Elgato videos look great on PC, Terrible on Mac.

[paulwgraber]

So I have been experimenting to try and find why my converted Elgato videos look like garbage on my iMac. 2018 27" 3.8 GHZ.
So I went ahead and converted the same footage on my PC and it looks totally different and better. No grain or blurriness. So why do converted videos on my iMac look like crap compared to my 4 year old PC laptop?

All Elgato settings being equal on both. When I play the PC mp4 on the Mac it looks great too. But when converted on the Mac, garbage. I really don't want to use my laptop to convert these.

Thanks.

 

[ColdCase]

You may want to try another mac. Most of these apps use built in OS conversion routines, just with some GUI on top, and if your mac's OS is corrupted or lacking a feature... dunno just guessing.

 

[paulwgraber]

Don't have another Mac to try it on. I have a $3000 top of the line iMac and I have to use a 5yr old laptop to convert my files. Seriously?

 

[ColdCase]

Have you checked with Elgato support? I routinely use an Elgato game capture (HDMI) on several of my machines, and that works well for SD to 1080 HD.

 

[iluvmacs99]

So I have been experimenting to try and find why my converted Elgato videos look like garbage on my iMac. 2018 27" 3.8 GHZ.
So I went ahead and converted the same footage on my PC and it looks totally different and better. No grain or blurriness. So why do converted videos on my iMac look like crap compared to my 4 year old PC laptop?

All Elgato settings being equal on both. When I play the PC mp4 on the Mac it looks great too. But when converted on the Mac, garbage. I really don't want to use my laptop to convert these.

Thanks.

I had used the Elgato Video Capture since 2011 and this was a known problem since even then. Unfortunately, you will have to live with this downside and use a PC to capture the footage.

Here's the problem. Elgato treats captured interlaced video as 1 frame, which is half the resolution of the original footage and then upscale to 2 frames back to the original input source resolution before saving it to either MPEG-4 or H.264, so yes the footage is an upscaled half resolution of your input source. So it looks crappy, blocky and muddy. The PC version, however, suffers no ill effects, so during the time when I had it and was shooting movies with a VHS-C camcorder (old school LOL), I kept the PC solely for capturing the footage from the VHS-C source and then use a firewire drive to copy the footages over for use with the Mac. When I upgraded to miniDV, I thought I would get better footage. Nope -- same crappy footage, whereas the PC was way better. My Desktop PC then had both Firewire 400 and 800 built-in so it was easy for me to get footage. And it had more horsepower (it was a Core2Quad) as opposed to a single core Mac Mini. I asked the Apple site and what I got back was that this has to do with how Apple system treats interlaced video and not really Elgato's fault. They told me to step up to a professional solution -- like get Mac Pro, FCP and pro capture equipment; LOL. Sorry I told them because I could get BETTER VIDEO from a PC without spending for a Mac Pro!

Once I started shooting 720p and up, the Mac and iMovie does fine with the footages.

Hope this helps.

 

[gpspad]

Wow, wish I would have known this before I capture 32 Hi-8 video tapes with my elgato card on the mac

I may try and redo a few, but the quality isn't the greatest anyway, as long as they are saved in some form, they don't have to be perfect. But sure wish I saw this post when I started converting them, I would have used an old windows PC.