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Apple dropping QuickTime and backup issues
I am seeking some advice on backing up some of my files and I have always received excellent advice from this forum and, thus, I thought I would throw this out to the group and see what folks have to say. Most of the work involves producing educational materials online as I am a university professor. But I also do more “artistic” work. These projects take me years to complete as I just can’t devote large blocks of time to complete them. I currently have a project that I have been working on since 2013 and using a workstation with the Adobe CS 6 production suite. Knock on wood it works fine…it’s sandboxed…completely “offline.”
My project is very short and the finished video will only be a few minutes long. Because I am doing a considerable amount of work with the footage in After Effects I shot with a Nikon D800 and recorded to an Atomos Ninja2 using ProRes as a file format.
My workstation is getting older and, in the event it goes out, I back up all my files. Because I’ve heard that reconstructing connections between Premiere and After Effects with material that has a dynamic link can be a mess, I’ve always exported all my After Effects work to QuickTime files. Thus, in the event of a complete breakdown I would have those parts of my project that I’ve worked so hard on intact. I’ve read with great interest Dave LaRonde’s thread on Apple dropping support for QuickTime and it made me think that it might be wise for me to back up my After Effects with image sequences….most likely using tiff files with the trillions of colors. I’ve experimented with this and the size of my image sequences are manageable. Again my project is very short….but I’ve put countless hours in working on it and, thus, I want to make sure I have an adequate back up. Any thoughts on this? Thanks!
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10 Replies
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I think you are 100% correct. not only is Tiff an open standard and supported by Sustainability of Digital Formats, but it supports Alpha 16bit/32bpc and won’t change a single bit of information if you turn off LZW compression. I have done extensive tests on this. PNG is smaller, but you lose 0.001% data every encode due to math rounding in compression.
Tiff was developed in the 1980’s and is STILL used by post houses 36 years later! That should tell you something.
Tiff allows for a wide range of different compression schemes, color spaces, and compression types.
You don’t need a license from Adobe to implement software reading and writing the TIFF format.
free open source library
https://www.remotesensing.org/libtiff/Non-proprietary
Unencrypted
UncompressedAdobe said they won’t create support for certain quicktime codecs anymore. Which means that once quicktime vanishes,
so will adobe import support!native Adobe decoding of many .mov formats is available today (including uncompressed, DV, IMX, MPEG2, XDCAM, h264, JPEG, DNxHD, DNxHR, AVCI and Cineform). Native export support is also possible for DV and Cineform in .mov wrappers.
Non-MXF quicktime container formats: prores, animation, dhxhd/hr, animation COULD go the way of the Dodo.
Adobe-DnxHD/HR does have a MXF format that is non-quicktime however.https://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/quicktime-on-windows/
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Thanks Chris! I was hoping my reasoning on this had some logic to it. I hope prores says around for a bit or my equipment keeps working as I am still shooting with my Ninja 2 as a recorder. This sudden, at least for me, news of the lack of support for quicktime is quite shocking.
Brian -
[Brian Betz] ” hope prores says around for a bit or my equipment keeps working as I am still shooting with my Ninja 2 as a recorder.”
An update from last week:
“Today we’re pleased to announce that Adobe has been able to accelerate work that was already in progress to support native reading of ProRes. This new capability is fully licensed and certified by Apple, and barring any unforeseen issues during pre-release, these fixes will be included into an update to the relevant products in Creative Cloud shortly… When these fixes are released most Windows users will have a seamless workflow for virtually all popular codecs even with QuickTime removed from the computer.”
https://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/apple-quicktime-on-windows-update/
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
Walter,
Thanks so much for the info! I missed that bit of info and as I am currently a CS6 user, I do not receive updated information from Adobe.
Brian -
great find! although as it doesn’t explicitly say that windows users will be able to export prores and png video codec, I have my fingers crossed!
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Is there a muxed open source equivalent of TIFF that also supports audio?
It would be nice to have just one file that includes audio. -
[Brian Betz] “I missed that bit of info and as I am currently a CS6 user, I do not receive updated information from Adobe. “
They didn’t send any real notification about it. If you do want to keep up on the latest, there’s a lot of information (buried in a lot of marketing) here:
https://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Chris Wright] “although as it doesn’t explicitly say that windows users will be able to export prores and png video codec, I have my fingers crossed!”
I would be shocked if Apple licensed ProRes encoding on Windows to either Adobe or Avid.
Official Apple ProRes encoding on Windows is currently available in Assimilate SCRATCH and The Foundry’s NUKE, if you need it.
As for QuickTime PNG, that one seems easy-ish. You know what to do:
https://www.adobe.com/products/wishform.htmlWalter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Walter Soyka] “Official Apple ProRes encoding on Windows is currently available in Assimilate SCRATCH and The Foundry’s NUKE, if you need it.
“There are other, albeit in some cases less official ways of getting there. And in some cases issues with readability on the other end — DEFINITELY not acceptable for iTunes uploads — but these have all been proven in the field for years.
ffmpeg is free, but command-line-y, so perhaps not accessible for everyone. Definitely accessible: the price. Free.
But because it’s a multi-purpose encoder, ProRes support is good, but you really need to test it before you get to a mission critical situation to see if the files are readable at the other end. Probably so, but issues have been reported.
AnotherGUI adds a nice front end, and makes batching easy…although since we’re talking about encoding final output, I haven’t typically found batching a huge need. But it’s here. Also free.
TEncoder is another free GUI front end that a lot of people prefer.
There are others, including some pricier GUIs with even more capabilities, but I want to draw your attention to one in particular that’s about the cost of a big-city movie ticket. Okay, a 3D movie ticket. LOL
Fallen Empire PRHelper for PC is unique among all these so far in that it provides an even nicer GUI for ffmpeg tech, with an added benefit. Fallen Empire is a RED-based production post house and workflow consultation company, and they’ve shaken this down in a serious way. ProRes-specific bugs have been worked through far more thoroughly than ffmpeg itself since ProRes is its primary intent.
Lots of the stuff you’d expect for a professional post product are there, including support for GoPro and DSLR input formats to go along with R3D, robust watch folder support, and because it’s developed by people who understand post, it supports a wide range of metadata including timecode and reel name) through the rendering process.
And at $14.95, a no-brainer to at least take for a spin…and yes, a free trial.
Cinemartin CINE PLI couldn’t make it easier. Export to ProRes just shows up in the Premiere and After Effects output modules. Not cheap: 699 €, but of course, a free trial.
Moving away from straight-up encoding, Telestream has a plethora of Windows ProRes encoding options. BUNCHES of ’em. If you’re doing heavy lifting, there are a bunch of Windows Server-based options that I’ve seen people poo-poo (how many people are running Windows Server?)….but anybody doing large-volume encoding of ANY sort should be looking at Telestream anyway.
Well within the reach of any small shop and many individuals, Telestream Wirecast is a terrifically robust streaming/broadcast solution that’s worth checking out for anyone doing online video, but has officially licensed ProRes encoding for $495, and runs on any modern stock Windows OS (ie, Windows 10 rather than Windows Server.) Free trial of course.
And of course, if $495 or 699 € is too much, you can take the aforementioned free and nearly-free options for a spin.
Nuke and SCRATCH are already in many folks’ toolbox of course, so use ’em if you got ’em. But if not, all these other options are cheaper than those. 🙂
In the meantime, don’t buy the FUD. ProRes for Windows can be done affordably, reliably, and even officially, for a surmountable expense, if any.
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[Greg C Neumayer] “Is there a muxed open source equivalent of TIFF that also supports audio? It would be nice to have just one file that includes audio.”
This was one of the things I was hoping for when I helped fund MOX [link].
It’s not all there yet, but there has been some progress:
https://github.com/MOXfiles/libmoxWalter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn]
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