Sunday, October 13, 2013

Why Being a Jack of All Trades Is Better than A Master of One. Or, A Crash Course on How Video Works for Lighting and Quality.

Video. The technical name of digital film. It's something very near and dear to me heart. I have worked with video for the majority of my life and have thus learned more than enough to know the ins-and-outs of what's important when making a video.

Click here or Scroll down to read some important basics about video lighting and quality.

I am a big Android fan. I like to "hack" my smartphone and enjoy frequenting the XDA community for new tricks, mods, ROMs, and Kernels. I'm not well-known in the community, but I do try to contribute as much as possible since I appreciate how everything is (mostly) free. But sometimes, I notice things that disgust me, and I wonder if it happens to other people for other situations.

My favorite mod for any Android smartphone is increasing the quality of my camera by changing certain values and testing accordingly. This is great to get the best out of your camera. I have been able to do this with every Android smartphone I have - save a Chinese Galaxy S4 Clone I couldn't get rooted.

Our adventure begins with yours truly browsing the community and finding a camera mod for my current smartphone. I was disappointed because I was just about to make my own, but had been preoccupied helping recoveries get created for my model. I flashed the mod and while it seemed better, I found that the mod I performed was fiddled with, but not at its full potential. So, I created my mod. Even luckier for the public, my mod could work with the preexisting camera mod to get the best of both worlds.

I then saw one of the posts on the preexisting camera mod where a user had asked if decreasing the bitrates video would decrease quality? The original poster (OP) replied no. That, to me, was an outrage. How could someone say that? This is where my title comes in.

Jack of all trades, master to none.

While most find this to be an insult, I find it to be a compliment. The way I see it, if I don't know at least something all the aspects of one subject, then I shouldn't be a part of it. The best way I see this is if you spent all your time learning a skill but one day that skill becomes obsolete, or the competition to saturated. Because I have no other skills, I'm essentially screwed.

Back to the story. I made a reply to the OP and disagreed. The OP responded by wondering why I cared and stating his was "better". I replied that he has "more" stuff, but then went into an explanation of bitrates.

Bitrates: Bitrates determines one major part of the quality of your video. Other parts involve lenses, audio, etc. As far as an Android smartphone is concerned, bitrate is key. The higher the bitrate the less compression artifacts noticeable in a video. Thus, higher bitrate equals better quality. Additionally, bitrate modes and codecs can also be vital in determining quality, but again, we're talking about an Android phone (and we're not going to bother with 3GP vs. MP4 here).

I also had to do a quick explanation of bitrates and 4K as the OP implied that they could be the same thing.

4K: 4K is a resolution that is a the rage for prosumer video cameras. To illustrate the size of 4K know that it is double the size of 2K, and that 2K is just a tad bit bigger than 1080P. So, 4K is a little bit bigger than twice the size of 1080P.

That being stated, bitrates and resolution do not go hand-in-hand. You can have a 4K video with a high bitrate, or a 4K video with a low bitrate. The bitrate does not determine resolution.

The OP had made some changes to how light worked which would help make the video look better when in great lighting, but come out dark (horrible) in low-lit areas. There are three areas to lighting:

  • FPS: Frames-per-second will determine the smoothness of a video, as well as how much light comes into the camera. A lower frame rate means more light but with choppier video.
  • ISO: This is known as ASA for film. ISO allows more light into the camera the higher it is, but higher values produces and increases "noise" in the video.
  • Aperture: The aperture will be ultimately determine by the lens being used. The lower the lens, the more light allowed into the camera. However, the aperture will also blur part of an image depending on if that image is near or far.
Aperture is not important to Android, or almost any smartphone, as it cannot be changed.

The OP was limiting ISO from 1600 to 1200, and the minimum frame rate for 1080P from 15fps to 30fps (and just recently 720P to 60fps only!). In adequate light, these settings would make gratifying shots, but the reason Android sets these rates are because people like to take pictures in low-lit areas without a flash. You might consider a low-lit area to be dark and gloomy, but a well-lit area for our eyes may still be considered low-lit by our cameras.

The OP wanted to due a comparison of his videos by another member, but I explained that it would be unfair. His method for using such low bitrates (lower than factory settings) was to use something similar to soft focus.

Soft Focus: Is a defect of lenses where an image seems somewhat blurry, but still has sharp edges.

The OP wasn't at an extreme with this, but what is troubling is that Android smartphone manufacturers already employee this technique on a very small scale to make photos seem better. You can normally see this when zooming in very close on a picture. The OP, moreorless, was just pulling back bitrates and making this effect more intense. To someone like myself, they are just ruining quality rather than improving it.

The main difference between their mod and mine was that I increased bitrates and they decreased bitrates. This also means that my mod increased file sizes of images and video, while his decreased sizes of images and video.

While I can rest easy knowing that I am obtaining true quality, I find it sad that people will think that somehow his mod is making their camera better when it isn't. I am a Jack of all trades. I know a bit about Android and I know a bit about video.

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