PP 7.2 choking on DNxHD Quicktimes?

[Per Holmes]

Hi,

It appears that I might have a different kind of problem, which is the encoding of the alpha channel.

DNxHD allows either a compressed or an uncompressed alpha channel. Compressed didn’t work, so I had gone with uncompressed.

Well, even on a proxy 36 mbit/sec DNxHD, having an uncompressed alpha channel pumps the bit rate up to 448 mbit/sec. Now it makes more sense why the RAID was blinking all blue. I thought it was just some Premiere preloading stuff. It was apparently crazy-large clips.

So I think I need to locate another format with an Alpha channel that I can import easily and play in real-time in Premiere. It seems that DNxHD with alpha channel is broken.

Best,

Per

[Tim Kolb]

It depends on the project… I’ve occasionally used PNG compression for simple graphics…or TIFF sequences…

I don’t personally use DNxHD in RGB, so I don’t know if the MXF wrapped variety will do this? I don’t know anyone who is using DNxHD QT codecs now that the MXF wrapper runs beautifully inside Adobe.

I stay away from QT as fast as possible (it isn’t a second-class citizen because of Adobe…you need to talk to Apple about why it isn’t 64 bit on the Windows side, Adobe just tried to adapt to it with their own server application).

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Per Holmes]

Hi Tim,

Thanks for your post. To be clear, I wasn’t blaming Adobe, I understand that Apple is not doing 64-bit for whatever reason, and Adobe has to work around them.

The pity is that After Effects has no way to export a direct MXF. The only MXF support it has is for a couple of specific XDCAM codecs. There’s not the same kind of MXF support as in Premiere.

All my other footage is 10-bit DNxHD from Resolve, and it plays beautifully. In fact, I can play 4 streams of this in real-time with no problems.

The problem with PNG is that it doesn’t work for large graphics. Decode is too slow, and encoding is glaringly slowly. I’m going every single format one by one to see if I can find one that works. The other Quicktime codes (e.g. Animation) are deprecated, and also produce huge files.

It’s a conundrum how to export motion graphics from AE and play them in real-time in PP. I need movie clips as opposed to mounting AE projects directly in PP because this is all lower-third and title stuff, and it saves me from re-rendering a million times while I edit, and it allows me to do the timing on the Premiere timeline in real-time, rather than editing keyframes in AE and re-rendering in Premiere. This project is too big, if I go that route, I’ll be altogether spending a month looking at the computer render. But it’s a month in 5-minute increments, so I have to sit and wait for all of it. So I have to find a clip solution.

Thanks,

Per

[Tim Kolb]

Hmmm… I guess I’ve found a QuickTime file with PNG compression to reasonably easy to handle myself. I wouldn’t use it for a feature film., but it seems to work well for L3rds, etc…

I completely understand the desire to stay away from multiple dynamic linked AE comps…

Even though Animation is “deprecated”…would it work for your project? (I realize the files are large)

Unfortunately, QuickTime is really not all that much more neglected than AVI…both wrappers are antiques.

I checked here on all the AJA codecs…they all seem to lack the ability to render an alpha channel.

I wonder if Lagarith would work? i think it supports alpha channels in RGB…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Per Holmes]

Hi,

If I were on a Mac, ProRes 4444 would be natively supported.

Separate note, it appears that ALL of Quicktime is deprecated, and will stop being pre-installed on Macs in 1-2 OS versions. That makes relying on Quicktime a bit dangerous. I need to be able to open this project for a revision in 5-7 years. Of course there will be some work to do that, but I don’t want to make it worse.

That said, I have a plan B that works, which is the 36 mbit DNxHD with uncompressed Alpha, wrapped in Quicktime coming out of AE. The quality on the titles only takes a negligible hit, but the uncompressed alpha channel means that I’m spending 36 mbit on the RGB, and 400 mbit on the alpha channel. But Premiere doesn’t choke on it. But this solution doesn’t sit well.

This is frustrating.

Thanks,

Per

[Per Holmes]

Hi,

I’m having success with Lagarith. A 10 second animation comes in at 240 MB, and it plays without stutter in PP on top of DNxHD 8-bit footage.

I’m guesssing this will never be supported on Mac, but the codec is GPL, so it may still exist in 5 years, as will AVI. So if I’m OK with the project never being openable on a Mac, then I think I have a solution.

Thanks for suggesting it!

Per

[Alex Udell]

Not to make your life harder….

but can you output separate mattes as whatever codec you want?

that would certainly give you both compatibility and lower data rates….

then just track matte comp them in PPro?

Alex Udell
Editing, Motion Graphics, and Visual FX

[Per Holmes]

Hi Alex,

Thanks for your response. That was one of the things I tried, but it causes more seek on the RAID, so the upper limit is lower. The workflow is also very bad with editing two sets of clips, adding Track Matte Effects, setting Frame Hold for two sets of clips.

I’ve decided to go with the Lagarith codec. Playback and scrubbing is snappy, even as I pile on layers of RGBA graphics. The files are a very reasonable size, and encoding is as fast as the other codecs.

The downside, or so I thought, was that I’d never be able to open the project on a Mac. But I read someone who said that they’d opened Lagarith AVI files on a Mac without codecs pre-installed.

But my failsafe is that I make sure that all Lagarith encoded AVIs go into a single folder in the project directory. This way, it would be possible to batch convert all the clips to e.g. Lossless RGBA AVI, which will for sure open on any device, and it should be possible to open the project anywhere as far into the future as I can see.

Thanks!

Per

[Alex Udell]

nice…

thanks for the follow up!

Alex Udell
Editing, Motion Graphics, and Visual FX

[Ericbowen]

Lagarith has been a go to codec on Windows with Adobe for a while. You can always convert the Lagarith to Cineform Quicktime if you need to move the media over to a Mac system. Then they can just install the free version of Cineform to read the codec.

Eric-ADK
Tech Manager
support@adkvideoediting.com