best way to export for the web

[Julien Deka]

… is H264… as I thought…

Well, I'm not so convince anymore.

I recently worked on a show shot on RED, edit with native R3Ds in Premiere CS5.5, VFX and grading in AE CS5.5 and 4K renders as DPX (16bits)…

It's a dark show, and I tried to get subtle in the dark areas… To not crush the blacks to much and I'm having a lot of details living int the darkness…

Unfortunately, when rendering H264 (1920 X 1080, or 720P) for the web (Vimeo or YouTube) I have several issues (this goes for Media Encoder, or from AE the same)

- the image goes darker (even when I turn on the Quick Time gamma legacy box); by that I mean, the black are crushed a bit more, but more over area that where supposed to be very dark but not black are now completely black. I'm losing details, and it apperas there is no way to embed color profile into a H264 file, right ?
- halo artifact… whenever I have a ramp from light to shadow (optical flare on a lamppost, in front of a dark sky, for example), it's so nice in the DPX and it looks like crap in the H264….
- lots of blockiness, especially in the darks once again (which is unlucky for the color style I'm looking for

I know I'm talking about compressing my movie from huge sized DPX files to something way smaller to go online, and I know I'm going to loose details anyway… But so much, really?

When I'm watching a show like Sons of Anarchy on Netflix Online, the quality is amazing, there is so much details and levels of dark greys and blacks on there kuttes.

It seems that Netflix is using something called VC-1, and surprisingly Microsoft is behind this. I switched to Mac years ago, as I did think MS was unable to achieve something properly

Seriously, I didn't find out if I can somehow export in such VC-1 codec from Adobe products on Mac? Any idea?
But then I don't now if it is a codec that can be used for Vimeo and YouTube?

And my last question is: how would you do it? Any idea on other codec around that do great result? Or any tip to improve the quality of H264 in the darks?

Thanks in advance for helping me

Julien

 

[Andrew Gentle]

Check out this thread by Brian Iannone. YouTube accepts a surprising number of codecs, surely there's one you're happy with in here? The down side is that they'll convert it to H.264 for delivery so there's no avoiding it entirely but you can avoid some compression losses.

I just recently learned that YouTube supports some more advanced video codecs like ProRes, so I decided to do a few tests (okay... A LOT of tests) to see exactly what codecs and resolutions it supports.


YouTube Supported Codecs

[TABLE="class: grid, width: 500"]
[TR]
[TD][/TD]
[TD]1080p
(1920x1080)[/TD]
[TD]4K (4096x2304)[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]MainConcept H.26410 Mbps (Level 4.1, Main Profile)[/TD]
[TD]Yes[/TD]
[TD]n/a*[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]MainConept H.26450 Mbps (Level 5.1, Main Profile)[/TD]
[TD]Yes[/TD]
[TD]n/a*[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]MainConcept CUDA H.264[/TD]
[TD]Yes[/TD]
[TD]n/a*[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Photo-JPEG[/TD]
[TD]Yes[/TD]
[TD]Yes[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Apple Animation[/TD]
[TD]Yes[/TD]
[TD]Yes[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Apple Intermediate Codec[/TD]
[TD]No[/TD]
[TD]No[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]DNxHD 220 10-bit[/TD]
[TD]No[/TD]
[TD]n/a**[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]DNxHD 220 8-bit[/TD]
[TD]Yes[/TD]
[TD]n/a**[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]DNxHD 145 8-bit[/TD]
[TD]Yes[/TD]
[TD]n/a**[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Apple ProRes 4444[/TD]
[TD]Yes[/TD]
[TD]Yes[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Apple ProRes 422 (HQ)[/TD]
[TD]Yes[/TD]
[TD]Yes[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Apple ProRes 422[/TD]
[TD]Yes[/TD]
[TD]Yes[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Apple ProRes 422 (LT)[/TD]
[TD]Yes[/TD]
[TD]Yes[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Apple ProRes 422 (Proxy)[/TD]
[TD]Yes[/TD]
[TD]Yes[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]QuickTime Uncompressed 8-bit 4:2:2[/TD]
[TD]Yes[/TD]
[TD]Yes[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]QuickTime Uncompressed 10-bit 4:2:2[/TD]
[TD]Yes[/TD]
[TD]Yes[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]

*MainConcept H.264 and CUDA H.264 encoder does not support 4K.
**DNxHD codecs do not support 4K.

Personally, I find these tests to be very interesting. And surprising. Normally, we export a video from our NLE to H.264 and then upload that to YouTube only for it to get recompressed again by YouTube's encoder. That means that the video is being compressed (and destroyed) twice. Whereas, if you export from your NLE to a codec like ProRes or DNxHD, you can reduce the loss of quality by ensuring the you're delivering a high quality file to YouTube. YouTube will then take that high quality file and compress it down to H.264, but at least you're doing everything you can on your end to receive the highest quality image possible from your YouTube videos.

 

[Subhadip Sen]

Avoid Quicktime like plague. Choose H.264 under "Format" (it will use the MP4 container). ~40 Mbps and 2-pass will get you good results. The best option is if you can get hold of a Windows system and use Debugmode Frameserver to X264. You don't even need Adobe, you can just encode from the DPX directly. X264 can get you excellent quality at ~8 Mbps configured appropriately. Alternatively, render uncompressed from Adobe and then use that to encode X264 separately. Hybrid or MPEG Streamclip are good solutions on Mac OS X. If you want the best quality, you should consider hiring a compressionist.

 

[Julien Deka]

you should consider hiring a compressionist.

You are so right. I should hire a DP, an editor, a VFX artist and a colorist as well… Hopefully those times will come…

In the meantime, I need to figure this on my own… well not really since you guys are here to help

This hybrid website was unclear to me, but I will definitely check MPEG Streamclip.

So far I did a test of H264 (mp4) out of Adobe Media Encoder, and I din't set the Vimeo profile that comes with it, but I rather did what you suggested by using higher bit-rates: 20 Mbps did a not so bad job, and I can probably raise to 40 like you suggested and I would still be okay with the 5Gb week limitation on Vimeo.

Andrew, other codecs are actually very interesting, but it's a 15 minutes piece and it can quickly go above this 5Gb week limitation.

Anyway, thanks a lot for sharing guys

Julien