-
H264 High 4:2:2 Profile Encoding
We have a need to get large amounts of footage (3-4 hours) to remote offices on an almost daily basis. We currently ship hard drives out via overnight delivery and are looking for ways to reduce this cost.
We currently encode everything to ProRes422 – but I’m thinking a high bit rate H264 file using the High 4:2:2 Profile to maintain our color space might do the trick and allow us to have a small enough file size that we could use “the cloud” to transfer files from location to location. All of our offices use Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 for editing.
Does anyone have experience doing this? Some of our files have up to 10 tracks of audio (surround mix, stereo mix, mono mix, etc) – does H264 support multiple tracks like that? Will H264 support captioning information that might be embedded in a file?
I can sit down and start running a bunch of tests on my own – but I thought the guru’s in this forum might save me some testing work before I get started.
Thank you!
Don Hertz
-
2 Replies
-
I’m not an expert on audio, nor am I a guru.
H.264 is a video encoding specification, not a container. Your container can still carry audio in as many channels as your software allows. It can be LPCM, Dolby, whatever – different encoding. E.g. MOV container, H.264 video, LPCM audio.
To match Prores 422 you will need at least 50 Mbps or more. You might want to factor in additional upload and download times based on the Internet speeds at each location. Four hours at 50 Mbps is about 50 to 100 GB. The total bandwidth is equal to your upload plus each download. A CDN will let you manage this easily, but it might cost about $1 per GB of bandwidth, with storage extra. Try speaking to Akamai. A yearly plan might give you a better deal.
FedEx also has a business account deal with huge discounts, try that as well.
Hope this helps.
https://www.wolfcrow.com – Workflow information and support for filmmakers, photographers, audiographers and videographers.
-
Don,
I hate to say it, but I think Fedex is the way to go. You could, convert everything to very, very small h.264 (make sure they’re QuickTime files) and then *slow ship* the same drives – relinking later. If you wanted to go down a proxy route, you’d want to create QuickTime h.264 files (and try them around 5mbs or so – this is easily sent over the net. But I’m assuming you’re Fedexing due to timely nature of materials, so this wouldn’t really work.
Decently large h264 files will could cut the ProRes files in half or so, but that’s still an issue (otherwise, why not just bring in a second faster data connection.)
Best,
Jeff I. Greenberg
Author/Master Instructor/Speaker/Consulting
My contact info and more
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up