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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

how to H.264

J

Joyfool

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Can someone recommend the best way to deliver the highest quality h.264 from 4K R3D's? I'm having the darndest time delivering a nice quality 1k h264. I get a lot of blockish artifacting from the compression. At first I belived it was the nature of the codec until I saw the Red Reel that Jarred posted. Now I'm intrigued. What's the best workflow to deliver such clean h264.

I'm using FCP proxies to Color resizing to 2k roundtripping to FCP and outputing to 1k h264. The shots in question are low light tungsten...

Any suggestions?

thx
 
hey joyfool,

what is your bitrate in the Master and in the final QT h264 ... sometimes that can be tricky

probably it is better to render out only an "untouched" quicktime-movie in FCP and do the coding in compressor or "MPEG Stremclip" (thats my workflow)
 
What you might be seeing is the low light noise.
I put the clip through Video Purifier then transcode it.
 
Meryem,

Aside from the noise issue, those presets seem to really pack up well. Also I like how they cover 2:1 aspect ratio, too. Thanks for sharing.
 
you're welcome, Kaku, it's always nice to be able to help out someone as helpful as you!

these presets, as you say, don't deal specifically with noise, but they do seem to produce cleaner h.264 outputs than the settings baked into Compressor alone.

i'm going to check out Video Purifier on Monday, when I get back to work. anything that enhances footage quality is welcome.

so thanks back....
 
Joyfool said:
Can someone recommend the best way to deliver the highest quality h.264 from 4K R3D's? I'm having the darndest time delivering a nice quality 1k h264. I get a lot of blockish artifacting from the compression. At first I belived it was the nature of the codec until I saw the Red Reel that Jarred posted. Now I'm intrigued. What's the best workflow to deliver such clean h264.

I'm using FCP proxies to Color resizing to 2k roundtripping to FCP and outputing to 1k h264. The shots in question are low light tungsten...

Any suggestions?

thx
Click to expand...
I hope you don't mind me for stating the obvious, but this is what I found, that works for me.
Start with the cleanest images possible. "Garbage in garbage out" definitely applies in this case. If you have any noise in the picture, especially in the dark areas, H264, just like any compression will only exaggerate it. Noise reduce it, before compressing it.
There are no magic settings for H264. Choose your sizes carefully, if the compression is for the web. Also for the web, make sure that you limit your data rate to no more than, say 2500- 3000 kb/s and set it to streaming. And always use a double pass for the highest quality. That is it:)
 
The H264 encoder for Compressor isnt very versatile. It hopeless for .mp4's However the resize and frame rate convert are very good and worth using where you can.

Use this h264 component for compressor.

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/24173

Its an X264 encoder that works with in the Compressor frame work. Make sure you read some docs to know what the settings do. Wiki is good for this.

If you need to rewrap in mp4 use

http://www.squared5.com/svideo/mpeg-streamclip-mac.html

Just put the files in the bath list go save as mp4 and the app re wraps the .mov file to .mp4

Dave
 
Hi Guys

ho wis the situation of gamma exporting H264 ?

I mean , does compress export at gamma 2.2 or 1.8 ?

Thanks

G
 
Kaku, have you ever used "Neat Video Pro" for noise reduction? I'm wondering how that compares to Video Purifier (Neat Video is $99 versus the nearly $400 of Video Purifier)

Here is a link: http://www.neatvideo.com/
 
I'm currently testing Purifier, Neatvideo, DE:Noise and CHV for "Digital Production".

At first view Neatvideo does very well, but I need further tests bewfore I dare to judge them.
 
I've found (via an article on ProVideoCoalition's web site) that if you create an intermediate file using Photo Jpeg as the compressor, then run that through FFMPEGX or Compressor using X264 then you can rid the video of gamma issues and get a fairly good and customizable result.
 
x264 is the way to go, gamma control!

go to macupdate.com search x264, there are a few free codec options. End client can play with stock QT player, no special codec required.
 
I like the consistency I'm getting from the x264encoder, but does anyone know if there's a way to do progressive downloading/streaming with it? Right now I just get the Quicktime logo while the file downloads... not good for the client's website.

Edit: Answering my own question! Maybe there's a built in way to do it, but this Adobe Air application (QTIndexSwapper) works a treat: http://renaun.com/blog/2008/02/25/250/
 
I'm having really good luck with FFmpegX and x264 rendered from files outputted from FCP. Scaled to final size in second timeline in FCP, then output and drop into FFmpegX. Lots of controls and options in there.
 
Spike said:
I'm trying the x264 but the renders keep failing. Is there a setting I need to shut off? All the info I'm finding on the codec seems to be old.
Click to expand...

I had the same problem back in the day. Just restart your machine.
 
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