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Blackmagic NYC Show – “this ‘n that”
Blackmagic NYC Show – “this ‘n that”
Blackmagic had their NYC show yesterday so I’d thought I post my observations. I don’t want to get anyone in trouble so assume “plausible deniability” and my own interpretation.Steve Bayes, Apple Product Manager gave the 30 minute FCPX presentation. It was just a minor demo and some mention of using Blackmagic for monitoring as well as Resolve compatibility.
Marco Solario did the BMCC presentation focusing on it’s use for ENG and HD ENG lenses.
He played a clip from NAB in which Grant Petty talks about wrapping Cinema DNG in .mov
That intrigued me.Trying to glean information about that from BMD reps and they were somewhat dismissive.
Bayes was at the Apple table demoing FCPX and chatting. I asked him about Grant Petty’s comment on Cinema DNG .mov and he seemed to feel it made more sense to use ProRes444. In other words he didn’t seem to show much interest. He seemed to feel it would be rare that anyone would see the difference between 4444 and CDNG. I mentioned the BMD cameras are CinemaDNG or ProRes422 HQ. If using CDNG I didn’t want to have to transcode outside of FCPX. I’d much prefer FCPX wrap to .mov or otherwise do the transcode to PR4444 if he felt that was preferred.
So take this with plausible deniability in that I imagined or misinterpreted the above conversation as I don’t want to get anyone in trouble even though you all know I’m such a trouble maker but… it doesn’t sound like any direct CDNG or FCPX transcode on import is coming.
I also brought up Compressor and, from the discussion, I’d gather (although Bayes obviously wouldn’t say) that Compressor is going to get an update as well. My hunch it’ll be much better GPU assisted encoding to take advantage of the new MacPro. Basically I felt the conversation was greater than the some of the parts given comments made about my complaints around Compressor.
I also talked to Bayes about the lack of High Profile CABAC encoding in Compressor despite the fact that current iPhone, iPad and, I believe, AppleTV now support. He seemed both curious and questioned the necessity. I pointed out that to mach the quality of other encoders such as Squeeze or Episode (both of which not only have MainConcept but support x264 as well) or even Media Encoder (MainConcept), I had to up the bitrate in Compressor.
All the above through my rose colored interpretation and, as such, the conversation is deniable of course.
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3 Replies
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[Craig Seeman] “I also talked to Bayes about the lack of High Profile CABAC encoding in Compressor despite the fact that current iPhone, iPad and, I believe, AppleTV now support. He seemed both curious and questioned the necessity. I pointed out that to mach the quality of other encoders such as Squeeze or Episode (both of which not only have MainConcept but support x264 as well) or even Media Encoder (MainConcept), I had to up the bitrate in Compressor.”
Craig,
I don’t go real deep into the CODEC stuff, but I’ve been using x264 for years and I’m a big fan of it. I use it from within Compressor 3.5.3. I take it you mean that you’re looking for the x264 codec capability built into Compressor 5? If so, that would be nice. Hasn’t the development for the x264 plugin stopped at this point?
Thanks,
Dave -
[Dave Gage] “I don’t go real deep into the CODEC stuff, but I’ve been using x264 for years and I’m a big fan of it. I use it from within Compressor 3.5.3.”
x264 for Quicktime shut down development January 2012 as you note.
https://www003.upp.so-net.ne.jp/mycometg3/Since Apple has moved away from Quicktime to AVFoundation CoreMedia, Quicktime components may well break soon. Perian also shut down probably for similar reasons.
x264 is now commercially available which is why Episode and Squeeze can use it. That requires a license fee that Apple is not likely to pay.
Either Apple improves their H.264 encoding or Compressor will remain a very poor H.264 encoder compared to the alternatives. Apple doesn’t have to use x264. They can further develop their own but, to the best of my knowledge, they are the only one used in a major commercial product that do not use features that are important to getting the best quality.
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