Pixelated recordings in Wirecast

[sunkast]

So we started using Wirecast to record shows at GFQ. Everything seemed fine for about a week. But now for some strange reason, every recording looks like it has some pixelation issue. The video itself is fine. We record a back up copy using Vidblaster, and recordings on it come out looking just fine. It also looks normal on our stream. It only seems to be affecting the recording in Wirecast.

I've doubled checked the settings. Tried other formats. Uninstalled and reinstalled Wirecast. But the recordings still come out pixelated.

Here are a few examples, click on the images to make them bigger.

http://imgur.com/a/qVFIy

The first one is pixelated. The second is the same show recorded in Vidblaster and is clear.

Anyone have ideas why Wirecast is doing this?

[Linuxcooldude]

It might help if you list your recording settings down like resolution, bitrate, encoding ect. Are you broadcasting at 720p but recording at 1080p? You can usually downgrade resolutions no problem, but trying to record at a higher res from a lower one will get pixelation problems.

The pictures you linked all look good to me.

[sunkast]

I talked to Jase on Twitter last night and he suggested I try unchecking Render using YUV in the Wirecast preferences. This seems to have done the trick.

[oscarmartz]

Sunkast what was the issue? Why were it getting pixelated? Also what does the YUV setting do ?

[sunkast]

I've got no idea why the video was coming out pixelated in recordings. YUV is a type of color space, some what similar to RGB.

[oscarmartz]

thank you Sunkast. Are you sacrificing anything by turning it off?

[JaseRossi]

From what I have found and even talking to some people at Telestream, The problem that Sunkast was having I have had for a while now. This bug or problem shows up only on Nvidia based video cards. Not all of them but most of them. In the settings in Wirecast it has a option to render the YUV colorspace to the RGB of the video card. For some reason the Nvidia drivers have a big issue with this. It is mostly caused because Nvidia uses a software solution that controls the color, brightness etc for their video cards. This conflicts with the way Wirecast renders the YUV colorspace to the video card causing the whole video to have this odd pixel effect to the whole video. It can also cause frame rate issues as well.

I have tested this one 5 different Nvidia cards and all of them have this issue if you let Wirecast render the YUV colorspace to the video card. I also tried 5 different ATI/AMD video cards. Nothing at all. No problems. So it seems to be just a issue with Nvidia cards. If you turn off the option in Wirecast to not let it render the YUV colorspace to the video card, the pixel issue goes away. Some people will say this isn't a Wirecast issue or it isn't a bug, but it is. I have talked to a few of the Telestream techs and they are aware of it. I hope this issue is fixed in version 5 since it turns people off of Wirecast because they think the software is crap. So if your live video and or local recording has a over all pixel effect to it, and you're running a Nvidia based video card, then turn off the option in Wirecast to not render the YUV colorspace to the video card. You can find it under File, Preferences, Advanced.

This should fix the issue until Wirecast figures out why the problem happens.