• Compression Techniques

  Fastest way to convert from a ProRes file to WMV??

  Posted by Eric Conley on August 28, 2012 at 9:34 pm

  I am trying to find the fastest solution for making a 1 hour long program, into a windows media file to be posted on our clients intranet. Time is essential for this conversion!

  Right now, we record a presentation in the morning, bring it back to our edit room, and add b-roll shots. We output a file, and use Episode to encode a WMV. Our edited file is a 1920×1080 file, and our final wmv file is a 320×240 letterboxed file. On average, the conversion takes 6 hours.

  IS THERE A BETTER WAY??? We have looked at several boxes that stream wmv, and convert real time to a file. The biggest problem I have with that, is sitting for an hour hoping that nothing happens to either the playback or the record side of this process. Is there some type of card for our MAC that can speed up the encode? We have access to PC’s so, if there is a solution on that side we can do that as well.

  What is the fastest way to convert an HD ProRes Quicktime file to a WMV file?

  Ty Thompson replied 13 years, 9 months ago 3 Members · 4 Replies
• 4 Replies

• 

  Craig Seeman

  August 28, 2012 at 9:39 pm

  Without specs I can only make a general guess.
  Bootcamp your Mac and run Windows 7 and the free version of Microsoft Expressions Encoder as well as the current version of Quicktime for Windows (may support playing back ProRes).
  Boot into Windows and encode with MEE.

  BTW please do read the sticky on the top of this forum. If you include specs and version numbers the accuracy of the answers are better which means you may get a usable answer faster than a guess.
• 

  Eric Conley

  August 28, 2012 at 10:03 pm

  MacPro-dual 3Ghz quad-core
  9 GB Ram
  OS 10.7.4

  Editing on FCP v7.0.3

  Telestream Episode 6.3.0.22

  Edited file Apple ProRes422 1920×1080 30p

  desired file: WMV9 320×240 letterboxed 400kbit/s
• 

  Craig Seeman

  August 28, 2012 at 10:14 pm

  That should do very well as a bootcamped computer.

  What I do is also have Parallels pointing to the bootcamped disk. This way I can drag and drop from Mac to Windows and then reboot into bootcamped Windows 7 for the heavy lifting. I love Episode but if you’re in a time crunch MEE running on Windows 7 is good and fast.
• 

  Ty Thompson

  August 29, 2012 at 2:24 am

  Break some rules, use handbrake, crop 8 from the height and target 536 height(this will do a very fast 2-1 reduce rather than an actual resize), check maintain aspect ratio, code to mpeg avs quality2 or normal profile(important for speed) mpeg avc, quality 18, higher if desired. Use crf instead of bit rate and save to mkv. If MP4 is used be sure to uncheck web friendly. It will encode at ~ 150 fps on a modern system. If more flexibility is needed, avidemux runs at similar speeds but again avoid resizes on HD as they are single threaded, once in SD the resize penalty is definitely more manageable.

Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up