is it possible to use quicktime codecs other than the system codecs with draft? I know H264 is not supported yet…
I would like to have draft create Avid DNxHD quicktimes for editorial and maybe use our matrox compressHD to crate the H264 movs in the future (you have to choose the matrox h264 codec to make it work).
Is there a list of possible codecs? Would be very helpful.
Thanks,
Timor
P.S. I noticed that draft is quite slow. Is there anything anything you can do to make it run faster…Does it use more than one CPU? (…maybe a “render locally” option for draft would help too?)
Here’s a list of the currently supported codecs that you can pass to the encoder that should currently work:
MPEG4
MJPEG
DNXHD <-- Here ya go!
RAWVIDEO
I’m currently working on getting H264 up and going. As for the slowness of Draft, that’s something we’ll have to look at for future builds.
what would i have to do to define the codec settings (e.g. DNxHD 185x) ? Does is try to use the correct settings based on the input or is there a way to specify which codec setting it uses?
We currently don’t have a way to set codec settings, unfortunately. We might have to put something in for this down the road, but right now it does just try to guess stuff as best as it can.
Yeah, you can change the bitrate, output resolution, and framerate when creating the encoder in Draft, but that’s it. I assumed Timor meant settings outside of those
What kind of dials would you like exposed for the codec’s settings? We originally wanted to keep get it simple so that the amount of required code to get something going is fairly small. Maybe you feel more controls are needed or possibly reorganized ( e.g., A Quality field) ?
Draft is still fairly young, and we only really have a foundation at the moment. So there is lots of room for new features, exposed settings, other ideas!
…regarding the avid codecs it would be important to be able to select the correct one from the list (see attached screenshot).
If draft spits out a random codec of DNxHD we might run in to trouble when recomforming the edit in the grading suite (if, for example, the framerate was not correct due to the wrong codec).
ideally i would like all the option that a normal video encoder has, but maybe that is too much to ask
Picking the right codec though is vital. All the rest (CBR or VBR, GOP settings, etc…) are not so important right now it guess…
For quicktimes one of the important features for us will be the “Fast Start” flag. Also the alpha flag to set a quicktime to display properly and not be all washed out/gamma screwy.
I’m currently trying to get h264 up and going, and it’s turning out to be a bit of a pain in the arse, but the QT Fast Start is next on my hit list once I get that done
we’re hiring a cg compositor that worked for me on film vfx back in the day. he’s a mac guy generaly, but we forced him to use pc’s and he’s well aware of the problem. i’m hoping we can solve this problem once an for all…but if you have any test imagery that displays the issues - discrepancy between apple/pc etc please share.
It’s almost rec709 but ultimately is completely different. (Were it so easy. )
It’s kinda close on Apple but the transparency fix does nothing.
On the PC the transparency fix is all but mandatory.
But thankfully it looks like the Windows + Transparency fix and the OSX H264s either way are pretty close to the same.
The interesting thing to note though is that this isn’t fixable with a 2D LUT. The R G and B full saturations all get wonky but the Luma actually stays pretty unmolested on windows.
Just out of curiosity, what version of quicktime are you using to create the H264 version in that example? Or are you generating it with a different application. I did a quick test doing an export of your animation compressed quicktime to H264 with both the quality and encoding set to best in the QT exporter (Using Quicktime player 7.66). My results are quite a bit different, though it’s still nowhere near close to perfect
Since Draft will be using a different encoding engine, the point is kind of moot until we do some tests with that, but I was surprised to see how different your results were than mine doing a simple H264 QT export.
…quickly back to my original question/request if you guys don´t mind :
I tried DNXHD but had no luck so far. The codec is very picky which datarates it wants. I tried to enter a rough ballpark on how many mbits it wants per sec but no luck. Would be very handy to get a list for each codec setting (for example DNxHD 185x = 185.000 kbps).
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