AWS Thinkbox Discussion Forums

PRORES yet?

Believe you me, this is definitely in the works! We hit a snag with our working implementation (not sure how much I can disclose here) and need to re-implement the muxer to create MOV files. There’s a bunch of incredibly frustrating stuff I can’t share and it’s not that we’ve been ignoring you. I’m buying Paul a celebratory cake when this is done. There may be dancing in the streets of Winnipeg (at least by me).

Just a quick poll of the crowd here: How important is audio support, and what features of the MOV container do you absolutely need? Writing the muxer, we need to figure out what features we need to support first to make it valuable for most people, then fill in the rest of it after most clients are working.

Hi Edwin,
sorry about this post, i could not resist in nagging you guys a bit…didn´t know it is such an emotional topic (but somehow great to hear it is)…

Did I read your post correct that it is not so much a licensing as it is a technical implementation issue? As it was working once (in the beta…3 years ago) so I am surprised to hear this (it does still run through FFMPEG, correct?).

Regarding your question:
I am not an encoding expert, so not sure how to answer the “features of the muxer” question.
Audio would definitely one day be of relevance but currently we don´t need it and would be happy with any implementation.

Hope this will one day be part of Draft, counting the days and counting on you,

cheers
Timor

It became a technical problem again once some unexpected rules landed. :slight_smile:

Would be nice if draft could do it indeed but isn’t it quite easy to script your own ffmpeg script?

I mean, will Apple bill you guys if you provided FFMPEG functionality in Draft?
Or does FFMPEG not allow commercial usage of their executables?

To bump this up once more…now that you are basically AMAZON and can do whatever you please…can we PLEASE get ProRes on Draft :wink: ?

Thanks,
Timor

I can’t go into all the business details here, but we’re not legally allowed to bundle quite a few different codecs for Draft that are provided by FFMPEG. In fact, they may not be able to ship it themselves. I’m pretty sure ProRes support is one of the many reasons FFMPEG doesn’t host a single one of its own builds.

I found a tutorial on how to do this here but since I’m not all that adept at Python just yet (or Deadline for that matter, I’ve only just taken charge of our render farm) I haven’t yet deciphered it:
https://artandmath.wordpress.com/2015/09/08/create-movies-via-terminal-with-ffmpeg-and-thinkbox-deadline/

In the meantime, we have a problem in that we need to take all of the image frames we generate from AfterEffects and Cinema4D and convert them into a ProRes of varying flavours in certain frame rates, sometimes with Alpha channels etc.

So since we’re all Mac based I was able to write a bash script that will automate the encode of image sequences without the need for any technical knowledge by the graphics team. Its simply runs an interface in which the team selects various options and at the end builds the appropriate Ffmpeg command

Just a sample of what the script does:

echo "\n\t\tWhat framerate is the material?"
     echo ""
     echo "\t1) 23.98fps"
     echo "\t2) 24fps"
     echo "\t3) 25fps"
     echo "\t4) 29.97fps"
     echo ""
     echo "Answer 1,2,3 or 4? \c"
     read framerate

Ask the user what frame rate they want for the output:

echo "\n\t\tWhat ProRes format would you like?"
     echo ""
     echo "\t1) ProRes422 (Proxy)"  # -profile:v 0 gives a 11.4MB size and moves you to 10-bit 4:2:2 space
     echo "\t2) ProRes422 (LT)"     # -profile:v 1 ranges at around 28MB, it too is in 10-bit 4:2:2 space
     echo "\t3) ProRes422 (Normal)" # -profile:v 2 moves us up to 45.2MB with 10-bit 4:2:2 space and finally
     echo "\t4) ProRes422 (HQ)"     # -profile:v 3 goes to 67.9MB at 10-bit 4:2:2
     echo "\t5) ProRes4444 "
     echo "\t6) ProRes4444 (Alpha Channel)"
     echo ""
     echo "Answer 1,2,3 etc? $flavour \c"
     read flavour
     
         if [[ "$flavour" = "1" ]]; then
      flavour_out="prores -profile:v 0 -pix_fmt yuv422p10"
      ProRes=ProRes422Proxy
    elif [[ "$flavour" = '2' ]]; then
       flavour_out="prores -profile:v 1 -pix_fmt yuv422p10"
       ProRes=ProRes422LT
     elif [[ "$flavour" = '3' ]]; then
       flavour_out="prores -profile:v 2 -pix_fmt yuv422p10"
       ProRes=ProRes422Normal
     elif [[ "$flavour" = '4' ]]; then
       flavour_out="prores -profile:v 3 -pix_fmt yuv422p10"
       ProRes=ProRes422HQ
     elif [[ "$flavour" = '5' ]]; then
       flavour_out="prores_ks -profile:v 4 -pix_fmt yuv444p10"
       ProRes=ProRes4444
     elif [[ "$flavour" = '6' ]]; then
       flavour_out="prores_ks -profile:v 4 -pix_fmt yuva444p10"
       ProRes=ProRes4444Alpha
     else
       echo "Unknown parameter"
     fi

And then builds a FFmpeg command that runs and drops the file in a designated drop folder for pickup.

###
# Finally run ffmpeg command
###
    /Volumes/DeadlineRepository/ffmpeg/ffmpeg -f image2 -framerate $framerate_out -i /Volumes/Graphics/_RenderFarmTest/$gfx_machine/ProRezzerated%4d$extension -c:v $flavour_out /Volumes/Graphics/_RenderFarmTest/$gfx_machine/Output_$ProRes$framerate_out.mov

Thats just a small code snippet to get the gist. Anyone else done anything similar or have another solution?

I thought i´ll share this here without further comment:

Sounds like this was actively being worked on almost 3 years ago? Did it get permanently killed due to complications? I might be working on a tool for our studio soon regarding automatic ProRes creation, but before I go down that road, I figured I’d bump this up

I’d also like ProRes4444 in draft please.

Is this dead? We’re about to test the DNxHD option to see if it’s a valid path for us but we’d vastly prefer ProRes. We use 422HQ and Proxy throughout our pipeline and 4444 sometimes where it makes sense. I’m going to test if the concatenate function works on codecs that Draft doesn’t support… it might but I’m going to guess it will not… Is there any hope here?

This topic needed its yearly bump, but has everyone largely given up and rigged up ffmpeg to take over the ProRes encoding?

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