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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 :)

X264 vs. H264...

Jarred Land said:
2K PRORES LT version on the way... Up in the hills my pipe seems a bit slow on the upload side today so its about 4 hours away still ( its 5.4Gb ) Ill let you know when its up.
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Nice Jarred...waiting to see it again.

The projection @ RED Booth in 4K blow my mind.
Thanks Pal.
Cheers
 
Hey jarred
i'm using mpegstreamclip for H264 most of the time and am pretty happy with the results. I will try the conversion when I get the prores link. If you want to check out the software: it's at www.squared5.com . It's freeware and the guy who wrote it seems to be a pretty smart guy. Maybe he can make things happen if it doesn't work directly. ;)
 
Stivan Widick said:
Is there a current prores decoder for Win7 x64 that will work with Avid and/or CS5?
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CS5 will decode Prores on PC with no problems - should work out of the box. It's only the encoding side that Apple hasn't opened up for PC's.

Not sure on the avid front (though I think it would be fairly straight forward getting it to work there too).
 
Ok guys here is the 2K QT ProRes LIGHT file for you to play with. Truth be told i still think X264 does a better job than PRO RES LT... but H.264 is horrible to encode from.

As you will see the 4:2:2 ProRes codecs are really shitty dealing with gradients ( introducing banding etc.) ,but lets see who can take this file and shrink it the best.

For you guys that just want to watch the movie in 2K.. this 5GB file might not be worth the download.. Jim is baking a X.264 Quicktime right now in the 1Gb file size so your better off waiting.

http://red.cachefly.net/TATTOO2K-PRLT.mov.zip
 
thanks!
 
Downloading now Jarred. Can't wait to see it. And maybe encode it too.
 
Thanks Jarred. Speeds are terrible though - it is going at 10-20 KB/s!

No doubt - X264 (Very Slow preset) is superior to ProRes LT, even at 1/10th the bitrate. I have a feeling even with a Normal preset the 1GB X264 will be superior - so wouldn't that seem like the better starting point to compress from?!
 
it is on cachefly so it will seed out to a bunch of servers shortly.. can't get much faster then those guys. I will only put this file up for a couple days.. the bandwidth bill is gonna make me and Jim's head spin when it comes in :)

not sure how much a torrent would help.
 
Torrents are great, but it's of course very dependent on how many really want the 5GB ProRes.

Those that only want to watch the short will probably just get the more compressed version.

Looking forward to looking at this after breakfast here in Switzerland =)
 
Here is the trick we learned for delivering h264 .mov files which removes *most* of the horrendous god awful indefensible rage inducing puppy punching frustration of using Quicktime:

Window -> Show Movie Properties -> (Select video track) -> Visual Settings -> Alpha -> "Straight Alpha" & Save.

Nobody does it well though. It's a horrendous part of our pipeline. We can't send anything to clients that is 100% color correct except for uncompressed. "It looks a little washed out." "We know, it's the codec."

If we use WMV it gets slightly darker. If we use Quicktime it gets slightly brighter (even with the gamma fix). If we use straight .mp4 I've never gotten a good encode and it also tends to get washed out. None of the Adobe Encoders get it up to an acceptable quality level even when you crank all of the quality sliders to maximum. Also Adobe Media Encoder introduces HORENDOUS sharpening when downscaling so don't use Adobe ME for rescaling.

Thinkbox Software is working on something which might work. I've got my fingers crossed but they've got some great people working on a stand alone command line client deliverable encoding/slating app.

I've literally spent days on this problem trying to find a good workflow for client deliverables and h264 .mov + StraightAlpha is the best crappy solution I've found which works on all computers without additional codecs.
 
Speeds were fine for me. About 6MB/s. Downloaded in about 15 minutes.

Guys, I think it looks gorgeous. I like the fact that you weren't afraid to play it dark, and the reason is because you can. There's so much info in the shadows. Nicely done, and kudos to your entire team for pulling this off. Oh, and yeah Lia rocks!
 
Oh one other thing. I wouldn't recommend VLC for PC playback. Not sure what it's like on the mac but for me VLC has poor rescaling. It sometimes introduces a bunch of aliasing when rescaling. Haven't figured out which formats exactly and on which computers.

I highly recommend Media Player Classic - Home Cinema if you're on windows.
http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/
 
I understand the desire for absolute quality.

But for web/general distribution it needs to be .mp4 today. It's already been established that a good h.264 encode can be booth visually pleasing and bandwidth efficient.

If you reach a point where the properly encoded h.264 isn't good enough, it's no longer a problem with the format.
 
Just wanted to extract the file now, but got an error.

Can someone quickly confirm that it extracts correctly?

EDIT: my file downloaded to 1.6 GB. Did I get everything?

EDIT 2: Nope, should be 4.7 GB. Aborted download I guess...
 
OK, so I started with a standard 2-pass encode from Adobe Media Encoder CS5.5 @12 max 20.

Although the overall image looks good banding appears. One good scene to watch closely is 1.29-1.33 into the movie where the stranger enters the Old Man's room. The door has a pretty smooth gradient that will cause banding in many cases (not apparent in the 2k clip from Jarred).
 
Casey Green said:
Why not have RED team up with Apple to release RED ProRes?

Set the new standard. Thoughts?
Click to expand...

You mean another ProRes format which only can be created on 1/10th of the world's computers like ProRes? No thank you. ProRes is already causing us enough headaches as is--to spread it even wider would just spread those headaches.
 
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