X264 vs. H264...

[Pietro Impagliazzo]

No problem here to read that video on PC. Any modern PC have VLC or codec pack installed today.

Sheesh, Mac users only use things from Apple or something branded "iSomething", iVLC will be out soon.

Wow, great actors, great story, great look! I downloaded it to my Win XP machine and it played smoothly, except the sound was out of sync. Not that I was watching the sound.

Cinematography was classy indeed.

 

[Micheal J]

Imagine you have a short (like "Tattoo") and want to post it. You need a small file so you try to encode in H264 but it looks like shit. What to do. Post it with X264? Then everyone has to download a codec.

This is not right.

Jim

No one has to download a codec.

x264 is a H.264 encoder just like Apple's, MainConcept's (Adobe, Telestream use this) and many others and is *not* required for playback. It creates an H.264 that so long as your player can play back H.264 will play back. Of course some players can't play the full feature set of H.264 (eg. hardware devices like phones, TV set boxes, etc.).

The MP4 container is based off of QuickTime's container.

If you need to create H.264 files and are wiling to spend a little time learning the options, x264 is infinitely better than Apple's implementation. However it's just as easy to make a better compression as it is to make a worse compression with x264.

Tips for what I've found working with x264:

- 2 passes are not always required unless you intend to hit a specific bit rate otherwise the second pass with H.264 is a waste of time.
- An automatic data rate, turning on crf and setting the crf level to 20 or 21 is a great starting spot no matter what profile you use
- Manually setting your keyframes to 10x your frame rate reduces the "scrubability" of your video but visual quality and sharpness increases.

----

This isn't magic folks, it absolutely is not pure luck. It is math. Input, processing, and output. Something worth mentioning is I tend to have better results on output when using a constant bit rate instead of an average one. No using the "Quality" slider. But. This is a heavy duty compression method folks, x264 has addressed this type of issue where QuickTime has not.

I've found the opposite with x264 - any examples?

 

[Nathan VanderByl]

And agree with you Jim and Jarred, you will never ever see how clean and rich this movie is on a little 1k compressed quicktime, especially created with a 4180k bit rate. Yuk. Go to at least 10,000+ at least and go to 720P, also knock your keyframes out to 200.
This is a quicktime we did, that has 800asa shots at the start from the old REDONE (non MX). Gamma correct, looks like the master and you don't get hardly any bubbly grain.
http://www.zoomfilmtv.com.au/tvcs/downloads/ffa.zip
Apple HD trailers have good compressions going on, You can at least match those.

Fantastic job, Mark!

 

[Ryan Sparks]

Sheesh, Mac users only use things from Apple or something branded "iSomething", iVLC will be out soon.

FYI. I have been putting VLC and Perian on all my Macs for years (they are my first downloads on a new Mac after firefox and chrome)... Though IVLC does sound enticing...

 

[Jannard]

And agree with you Jim and Jarred, you will never ever see how clean and rich this movie is on a little 1k compressed quicktime, especially created with a 4180k bit rate. Yuk. Go to at least 10,000+ at least and go to 720P, also knock your keyframes out to 200.
This is a quicktime we did, that has 800asa shots at the start from the old REDONE (non MX). Gamma correct, looks like the master and you don't get hardly any bubbly grain.
http://www.zoomfilmtv.com.au/tvcs/downloads/ffa.zip
Apple HD trailers have good compressions going on, You can at least match those.

What app are you using to generate your 264's?

Jim

 

[Jarred Land]

The flickering, from what I can tell, is intentional and is (or meant to be) candlelight. Perhaps the compression is making it look more artificial. It can be seen to varying degrees from 5:09, as you pointed out, to 6:30, so it's not a momentary thing. But, it only appears on the left side of the actor's faces (screen right). I doubt compression artifacts would be that selective and smart enough to know there are candles in the scene ;-) I guess it could be argued that the compression is somehow affecting only the brightest part of the scene, but the flickering is also only affecting the left side of the gun holder's hat at 5:15, which is basically the same brightness as the right side of his hat, which isn't flickering. Then again, I could be wrong.

The lights lighting the faces were actually literally on Flicker Boxes

 

[Jarred Land]

I started a new thread for the actual film.. lets continue to talk about compression techniques etc. here

 

[Hector Pasillas]

I just download it and watched it. Looks great!

 

[Julian Banos]

If some one doesn't figure this stuff out.. we will.

Jim

You are the best encoders. I think .red files for web distribution would be amazing for all of us.

Please give it shot!

 

[Pietro Impagliazzo]

If some one doesn't figure this stuff out.. we will.

Jim

RedRay codec for PCs? Why not?

The movie pirating scene would be all over it in 2 seconds.

 

[Luis de la Cerda]

What about windows media (VC-1)?

 

[Subhadip Sen]

Here's the syntax I use which has given me great results:

program --level 4.1 --crf 18 --open-gop normal --bframes 8 --b-adapt 2 --qpmax 51 --merange 24 --me umh --subme 10 --trellis 2 --psy-rd 0.5:0 --output "output" "input"

This results in ~6 Mbps bitrates at 1080p, with exceptional quality (Blu-ray quality). One can adjust the CRF to under 18 for better quality (0 is lossless) - but 18 is widely accepted as the point of diminishing returns. Obviously, the trade-off here is render times, but it is well worth it. I see that the Tattoo X264 uses the "Normal" preset with only 2 b-frames - the above settings allows for superior quality at the same bitrates - the flexibility of X264 means it is almost like thousands of codecs in one! You can choose between trade-offs of render times and compression efficiency. Here's a great guide to the plethora of X264 settings. The problem with the default preset is that it was optimized for mainstream computers back in 2007 with dual core CPUs. We can afford to go for more aggressive presets today - thus majorly impacting efficiency while keeping render times in check. It just doesn't show off the real potential of X264. 10-bit is something I have been using off late, but for deliveries it doesn't seem to be worth it. X264 has a very effective deband algorithm, unlike most H.264 codecs.

 

[Elsie N]

So, for someone not well-versed in various apps, how do I encode an R3D file from CS5 Premiere to X264?

 

[Carlos Florez]

Ok.. i have a question for you guys. For a 2K downloadable version of this at badass quality..... be it X264 or PRORES or DNXhd... what is the maximum file size you guys would put up with to download? 1GB? 2GB? 4GB?

p.s... just looked at handbrake. Looks good but incredibly restrictive as already mentioned... any other suggestions?

Any Size, bring it.

 

[Subhadip Sen]

So, for someone not well-versed in various apps, how do I encode an R3D file from CS5 Premiere to X264?

If you are on the Windows platform there's a very simple option. Download X264VFW (64-bit version, of course). Render out of Premiere Pro CS5 as you would normally. Choose "Microsoft AVI" under Format. Browse down to video codec and select x264vfw. That's about it - render normally. The recommended codec settings are Preset "Very Slow" and CRF 18. If this doesn't work, render to any lossless codec (or uncompressed, worst case) and then transcode that to X264 using any GUI or CLI. On Windows, I would recommend MeGUI. On Mac, Handbrake is a good option, though quite restrictive. There are several GUIs for Linux too.

 

[Elsie N]

If you are on the Windows platform there's a very simple option. Download X264VFW (64-bit version, of course). Render out of Premiere Pro CS5 as you would normally. Choose "Microsoft AVI" under Format. Browse down to video codec and select x264vfw. That's about it - render normally. The recommended codec settings are Preset "Very Slow" and CRF 18. If this doesn't work, render to any lossless codec (or uncompressed, worst case) and then transcode that to X264 using any GUI or CLI. On Windows, I would recommend MeGUI. On Mac, Handbrake is a good option, though quite restrictive. There are several GUIs for Linux too.

Thanks Subhadip, I've had some quality problems rendering to DVD (Blu-Ray version was fine). Maybe this is the answer.

Windows 7 64 bit.

 

[James Brundige]

I will hunt you down and cut your nuts off

deal?

Love the way you get to the point. Customer relations would be so much easier if everybody was this honest.

 

[Marcus C. Hambsch]

h264 playback . . .

h264 playback . . .

Hi Mr. Jannard ! Hi Jarred !

Hi everybody !

The huge number of posts shows that to deal with this wellknown issue is a pain in * * ...

X264 is not the cure since it's simply another method of creating h264 movies.

The real problem is Apples Quicktime Playback (and color management /gamma issues between apps).
The movies are not interpreted properly without tweaking.
Gamma issue, shifted black point and so on.

VLC interprets properly, Media Player Classic also like a few others.

Encoding with Adobe CS5 Media Encoder produces fine results - played back with Quicktime Player looking like a mess.

So its hard to send a well mastered h264 mov to the client as requested and depending on OS and player it looks completely different.
Many Mac users I know shifted to VLC or mpegStreamClip but movs opened with standard QT player or newer QT X its still look washed out and people complain about the quality (thinking the film is badly encoded or mastered).
It's hard to explain to the client that the file is correct and encoded properly but this is a wrong player interpretation . . .

So X264 does a nice encoding but the problem remains unsolved for years.

I stay away from Mac (no Pro attitude with apple for a while with color, shake or FC) but if a mov is requested the mess is back.

Watching "Tattoo" with the Quicktime Player it looks horrible with no blacks and wrong gamma - opened with Media Player Classic (on PC) or VLC the film looks brillant . . .

So - recomend a proper player and enjoy the great short movie.

Thanks to the film makers for the beautiful cinematography and thanks to RED for the making of the fine tools to get this achieved.

Regards,

Marcus

 

[Jarred Land]

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.

 

[Nik Skjøth]

Why anyone still uses quicktime/mov is beyound me. The codec only works well on macs, and as you know there are PC's out there to.. why exclude your viewers?

H.264.MP4 is the ONLY way to go, its cross platform and it f****** rocks.