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Mavericks & Lossless Exports
Mavericks isn’t playing nice with Animation or PNG codecs (See https://support.apple.com/kb/HT6055 )
So, I am looking into how to export a lossless H.264 file from AME. I’ve heard there is a way of doing this, but am unclear on how to ensure it is lossless, as H.264 is one of the few lossless codecs QT 10 will now play without automatically converting.
I’m aware QT 7 will work, but am just curious of a workaround for QT 10.
Thanks! -
8 Replies
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I would be very surprised to learn that any H.264 compression result could possibly be lossless.
What is the purpose of these files? Are you using them as intermediates in a post-production pipeline?
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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
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Hi Emily,
What about ProRes with alpha?
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers -
ProRes 4444 (which Jeff is referring to) is lossy, but it loses _very_ little information in one or two generations of compression. I use it as an intermediate codec when doing compositing work for webisodes, and I don’t find any crucial information to be lost.
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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
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That is what I was thinking as well, I heard about a lossless H264 format from other online forums but have never encountered it in my own work. My only hesitation about ProRes 444 is that Windows won’t play it.
The purpose of this output is to give a client a highest resolution copy as possible for archiving purposes. That way if they need the video in another format they can compress it easily on their end. -
My assumption is that Windows will not play this format unless the user has downloaded an additional plugin for QT, but i may be wrong.
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Hi Emily,
While I’ve not specifically tried ProRes 4444 on a PC, the regular ProRes files work fine on PCs as long as the standard QT player is installed, no special plug-in needed.
Thanks
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers -
> My only hesitation about ProRes 444 is that Windows won’t play it.
That is not correct. QuickTime on Windows can play any of the ProRes flavors. It’s encoding (writing, creating) ProRes files on Windows that is the problem.
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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
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Ah! Good to know, I was unaware! Thank you!
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