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What’s up with Sheer Video Codec?
I have read great testimonials from industry professionals regarding the SheerVideo codec as a lossless compression codec of phenomenal quality. The claim being that its “lossless” qualities really do apply to its amazing compression capabilities.
Back in 2007 the following glowingly laudatory article was posted at Creative Cow Magazine regarding SheerVideo
https://magazine.creativecow.net/article/crossplatform-workflows-using-sheervideo-compression
I go to the website– https://www.bitjazz.com/en/products/sheervideo/ and read about a demo I can download for the following product:
SheerVideo™ HD Pro for Mac Universal Binary Demo
The Creative Cow article said the only downside was that using it in Final Cut Pro 6 you would discover that Final Cut was not “hardwired” to RT playback footage encoded with SheerVideo–any effect or filter or title on that footage would turn the timeline red and require a render…but that the render itself was so much faster in general than with other codecs, including Apple’s own codecs.
But, looking around the BitJazz website this seems to be a product whose development stopped in 2007. I am suspicious because the whole site looks dated as if it ran into some issue which stopped its development a couple of years ago. It just seems to be sitting out on the fringes with no more hype or new versions or news since nearly 3 years ago.
Can any of you Hollywood houses bring us up to date on whether SheerVideo is still being used for professional productions, such as the Simpsons, etc?
If so, has the product been updated? Does Final Cut Pro 7 acknowledge this codec now so far as to support it for RT?
I don’t read any reference to Mac OS X Leopard either on the BitJazz website. I would love to use this product if it is actively developed and supported.
Thank you for the industry update!
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7 Replies
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yeah, honestly with prores I wouldn’t bother with any other codec.
no reason to. -
Responding to my own post: I found Andreas’s patent submission dated 2008. He was a poster on Apple Lists going back to 2003-2004 up until 2007 and then posted a couple of things in 2009.
BUT, looking at his Support page more closely I now see that his latest SheerVideo codec 2.8.0.10 was posted October 21, 2009 and that Andreas posted LOTS of revision versions in 2009, every couple of months.
So, it appears since the 2007 article that SheerVideo has been robustly developed, de-bugged, and continuously refined.
With that I have downloaded a 20-days trial to see what the new-and-improved SheerVideo codec does in Final Cut Pro 7.
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HMMMMMMM…..I hear you.
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Hi Dave!
In my humble opinion…
I remember being very excited by Sheervideo but then Apple (so to speak) beat them to the punch.
It was my impression that ProRes stole Sheervideos thunder by filling it’s intended role along with RT effects in FCP.
ProRes basically does what Sheervideo was trying to do.
But since ProRes was engineered along with the folks at Apple, and AJA my recommendation is to use ProRes instead.
-Nicholas Bierzonski
Senior Editor/DVD Author/Java Boy
http://www.finalfocusvideo.com
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And why don’t you have a look to the BitJazz web site and read?
The last update of Sheer is just 4 month old.
Andrea and Owen do not stop working in Sheer (the best codec of the world).[Nicholas Bierzonski] “ProRes basically does what Sheervideo was trying to d”
Prores is a compressed codec.
Sheer have always been “too much” for FC.
Probably Smoke users will still see the difference.
Rafael -
I know this thread is old but I wanted to know which version of After Effects the latest plugin is compatible with. I know they haven’t updated the plugin in years but to this day I don’t know any other codec that can compress animations better than Sheer with such a small file size. Better than ProRes by a long shot. Their Mac version is not longer compatible with new Macs so I’m trying it on the PC side.
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Just found this post after someone asked me for some old footage, and I found I had compressed it with Sheer. Not sure how I’m going to recover it yet, aside from installing an old OS version on an old Mac. I think I’ve tried to use Sheer on a modern OS and it didn’t work. Anybody have a different experience?
I find it odd that people were so suspicious. Sheer was an excellent codec, and the only viable lossless one that I know of (there was one other short-lived one that I can’t remember the name of).
ProRes did not “beat” Sheer to anything; Sheer pre-dated ProRes by years, and ProRes is still lossy. Apple has never understood the need for lossless compression, for intermediate results and archiving. Then again, Apple didn’t understand the seriousness of their ridiculously defective gamma-handling either.
Now that Apple has largely abandoned the media-creation space, I guess we never will see a widely accepted lossless codec.
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