Quality loss when rendering in H.264 or even AVI RAW I rendered a video in H.264 (with what was recommended in the accepted answer here in fact: Video Quality Loss after Rendering in VSE) but the rendered video was always blurrier and less contrasted than the original sequence. So I tried to not compress anything with having AVI RAW as the output format, but even that does not seem to preserve the video quality...

Attached is a picture comparing the two: the left one is the original sequence, the right one is the rendered video (H.264 or AVI RAW look the same).

I tried to play with options such as anti-aliasing, lossless output, the bitrate or even the GOP size but the result is more or less always the same and there is an obvious quality loss.

What could this be due to? I must mention that I'm on Ubuntu 14.04 with Blender 2.77, maybe this has something to do with codecs on my operating system? Or is this quality loss unavoidable, which would be very surprising to me..?

Many thanks,
Assuming you didn't miss anything obvious (wrong resolution) I would recommend to render it out with a really high bitrate (24300k) and then use handbrake to compress it in a useful manner. The default bitrate of 6k is just way to low.



Also there may be a blur node hiding in your setup. Looking closely at the ladder on top of the mast it seems like everything is spread out by one pixel.(left original, right encoded)