just a bit of manual work. Let me know if you are curious.

RE: Why does VIRB Edit Export at Half Original Bit Rate?

Former Member — Thu, 10 May 2018 18:17:51 GMT

So for the ones that want good quality what CPU do you recommend to help speed up the process?

RE: Why does VIRB Edit Export at Half Original Bit Rate?

Former Member — Thu, 10 May 2018 18:01:50 GMT

"Are you saying people who use invidia graphics are just screwed?" --bramezan
"temporarily screwed" would be more accurate. I have a fix.

"I understand CBR and VBR and if you encode a CBR source video with VBR the bitrate may go down naturally. But from what I've seen, the source is already VBR." --aramezan
I believe all videos recorded with virb cameras have the same bit rate, whether its staring at a motionless wall for 10 minutes, or a fast moving mountain biking video. A large part of the bit rate loss comes from encoding to VBR from the CBR source video because 80mb/s is an unnecessarily high bit rate for most videos. That being the case, comparisons between the source and destination video bit rates aren't helpful in determining quality. My goal is for a max quality export to be visually indistinguishable from the source video. If VirbEdit exports an 80Mb/s video down to 40 and it looks just as good as the original, that's a win in my book.

"Purdington, please make sure you are testing with an action video and not a test video of someone's cubicle" --aramezan
I will keep this in mind

"It sounds like you have already found a solution? Is there any roadmap as to when an update will be released?"
Yes I have a fix, yes there is a road map for when it will be released. No I can't tell you when it is :(

For the more technically minded, when you select "ffmpeg" as your encoder, in 5.x we started using nvenc (Nvidia's encoding API) in our exports for people using nvidia cards. Everyone else's exports use libx264. It turns out nvenc has terrible quality even with the highest possible quality settings. The solution I settled on is to have high and max quality exports use libx264, which does not leverage the gpu, while medium and low still use nvenc. This means your exported video will look better but take longer for high quality settings, and for medium and low they will be much faster, but much lower quality. I think some of the other speed improvements in 5.x will still make libx264 exports faster than they used to be, but 4k videos are not going to export in real time anymore. I deeply wish that there was a way to export a video really fast at really high quality with reasonable file sizes, but there is no way that I am aware of. You pretty much have to pick 2 of those things.

RE: Why does VIRB Edit Export at Half Original Bit Rate?

aramezan — Thu, 10 May 2018 01:45:02 GMT

Purdington, please make sure you are testing with an action video and not a test video of someone's cubicle where there is no movement. In my kayaking videos where I'm moving 1-2mph, I see a lot less degradation than my cycling videos, even though the source of both is 60mbr and output is 41mbr. Which makes sense that a higher motion video would require a higher bitrate when you start thinking about keyframes and encoding.

RE: Why does VIRB Edit Export at Half Original Bit Rate?

Former Member — Thu, 10 May 2018 01:26:22 GMT

So I just did a test video on a non nvidia graphics with a source bit rate of 80mb at it exported and 30mb.

Update: I did some more testing and you are definitely on to something. I believe the drastic reduction in bit rate was due to it reducing the fps from 60 to 30 (not sure why that should matter as no other software does.) I tested it on 4k 30 and source is 60mb and it exported at 55mb. That is definitely an improvement but in 4.2.3 if you selected medium target quality it would export at the source bit rate. Now selecting max reduces it by 5mb. Having said that it's not worth the export times!!!

RE: Why does VIRB Edit Export at Half Original Bit Rate?

aramezan — Thu, 10 May 2018 01:19:26 GMT

Don't troll the poor folks on the GCM forum, you won't find me there ;)
@aramezan is correct though that my team has other (very demanding) obligations besides VirbEdit. However, everyone's persistence on this matter helped me to persuade the right people that this is worth making time for and I think I have a fix. I now believe that only users with Nvidia graphics cards would have seen a dramatic drop in quality that many of you have observed. After some testing and tweaking, videos exported by VirbEdit appear visually indistinguishable from the original, but this comes at a performance cost.

If you are not using an Nvidia graphics card, and you experience a significant loss in quality as compared to 4.2.3, please let me know so I can look into this more

Purdington, first thank you for the reply. I feel like this is christmas morning lol. This has been such a huge problem for me and if you get this fixed you would be considered a hero in my eyes. Specially after you talked me into purchasing an nvidia card through our many discussions here :).

It sounds like you have already found a solution? Is there any roadmap as to when an update will be released? Also, in terms of performance cost, is the solution simply to not off load to the gpu anymore? Or is there a performance hit just because the output file will have a higher bitrate? Hopefully the second one because if the first then it would be basically going back to 4.2.3

Also, can you detail how the quality dropdown will work with this fix? Can "Max" quality have near the same bitrate as the source and each step down in quality reduce the bitrate? I understand CBR and VBR and if you encode a CBR source video with VBR the bitrate may go down naturally. But from what I've seen, the source is already VBR.

RE: Why does VIRB Edit Export at Half Original Bit Rate?

Former Member — Thu, 10 May 2018 01:04:56 GMT

Don't troll the poor folks on the GCM forum, you won't find me there ;)
@aramezan is correct though that my team has other (very demanding) obligations besides VirbEdit. However, everyone's persistence on this matter helped me to persuade the right people that this is worth making time for and I think I have a fix. I now believe that only users with Nvidia graphics cards would have seen a dramatic drop in quality that many of you have observed. After some testing and tweaking, videos exported by VirbEdit appear visually indistinguishable from the original, but this comes at a performance cost.

If you are not using an Nvidia graphics card, and you experience a significant loss in quality as compared to 4.2.3, please let me know so I can look into this more

Honestly I'm not sure how to take this. Are you saying people who use invidia graphics are just screwed? Correct my if I'm wrong but you guys suggest nvidia cards in your minimum and recommend requirements.

I'm pretty sure I have tested this on a non nvidia machine with the same results but I will test it again.

RE: Why does VIRB Edit Export at Half Original Bit Rate?

Former Member — Wed, 09 May 2018 17:11:06 GMT

Don't troll the poor folks on the GCM forum, you won't find me there ;)
@aramezan is correct though that my team has other (very demanding) obligations besides VirbEdit. However, everyone's persistence on this matter helped me to persuade the right people that this is worth making time for and I think I have a fix. I now believe that only users with Nvidia graphics cards would have seen a dramatic drop in quality that many of you have observed. After some testing and tweaking, videos exported by VirbEdit appear visually indistinguishable from the original, but this comes at a performance cost.

If you are not using an Nvidia graphics card, and you experience a significant loss in quality as compared to 4.2.3, please let me know so I can look into this more

RE: Why does VIRB Edit Export at Half Original Bit Rate?

aramezan — Mon, 07 May 2018 13:09:11 GMT

Good info ritchie. Unfortunately I don't believe we are going to see another update to virb edit until garmin releases a new camera, which is unfortunate. I'm betting Garmin has reassigned the virb edit team over to another product, like GCM. GCM seems to update twice a day on my phone. But that doesn't mean we should stop pointing out the problems. Because garmin has continued with very flawed software ruining a very good hardware cameras. Maybe we should start posting for purdington in the GCM forum :)

RE: Why does VIRB Edit Export at Half Original Bit Rate?

Former Member — Sat, 05 May 2018 01:05:32 GMT

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?

I wish I was wrong but I don't think is does any good to bring up issues to Garmin. This issue has been around since October. This is what Garmin does when we post issue.............. https://youtu.be/cDWgs2cnga0

Then they come out with updates that have nothing to do with issues. To me it seems like it should be any easy issue to fix. I bet if they check the code it's shows a bitrate of 40 for every target quality level.

RE: Why does VIRB Edit Export at Half Original Bit Rate?

ritchie — Fri, 04 May 2018 06:28:25 GMT

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?

RE: Why does VIRB Edit Export at Half Original Bit Rate?

Former Member — Sat, 07 Apr 2018 16:02:27 GMT

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.

It has been over 6 months since this issue was brought up and still nothing has changed. Have you guys found and solution and if so do you know when we will see it?

RE: Why does VIRB Edit Export at Half Original Bit Rate?

Johnmcl7 — Sun, 01 Apr 2018 18:19:44 GMT

I tried the 360 camera first over Winter and assumed the quality was horrible due to the poor light but on exporting a video today in bright sunlight with the maximum quality settings, it's hideous:

https://photos.smugmug.com/Other/General/i-85V8QJB/0/2340b1ef/X2/Garmin_360-X2.png

That's before another conversion for uploading to Youtube as well.

I understand the software is meant to be quick and easy to use but it's worthless to anyone with this level of quality particularly for such an expensive device. What are people doing to get around this? I started trying to work with the videos in Vegas Pro instead but you lose all the features I actually bought the camera for.