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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...

Why not only post a small part of the 2K QT ProRes LIGHT file ?
Just the last scenes in the bar and the darker part when the old man is telling about the drawing?
 
Jarred,
Thanks for the 2K ProRes LT.
Can you please tell us exactly what's the difference(s) you noticed between the original uncompressed file vs this ProRes encoded file?

Is the latitude a little smaller?
Blacks look a little grayish?
banding problem in certain frames?
Colors are a little off?

Thanks,
Eric
 
I don't think RED needs to team up with Apple for ProRes.

ProRes is already out there and it's fairly common. To launch yet another, less widespread, intermediate would be counter productive, no?

The one exception would be if there would be a .DNG alternative for moving pictures. I know there's been talk, but I think that was on a RAW level. Although cool, what we need is a wavelet like CineForm.

That said, my understanding is that if you just take your RED-files into RedCine, set WB and ISO/FLUT, then export that otherwise totally ungraded footage to ProRes. You then grade this and you have a pretty solid intermediate/workflow that you can export to many flavors.

I'm currently trying to see if higher bitrates can get rid of the banding, else I think we need to learn to live with the fact that compressed files are not the same as the original. Perhaps h.265 can do better?

It's not really realistic to judge camera quality based on a compressed file, and for casual movie watching, 99.97% will never know there was ANYTHING wrong with that h.264-assuming there's no gamma shift (and the AME looks fine, gamma wise).
 
I'm getting decent results with the Elgato Turbo.H264 HD

The good:
-simple interface, with popular presets
-good use of available cores(60-80%)
-no discernible level/gamma/colour shifts
-.mp4 container
-fast transcode: average 33-36fps from the sample prores file with the 1080p HD preset
-efficient encoding: 4-5Mbit/sec. average with HD preset defaults
-there is a HW accelerator(USB dongle) included with the package, especially useful on notebooks or slower CPUs

The not so good:
-there is still a bit of banding on the door scene
-not very flexible with h264 settings
-one pass only encoding

The bad:
-limited to HD raster size
-Mac only

The resulting file is around 300MB for the 9min. movie

cheers,
Bogdan Grigoresco
www.finale.tv
 
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Gavin Greenwalt said:
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/
Click to expand...

Indeed - it's a superb player. A strong focus on functionality without the useless gloss. But I urge everyone on Windows to try out the MadVR renderer with MPC-HC. It is miraculous! No other viewing solution would suffice.

VLC has problems of its own.
 
OK.

Choosing the 1080p High Quality preset in the latest Adobe Media Encoder, making sure to keep actual size at 2048x1080, but keeping the bit rates at 32 with peaks at 40, there is no visible banding on playback and gamma is correct.

The file size comes in at 2.17GB though, so it's not that small. But of course, better than 5.41GB, and in an accessible format.

This means that it's just a question of finding the sweet spot between size and quality. In this case, perfect might not be desirable.

I have to underline: what you want from your web distribution files is gamma correct footage with a minimum amount of artifacts. If you shoot for "perfect" you will find that the curve is exponential with massive file size increase with little to show for it.

An encode at around 10 Mbit/s come in at 600-700MB for this movie and will be a pleasure to watch.

I'll try to get a few screen grabs up shortly.
 
Here are some screen grabs for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy!

They are all encodes done in Adobe Media Encoder 5.5. 2 passes variable bit rates at the noted settings.

Keep in mind that when the movie is playing back, some "artifacts" that might seem obvious on a still frame is not noticeable at all.

TAKE NOTE! They are NOT necessarily the exact same frame, so don't judge slight luminance or color differences. This post is about banding.

This is 12Mbit max 20Mbit. Size=571MB
12-20.png


This is 20Mbit max 25Mbit. Size=1.28GB
20-25.png


This is 32Mbit max 40Mbit which is the 1080p default HQ preset (probably for a reason). Size=2.17GB
32-40.png


This is ProRes LT, as provided by Jarred. Size=5.49GB
PRLT.png


Available time is running out for me now. I'll update this with an ProRes LT-->Uncompressed-->Handbrake encode to see what happens.
 
Good work Andree... cant wait to see where you end up.

And Bob G.. the Elgato Turbo HD is still to me one of those rare jewels of tech that have come out in the last couple years.. the last software upgrade was pretty great. I am amazed how much power that little USB key has.. the speed is incredible even with large encodes. For a one button tool its pretty fantastic.. Just wish they gave a few more knobs and levers :)
 
Eric Z said:
Jarred,
Thanks for the 2K ProRes LT.
Can you please tell us exactly what's the difference(s) you noticed between the original uncompressed file vs this ProRes encoded file?

Is the latitude a little smaller?
Blacks look a little grayish?
banding problem in certain frames?
Colors are a little off?

Thanks,
Eric
Click to expand...

you pretty much summed it up :)
 
Jarred Land said:
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
Click to expand...


Thank you, I love my 50MB connection for this!!
 
I guess I was a bit too soon to speak.
The zip file (4.89GB) seemed to download fully, but somehow it got corrupted :(
Any way I try to extract the MOV file seems to fail (7zip, WinRAR).
7Zip reports "Unsupported compression method".

I'm using WinXP x86 at work here with a download rate of 1.2MByte/s.

I'll try again when Mr. Janard posts the new x264 encode.

Eric
 
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Pietro Impagliazzo said:
RedRay codec for PCs? Why not?

The movie pirating scene would be all over it in 2 seconds. ;)
Click to expand...


You naughty boy. :biggrin5:

Actually there are similar (open) alternatives, like this one:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_(video_compression_format)


But it's still not sufficiently developed, I`m afraid. It's based on wavelet compression, like the RedCode, but this type of codecs requires a lot of CPU power. Something like twice the requirement for h.264, if I'm not mistaken.


Still, x264 does a pretty good job. ;)
 
Eric Z said:
I guess I was a bit too soon to speak.
The zip file (4.89GB) seemed to download fully, but somehow it got corrupted :(
Any way I try to extract the MOV file seems to fail (7zip, WinRAR).
7Zip reports "Unsupported compression method".

I'm using WinXP x86 at work here with a download rate of 1.2MByte/s.

I'll try again when Mr. Janard posts the new x264 encode.

Eric
Click to expand...


! C:\Users\Laptop\Downloads\TATTOO2K-PRLT.mov.zip: The archive is corrupt

Snap

Tried a WinRAR repair:


! Read error in the file C:\Users\Laptop\Downloads\TATTOO2K-PRLT.mov.zip
An attempt was made to move the file pointer before the beginning of the file.
 
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Same thing happened to me and I got it pretty soon after it was available. Downloaded it twice with the same result and I couldn't fix the archive. I'm gonna just have to wait for the smaller high-res file.
 
Anyone with Windows PC had any luck?
I believe the file I have is intact, but Jarred did not post a hash or anything (MD5, SHA1), so it's hard to tell just by looking at the file size.
 
Tried a few zip-programs, but no luck so far. Everything shows a file with the size of something around a 1gb (i guess the real filesize is 4gb + reported size).
Zip isn't the best choice for files/archives larger than 4gb, because the original zip-format doesn't support it and the later added zip64-format isn't integrated in all clients. That being said, WinRAR and 7-zip do have zip64-support.

Currently i think the program which has been used to make this zip doesn't have proper zip64-support.

A few short hints, maybe they're useful for someone:

For proper playback on windows, use MPC-HC and try MadVR, which is a very good renderer. Grab newest builds of mpc-hc here: http://xvidvideo.ru and MadVR here: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=146228
If you want gpu-decoding without the limitations of DXVA, have a look at CoreAVC http://corecodec.org and the new free decoder named LAV CUVID ttp://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=160290 . This kind of decoding is for NVIDIA only, but with that you can use GPU-decoding in combination with MadVR (and even FFDSHOW for some post-processing.).

There are builds of x264 that do support 10bit-encoding. With RED-source-material i see lots of potential. ;-) Don't know about osx, but for windows you can find them at http://x264.nl and http://xvidvideo.ru
And last but not least for windows users who don't like the cli there are vfw-builds of x264 too, you can find them here: http://komisar.gin.by/
 
Damnit! My download hung at 99% in Internet Explorer 9. I have a crappy connection at home. Since I've noticed others have had similar problems, how long do you think it will be until this problem is corrected server side?
 
Full size is 5.26GB on the server.. if you are not downloading that full file, you are doing something wrong. If you are getting hung up at 4GB.. you might be trying to download this to a FAT32 drive or usb stick etc which has 4GB max file format.

I just re-downloaded it to verify and it works fine. Remember its a PRO-RES file.. you need to have that codec installed.
 
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