Transcoding to DnxHD blah blah blah…

[Duke Sweden]

I’ve only just started transcoding to DNxHD from h264. To my eyes, which are very bad, I see no degradation, no banding, etc. In fact if I open the transcoded file in the program monitor and the original .MOV file in the source monitor I see absolutely no difference. There’s a big difference, however, in how smoothly the file plays when scrubbing the timeline, or just letting it play while I tweak it, so this is a godsend for me, since it’s become obvious to me that a $700.00 workstation is no better, and in most cases much worse, than a consumer PC, and I don’t have the money, or the need, for a $2,000.00 workstation.

[Alex Udell]

I hear you Oliver….

like I said….it is Lossy….but negligible….

ProRes and DNX I don’t think use a logic that can see that the input is already compressed….

the software host is just handing them an array of data.

they MIGHT be smart enough to see that if the input is matching codec, then it wouldn’t recompress and pass it thru….but if it’s a different codec…not sure how’d they do that….

again…no visible degradation in a single pass….

but I’m not an engineer….I just play one on TV….

🙂

Alex Udell
Editing, Motion Graphics, and Visual FX
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[David Roth weiss]

Duke,

Don’t let Alex’s discussion of “lossy” compression upset that newbie head of yours… it’s a technical term, not one that describes a visually apparent loss of quality. And, your eyes are just fine, there is no monitor at any cost that would be good enough to show you the difference between your camera original and that material transcoded to ProRes. The only way a trained engineer can tell the difference between the two is to use a “difference keyer,” which can be used to show a visual representation of the pixels that are different between a frame of the original and the same frame of the transcoded version, i.e. these differences bring the lost pixels. Trust me, in your case it would be just a few green and blue pixels that would never reveal themselves to you in your moving video.

And, until you replace the video card in your new machine with a newer and GPU, your new computer will not reveal its power to you. In the day when your machine was built Cuda processing was not built-in to NLE software yet, and the cheap powerful GPU cards we have today simply did not exist. A Quadro 6000 card, would have cost you $6800 in those days, while today you can buy more powerful cards for $600.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los Angeles

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Duke Sweden]

Starsky & Hutch, season 3, right!?! 😉

Don’t worry, I’m not that much of a noob. I’ve heard the word lossy before. But I appreciate you worrying about my mental well being 🙂

Like I said, right now PPro is behaving wonderfully with my new workflow, but I know these things are relative and it won’t be long before even this seems laggy to me. My only complaint is I have to play the timeline at 1/4 resolution which makes it look like crap, hard to discern if the changes I’m making look good. But even the two z800’s froze up when I tried to play at full resolution, so…