Exporting Self-Contained

[Michael Slowe]

Robin, I have had exactly this experience and I think that I just ignored it and carried on, with no ill effects. It was a while ago and hasn’t happened since. Are you able to complete the export or not?

Michael Slowe

[Floh Peters]

[Robin Hamilton] “We’re trying to export a 1080p ProRes timeline as a Self-Contained video. The problem is that quicktime reports that the resulting quicktime movie contains the Animation codec. As far as I can tell, all of the clips are on the timeline are ProRes. Any ideas as to what may cause this?”

Usually QuickTime displays the first codec it finds in the file. This means that if you have e.g. a Black clip at the start (or an “empty” part of the timeline), this will determine which codec is reported by QuickTime. You either can replace your Black clips with black video clips in the ProRes codec.

To make sure that you have everything in ProRes, select all in your timeline, right click on a clip and choose “Get Clip info”. Then sort the bin to the “codec” column and check if everything is in ProRes.

[Robin Hamilton]

Thanks for the response Floh. I assumed it wasn’t working properly because of a wrong codec clip I just couldn’t find it, and this explains it!

Another quick question, if you export a ProRes timeline via quicktime (not self contained) in the export window, does this re-encode all the ProRes video to ProRes (meaning a loss in quality)?

edit:
So when you say Quicktime “displays” the first codec it finds in the file, only the black clip is a different codec and the codec actually switches to ProRes in the Quicktime file? I wasn’t aware that you could have multiple codecs in one Quicktime file.

Thanks,

-RH

[Robin Hamilton]

Double post

[Dave Mccarthy]

We encode color clips into a 2×2 rectangle of animation codec to save space. It’s completely legal to mix codecs and sizes like that, and most (but not all) QuickTime applications can handle the decode correctly.

If you export to QuickTime, there is a decode/encode step so it is theoretically possible to have generational loss in the image. But ProRes is pretty good and I doubt that it would be noticeable.