Cheap videos in HD

[Memfis]

Is it just me or there is something wrong about cheaply made videos using high resolution? If you compare old amateur YouTube videos in 240p to modern 720p ones, the former seem to have a more genuine feel. It's like they are more honest about being quick-and-dirty, whereas HD vids often just look like fake attempts at professionalism. I don't need a stupid prank or someone's thoughts on Metallica's new album to show every detail of the guy's face. That almost seems like missing the point. I don't think having better technology automatically means that it has to be used everywhere. Bring on your shitty webcams!

[Tristan]

Unless you go full screen (or have a huge monitor, I guess), you don't need more than 480 anyway. And you can always select 144/240p manually, so I dunno, seems like a non-issue to me.

[Benjogami]

I've never felt that way, but that's interesting. Perhaps it's the same phenomenon that makes high fps movies look cheap or more fake to us. I imagine it's because we're used to high-budget serious movies being 24 fps, whereas higher fps video is associated with cheap stuff like soap operas and public television. I predict that the standard for movies will be 60 fps sometime soon. Modern TVs interpolate lower fps video to 60 fps, and I hate it, but since these TVs do it by default, I think people will get used to it and will start preferring real 60 fps content. 

 

HD video recording can be done by any newish smartphone, so it makes sense that everyone's garbage videos are HD now. It will become the new normal.

[Reisal]

I just use 720p minimum (1080p for games) because there is no pillarboxing going on.

[Deleted_Account]

So I cleaned the screen earlier today with windex. Like most household cleaners i applied heavily and wiped down with my shamwow but it looked like some residue may have remained. The picture has heavy streaking and a severe rainbow along the bottom. When i turned it on, there was a loud pop and like a fart sound and i get no picture now. What gives? The windex is an older bottle. What do now?

[AndrewB]

For compressed video streams, HD video is only HD on the black and white (luminance) layer. Color (chrominance) layer is encoded at half the resolution both ways. This reduces overall bitrate by about 50%. And that's in addition to all the other blocky compression tricks.

[kb1]

That's right. It's like those "HD sunglasses" - HD has become a generic term. What exactly makes "HD" HD? Is it that every pixel has a unique color? Static can do that. For a while we had DirecTV (satelite), and the HD was massively compressed and awful. If you do the math, and were to store uncompressed 720p on a DVD, you might get 5 minutes of video. There might be some standard maximum allowed amount of compression to legally still be able to call a video clip HD, but I don't know of any. In other words, you could use your gazillion-pixel super camera, and face it at a black curtain for 6 hours, and the video would be indistinguishable from a blank screen. You could compress it to 1K-per-second, and still call it "HD". "HD" does have a real technical meaning, but when you compress the video, all it really means anymore is "looks pretty good", which is ridiculous.

 

Certain entities in the field could (and may actually have) a definitive way to test for a specific amount of fidelity in playback, but such a test would almost have to be based on the testing of very specific source video samples. And this, of course, still does not tell you, the consumer, if the content you're watching is of X level of quality, so you're essentially back to "looks pretty good" (sigh).

[Nevander]

I wanna know how people can manage to record videos over 10 minutes and render them HD and not end up with a HDD full of GBs of videos. Like seriously how do people manage this? I could render a 6 minute video at 720p - fucking 200 MB. Is this normal or am I doing something wrong?

[Edward850]

17 minutes ago, Nevander said:

I wanna know how people can manage to record videos over 10 minutes and render them HD and not end up with a HDD full of GBs of videos. Like seriously how do people manage this? I could render a 6 minute video at 720p - fucking 200 MB. Is this normal or am I doing something wrong?

For 6 minutes of footage at 30 FPS? 200MB is actually a tad off. Rough math suggests you're encoding at about 4,656 kbits/s, when you should be encoding at atleast 5000 (5 mbps) for Youtube uploads at 720p (6.5 mbps for HDR videos). That comes to about 214MB excluding audio.

 

Yes that's actually normal quite easy to store. 1TB drives are the norm these days, and anybody taking video production seriously will be buying dedicated archive drives of at-least that size, usually more.