Ideal video/audio format for work in AE? (using mencoder to convert from h.264/aac mp4)

[Brendan Coots]

Linux/Windows systems eliminate some of your better options, like DVCPRO HD or ProRes 422. If you have the drive space and system beef, a lossless format like Quicktime Animation would be a good bet, although the files will be way larger than necessary. I suppose a good middle-ground option would be Windows Media 9, which supports HD and, provided you set it up correctly, can look very nice. Just make sure to test for the ideal bitrate setting, which might be around 8-12Mbps.

I’m sure you realize this, but any option aside from a lossless codec (like Animation) will degrade your footage to some degree. Given that it’s starting life as h.264, it’s already a bit hobbled.

Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com

[Kevin Camp]

as brendan mentioned, lossless animation or uncompressed avi would be best, to avoid further compression.

if you needed to conserve disk space quicktime’s photojpeg is good quality codec with no temporal compression (which would be good for ae).

avid’s dnxhd is a good alternative to dvcprohd. it’s a free download here. it is a quicktime component, so you will probably need qt installed.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Jonathan Holt]

Hello again,

Thanks for the advice Brendan and Kevin! Brilliant stuff. After compiling the latest SVN version of ffmpeg, I’ve found it supports encoding to DNxHD, the AVID codec. Having written a script, I can now convert all my files into this format in bulk; perfect.

My only problem is this: if you look at the following table, DNxHD Bitrate Settings, you’ll see that to encode 720p at 59.94 fps, I need to use a bitrate of 145Mbps. As I’m only starting with an initial bitrate of around 11-12Mbps, you can imagine how much more disk space is consumed when I convert one of these files. They increase in file size by a factor of about 10.

Is there any way around this, or do I just bite the bullet and accept that if I want to use a codec designed for HD NLE, I’m going to need a lot of space, regardless of the fact that it needn’t be so high a bitrate?

Many thanks once more,

Jonathan.

[Jonathan Holt]

Actually, I have another question.

I’ve just been experimenting with Premiere (Pro CS3), and I’ve found that if I import a DNxHD movie file (with PCM audio in a .mov container), when I export the movie, if I choose to export as DNxHD, it takes forever to export. (Several hours for a couple of minutes of footage.)

Why is this? Is there no way to simply edit the footage in premiere (some very basic cuts) and export the movie without having to go through compression all over again? Can’t the cuts just be made “in place”, as it were?

Cheers,
Jonathan.

[Jonathan Holt]

Just noticed that it’s also outputting at 1920 x 1080 for some reason; project and export settings clearly set to 1280 x 720. What the heck is going on here?

[Kevin Camp]

you should be able to export a reference movie from premiere that will not re-render the media, just export a reference to the original media with the in and out points set that you can take to ae. that should save on time, disk space and extra compression loss.

i don’t use premiere, but i’ve seen some demos from adobe showing workflow integration between ae and premiere allowing you to take projects back and forth between the two (at least to some degree).

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW