Why do my exports look so bad?
I'm having issues with exports looking like they've been uprezzed from a lower resolution, even though all the elements are high resolution in the Screenflow project.
For example, I recorded a fullscreen screencast on y LG Ultrafine 5K display, then edited the recording in a 1920x1080 Screenflow sequence (scaling the 5k recording to fit the 1080 canvas). Everything looks great when selecting "View/Zoom to 100%" in the Screenflow UI:
But when I export this timeline to a 1920x1080 file, both using the "Web-High" present, as well as ProRes HQ (also at 1080), both exports look fuzzy.
Web-High:
ProRes HQ:
While I might be able to understand that the MP4/H264 might lose some clarity (although I've exported many Screenflow MP4s at very high quality over the past several years, and yet have only noticed this particular issue for the past few weeks), I would expect the ProRes export to look visually lossless to what Im seeing in the Screenflow canvas.
Any ideas what might be going on here?
My system specs:
- MacPro7,1
- Radeon Pro W5700X
- LG Ultrafine 5K display, running at 5120x2880 desktop resolution)
- macOS 12.2.3
- 48 GB RAM
- ScreenFlow 10.0.3
-
Mel Matsuoka said:
(scaling the 5k recording to fit the 1080 canvas).That would be a significant impact on resolution. Ideally scaling should be avoided.
Test by setting ScreenFlow Preferences Advanced to Screen Recording Compression: Lossless and then capture again and then export Lossless ProRes with Alpha and see if that looks better.-
CraigS But im scaling down, not up.
I understand that you can also get artifacting when downsampling, but the fact that the same 5k clip in a 1080 canvas looks crystal clear in the Screenflow UI at 1:1––before encoding–– seems to indicate that Screenflow is interpolating the clip scaling differently when it's getting encoded out to a file?
I just tested using Lossless capture, but I'm seeing the same results. However, as a test, I exported the 5k capture to ProRes, without any timeline scaling. The resulting 5k file looked perfect.However, if I change the Canvas resolution to 1920x1080, then choose "Scale to Fit", to scale the 5k clip down to fit the 1920x1080 canvas, I get the same results that I reported in my original post. Looks great in the Screenflow UI, but looks terrible when exporting to MP4 or ProRes.
-
-
Mel Matsuoka said:
but the fact that the same 5k clip in a 1080 canvas looks crystal clear in the Screenflow UI at 1:1––before encoding–– seems to indicate that Screenflow is interpolating the clip scaling differently when it's getting encoded out to a file?Display may not equal encode.
Mel Matsuoka said:
The resulting 5k file looked perfect.Which confirms it's scaling.
Please include examples of both in ProRes (they can be just a couple of seconds) and the developers can look at them.