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The Question – An Update On My Choices In NLEs
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[Jeremy Garchow] “You can also do it in X, there’s nothing stopping you.”
Jeremy,
This would be true if FCP X can handle hundreds of sequences per project.
Have you heard of such reports?
Franz.
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[Franz Bieberkopf] “Have you heard of such reports?”
I think someone said they had 10,000!
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[Jeremy Garchow] “But this goes back to what was said earlier. MXF is an open standard that can be propritized rather quickly, or have a proprietary element (such as a codec) in it.”
But… then it’s non-standard.
[Jeremy Garchow] “I just can’t see consortium control actually working or being a benefit other than in where there is a measurable benefit, perhaps I am too naive.”
H.264 just works, and that’s because of the Motion Pictures Experts Group (in conjunction with their ITU collaborators whose name escapes me at the moment.)
Remember when distributing screeners meant making Sorenson MOVs and Windows Media WMVs? We don’t have to do that anymore because H.264 has a standard implementation that just works everywhere.
Consortia and NPOs manage all kinds of standards we use every day, like SDI, DVI, HDMI, Ethernet, OpenGL, OpenCL…
[Jeremy Garchow] “And just for reference, why do you have to do that instead of using something else? I’m (naturally) curious.”
Maximum display performance with minimum workflow hassle.
[Jeremy Garchow] “Now that it’s been taken away, can’t it be added back in?”
Sure, it could be, and I hope it will be, but honestly I could see this going either way.
I think that third-party codecs were taken away because AV Foundation started life on iOS, where limiting media types as a design choice makes a lot of sense. That’s less true on the desktop, though, and the degree to which Apple wants to fragment their frameworks for their different devices remains to be seen.
[Jeremy Garchow] “I’m not up to speed on the state of third party import and export for Pr. What is being done in third parties that Adobe isn’t handling natively?”
To bring this full circle, CineForm offers import/export plugins. Because they plug right into MediaCore, they feel native.
(They also have separate plugins at the OS-level frameworks as QuickTime components and DirectShow filters, so they’re also accessible via QuickTime and AVI respectively, presumably with some feature limitation.)
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
maybe we’ve beat this to death.
[Walter Soyka] “H.264 just works, and that’s because of the Motion Pictures Experts Group (in conjunction with their ITU collaborators whose name escapes me at the moment.)
Remember when distributing screeners meant making Sorenson MOVs and Windows Media WMVs? We don’t have to do that anymore because H.264 has a standard implementation that just works everywhere.
Consortia and NPOs manage all kinds of standards we use every day, like SDI, DVI, HDMI, Ethernet, OpenGL, OpenCL…”
I get it, and this is exactly where standards are very great, and that’s mostly to do with hardware.
But just because h264 is a standard, doesn’t mean it’s created equally, or freely. You pay for it, eventually.
[Walter Soyka] “Maximum display performance with minimum workflow hassle.”
And this couldn’t be done without open source products? I am generally asking, not dismissing.
[Walter Soyka] “To bring this full circle, CineForm offers import/export plugins. Because they plug right into MediaCore, they feel native.
(They also have separate plugins at the OS-level frameworks as QuickTime components and DirectShow filters, so they’re also accessible via QuickTime and AVI respectively, presumably with some feature limitation.)”
And how much do you have to pay for it?
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[Jeremy Garchow] “maybe we’ve beat this to death.”
That’s kind of the thesis of the Jeremy and Walter Show, though, isn’t it? Some of my favorite conversations here!
[image]Maybe we misunderstand each other here? I like ProRes, I just think it would be even better if it weren’t proprietary. My appeal for open standards are not about being free as in beer. They are about maximizing interoperability and reducing single-vendor dependence.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
One of my favorite gifs.
[Walter Soyka] “Maybe we misunderstand each other here? I like ProRes, I just think it would be even better if it weren’t proprietary. My appeal for open standards are not about being free as in beer. They are about maximizing interoperability and reducing single-vendor dependence.”
No, I get what you’re saying and it makes sense. I just would like to see more implementation if this is the case. Supposedly, FCPX has an SDK too, and it seems to work, but I just don’t see enough support, or really, not enough places that accept deliveries (broadcast or other) are clamoring for the open source, ‘consortified’ format.
Until then, I guess Apple laughs all the way to the bank:
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Until then, I guess Apple laughs all the way to the bank:”
That’s a good GIF, too.
[Jeremy Garchow] “I just don’t see enough support, or really, not enough places that accept deliveries (broadcast or other) are clamoring for the open source, ‘consortified’ format.”
ProRes is workable. It’s a de facto standard. It’s just that relying on it is a bad choice that we are collectively making. Kind of like developers relying on the QuickTime framework on Windows. Eventually, Apple moved on, and if you were counting on QuickTime to power your application, you had to move on, too.
I’m not saying something bad is going to happen if we all stick with ProRes. I’m just saying that it’d be better for the industry if ProRes became VC-6.
[Walter Soyka] “Maximum display performance with minimum workflow hassle.”
[Jeremy Garchow] “And this couldn’t be done without open source products? I am generally asking, not dismissing.”
Coming back to this… it’s not an issue of open source (although we are open sourcing the plugin when it’s complete).
There’s a specific image sequence format that we want to use for performance reasons on a specific playback device, but said image format can be neither read nor written by common apps. We currently have to render image sequences in a more common format like TIFF, PNG or TGA and batch convert them. Having just suffered through this batch workflow with a quarter million frames, we were looking for ways to speed up the process, so we’re cutting out the intermediate.
If the format spec were not available, we couldn’t build this solution and we’d be stuck with our slow and painful batch workflow.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Walter Soyka] “I’m not saying something bad is going to happen if we all stick with ProRes. I’m just saying that it’d be better for the industry if ProRes became VC-6.”
I want to believe.
Without being able to create my own media library, I have to rely on purchasable formats that work.
ProRes has been amazing in that regard. Almost anyone, from “high-end” to “low-end” knows what to do with a ProRes file.
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