The death of QuickTime as we know it

[Walter Soyka]

[Oliver Peters] “This all brings us to a very interesting (in a bad way) state of affairs on the Mac. You have 4 viable current post container formats. These would be … 4) Adobe’s internal implementation of I-frame MPEG2 (opaque outside of Premiere Pro)”

I thought Adobe’s I-frame MPEG2 stuff was intended for preview files only. Is anyone really using it in production? Especially now, with Premiere Pro CC’s nice MXF/DNxHD support?

I’d love to see MXF/DNxHD do well, since it’s all based on open standards, but I think that at least a couple things have to happen:

1) MXF needs to be better accepted on the desktop. I love SCRATCH Player, and I love VLC, but they’re not very user-friendly.

2) Avid needs to upgrade DNxHD, post-haste. Resolution independence is necessary today. The world is bigger than 1920×1080.

I don’t see Apple doing anything to make this process easier, and that’s too bad. I fear Apple doing exactly the opposite: drawing back into their own standards, maybe even taking us back to the bad old days when Macs and PCs didn’t play together so nicely.

Putting on my pundit hat, will this Balkanization of video formats could heat up the platform wars again? What will it mean for the Mac platform (or editors who like to work with it) when they can’t play nicely with PC or Linux tools and vice versa?

Image sequences forever!

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Charlie Austin]

[Oliver Peters] “2) QT MOV – in the process of being deprecated outside of H264 and ProRes codecs”

Actually, this isn’t entirely accurate. From the horses mouth:

• AV Foundation and QuickTime Player still use the QuickTime Movie file format
• Apple is deprecating the QuickTime 7 APIs, not the file format

SUPPORTED CODECS
• Delivery codecs
■ H.264, AAC, JPEG
• Mezzanine codecs
■ Apple ProRes, LPCM
• Camera device codecs
■ MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.263, DV…

the ellipsis is from the document this came from, so possibly more codecs are supported.

While QT 7 being deprecated is a big deal, I don’t think it’s the end of the world…

Full Disclosure: Regarding codecs, I really have no idea what I’m talking about, I’m just reading stuff. So maybe it is the end of the world… 🙂

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[Oliver Peters]

[Charlie Austin] “• AV Foundation and QuickTime Player still use the QuickTime Movie file format
• Apple is deprecating the QuickTime 7 APIs, not the file format
….
• Mezzanine codecs”

Well, Avid DNxHD is a Mezzanine codec and as yet is not supported directly in AVF, from what I understand. So presumably, Apple has to supply an SDK for AVF and then Avid (or other manufacturers) have to rewrite to work inside the AVF framework. It won’t come from Apple directly.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Oliver Peters] “This all brings us to a very interesting (in a bad way) state of affairs on the Mac. You have 4 viable current post container formats. These would be:”

The slow death of QT hasn’t seemed to change much here. These issues have been going on for quite a long time (the closed AVF issues aside). AVF isn’t really a container, tough, it’s just a media access platform similar to Adobe’s MediaCore, but much more strict.

[Charlie Austin]

[Oliver Peters] “Well, Avid DNxHD is a Mezzanine codec and as yet is not supported directly in AVF, from what I understand. So presumably, Apple has to supply an SDK for AVF and then Avid (or other manufacturers) have to rewrite to work inside the AVF framework. It won’t come from Apple directly.
“

Makes sense… Again, i’m outta my element here. Lemme go see if there’s an SDK… 🙂

————————————————————-

~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Walter Soyka] “I don’t see Apple doing anything to make this process easier, and that’s too bad. I fear Apple doing exactly the opposite: drawing back into their own standards, maybe even taking us back to the bad old days when Macs and PCs didn’t play together so nicely. “

It’s always the end of the world around here.

[Walter Soyka]

[Jeremy Garchow] “It’s always the end of the world around here.”

Pardon my dramatic tones. You’re right that it’s not the end of the world — but narrowing support and encouraging a closed, single-vendor, proprietary format at the OS level sure feels like a step backwards.

Having a lingua franca was nice.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Walter Soyka] “Pardon my dramatic tones. You’re right that it’s not the end of the world — but narrowing support and encouraging a closed, single-vendor, proprietary format at the OS level sure feels like a step backwards.”

They also said that FCPX was a step backwards. Despite a few holes, there are also many steps forward and all of this on a brand new foundation.

So far, the entire workflow, is better. At least for me and my needs.

Despite the QT deprecation, MXF readers still seem to work in Mavericks. I can’t imagine that this next step will be anymore proprietary than QT was (or is).

[John Heagy]

My top wishes for AVFoundation are reference movie and third party codec support.

I’m more concerned about the end of QT APIs on Windows than OS X.

John

[Walter Soyka]

[John Heagy] “My top wishes for AVFoundation are reference movie and third party codec support.”

I’m not currently optimistic on either one:

https://www.subfurther.com/blog/2013/06/15/av-foundation-and-the-void/

I’d love to be able to change my mind.

[John Heagy] “I’m more concerned about the end of QT APIs on Windows than OS X.”

The silver lining is that fewer and fewer developers are relying on QuickTime APIs on Windows — ProRes decode support being a notable exception.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events