Video quality for Youtube.

[Phallus Erectus]

Hi (Doom) Guys:

 

Almost all videos in Youtube are so bad due technical reasons of Doom Engine. I'm very disapointed... but, as formerly programmer and graphic designer I made my own solution for solve this crap. A made a custom wads for give more clarity for videos without loss quality and it is 100% Doom compatible, no hassle.

 

It just make Doom maps more brillant, with more clarity.

 

I don't want to be selfish, I like share my "discovering" with all the community.

 

If you like test my solution in your videos, just download the zip file and use just one of the wads (one at a time): clarity1.wad is bright... and clarity2.wad is brighter even. Test in the darkest maps.

 

Just make sure that the wad is the last to be loaded to ensure overrides the the standard colors.

 

Share freely.

 

- Phallus Erectus.

 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kkRV39EuY0rlo4_qJ8ma8NWYsGGvbTlH/view?usp=sharing

Edited October 11, 2020 by Phallus Erectus

[Phallus Erectus]

Hey (Doom) Guys, an update for this post. I uploaded three pics, the original colormap, clarity 1 & clarity2. Note that ugly bandage in the bricks are gone in calrity2.wad (no gamma correction for none).

 

The level is Map12 of Doom II. The Factory.

 

Have fun.

 

- Phallus Erectus.

[mxrgan]

Though I have had an entirely different problem with GZDoom where the hud screws up when I have my recording software open, this a great way to make doom look nicer in general, especially with software rendering.

[Bauul]

Can you explain a little more about what your program does?

 

From the screenshots all it seems to do is increase the brightness of the wad, which rather runs the risk of losing much of the atmosphere.

 

Also, I wasn't aware YouTube encoders were specifically bad for Doom.  Can you explain a little more in what way it was worse for Doom than any other game?  From the screenshots above I can only presume you mean you believe YouTube struggles with the palette banding in software mode?  

[Doomkid]

It seems like all this does is adjust the palette so that every sector appears brighter than it usually does. Kind of like a "soft" version of the Lite Amp goggles (I would actually prefer if they worked this way). 1 makes it a bit brighter, 2 makes it quite a lot brighter. Based on the screenshot I was thinking it possibly also removed the fake contrast from walls that are perfectly parallel to the X and Y axes, but that doesn't seem to be the case in-game.

 

This is a very small mod, but it will be nice for maps that are too dark to play comfortably. Actually, I'm sure there's some old .DEH out there that turns up the brightness as soon as you spawn and leaves it that way, but that's a less elegant solution certainly.

 

Anyway, the best way to make Doom videos look nicer for YT is to bump up the brightness and contrast just a touch and make sure you render them at a decent resolution and bitrate, you don't need to use a mod that turns up the brightness. It's still cool that you made this though since I think it will have use for some people.

[Phallus Erectus]

1 hour ago, Bauul said:

Can you explain a little more about what your program does?

 

From the screenshots all it seems to do is increase the brightness of the wad, which rather runs the risk of losing much of the atmosphere.

 

Also, I wasn't aware YouTube encoders were specifically bad for Doom. [The problem is not YT, is Doom itself by design, permit too dark rooms]  Can you explain a little more in what way it was worse for Doom than any other game? [The gamma correction its a crap] From the screenshots above I can only presume you mean you believe YouTube struggles with the palette banding in software mode? [Nope, YT works fine]

 

The colormap makes "think" the render engine that dark colors are more bright. In the clarity1.wad I reduce (cut out) the dark colors 30% less. In clarity2.wad 50%. If you use in Sigil, for example, you see new things.

 

My intention was use only for videos, the atmosphere of terror disapear if you play with more light.

[leodoom85]

Sucks that YT's codec is bad enough to "destroy" the source video that you can upload. Movement itself can make the video a bit blurry.

The tip that Doomkid gave about toning the brightness and contrast seems reasonable.

[Vorpal]

Youtube's (current) published recommended bitrate is 8Mb/s minimum for 1080p 30fps and 12Mb/s minimum for 1080p 60fps.

 

Most people seem to upload in "twitch stream quality" which is like sub 1Mb/s and intended for your garbage Canadian Northern Wastes satellite upload bandwidth...

 

Also I suspect youtube "punishes" content that does not meet their minimum recommendations - like a 1080p 30fps video at 7Mb/s will look good on hdd but terrible after youtube transcoding. But as soon as you tune it up to 8-10Mb/s it looks beautiful after youtube transcoding. 

 

Then keep in mind their encoding is tuned for filmed human faces. The pure color tones of pixel art and anime etc. suffers from heavy artifacting if you don't pump the bitrate as @Doomkid suggested.

[Phallus Erectus]

Hi again:

 

Here are a living example: The same speedrun recorded two times, one normal, the second with clarity2.wad. No gamma correction at all.

 

 

https://youtu.be/KWodcQbJYJA
 

Enjoy.

 

- Phallus Erectus.

Edited October 15, 2020 by Phallus Erectus

[Capellan]

Honestly at 360p I can't see much difference - maybe once it processes to higher quality I will, though?

 

 

 

Edited October 15, 2020 by Capellan
360p. The 6 is important

[Phallus Erectus]

7 minutes ago, Capellan said:

Honestly at 30p I can't see much difference - maybe once it processes to higher quality I will, though?

 

Just download the wad and test for youself. And you tell me... it is independent of video encoders.

[TheUltimateDoomer666]

I downloaded the video at its highest quality (still only 360p) with a command-line tool.  I took PNG screenshots of approximately the same place in both versions.  Although there are still compression artifacts in the "clarity" version, it does appear that the textures retain more detail/contrast; in the original version the dark parts become very blurry and mushy.

[Edward850]

On 10/13/2020 at 3:14 PM, Vorpal said:

Also I suspect youtube "punishes" content that does not meet their minimum recommendations - like a 1080p 30fps video at 7Mb/s will look good on hdd but terrible after youtube transcoding. But as soon as you tune it up to 8-10Mb/s it looks beautiful after youtube transcoding. 

There's no conspiracy, just the nature of lossy encoding an already lossy encoded video. It's like saving a low quality jpeg of a low quality jpeg, you've already lost so much of the original source image so asking a video encoder to take that and then encode thd video again is just going to make it worse no matter what. And because it only has the encoded image to work with, it's going to be very noisy and leaving the encoder to make a much harder guess as to what's relevant and what isn't. 

 

Until we can get a neural network to do the job, you can only do this litteraly and it's not going to know the difference between what's important motion and what's just compression artifacts. This is also why video editing needs you to start with raw or very high bitrate footage, because you are naturally going to need to re-encode that on the export. 

Edited October 15, 2020 by Edward850

[Dimon12321]

If you have a 1080p video, upscale it to 1440p or 2160p using lossless codec or at a high bitrate. Then you'll get a decent 1080p quality on YouTube.

 

Here is an example of what you might get:

 

Recorded using PrBoom's -viddump command in X264 at 90 MB/s. Upscaled in VirtualDup to 2160p using Lagarith lossless codec.

 

Here is an example of upscaling to 1440p using lossy x264vfw at 150 MB/s. I think it looks decent:

 

Edited October 15, 2020 by Dimon12321

[Phallus Erectus]

On 10/15/2020 at 4:40 AM, TheUltimateDoomer666 said:

I downloaded the video at its highest quality (still only 360p) with a command-line tool.  I took PNG screenshots of approximately the same place in both versions.  Although there are still compression artifacts in the "clarity" version, it does appear that the textures retain more detail/contrast; in the original version the dark parts become very blurry and mushy.

Exactly: My point all the time is not it the resolution (or the artifacts due the enlargement of pixels); is the brightness and contrast (impossible to achieve within Doom render engine).

The picture in the top, has the regular setting (whitout clarity1.wad).

Below, with it. Note that the walls and the monitor screen looks more brighter.

 

Thanks for you help.

[Phallus Erectus]

Hi guys.

 

Thanks to all for your advices.

 

I'm so excited. I have a new project: "Slow Motion Doom".

Here just will put the link for the Facebook version (later for Youtube)

Also, I'll start another topic.

 

- Phallus Erectus.

 

 

Edited October 22, 2020 by Phallus Erectus