Will Premiere support JPEG2000

[Vince Becquiot]

Although I have not imported footage from that particular camera, I have edited JPEG2000 footage a few month back in PP2, and it worked like a charm. You can also export to JPEG2000 under Quicktime.

Vince

[Tip Mcpartland]

Thanks very much for your response to my post. Can you recall the resolution of the footage? Was it HD?

[Vince Becquiot]

It was 1080p footage, which I in fact had to export down to 480i, so you know they both work 😉

Vince

[Tip Mcpartland]

Music to my ears. Thank you so much for the good news.

Anyone who’s interested in buying this camera contact me off list and I’ll “reveal the deal” I’ve put together for a great package price.

Tip McPartland
tipsd9video@msn.com

[Ron Shook]

Tip,

[Tip McPartland] “Music to my ears. Thank you so much for the good news.”

Be very careful about reading too much into that. Remember that Infinity’s JP2k will come in an MXF wrapper and I don’t think that the Adobe products can deal directly in any way with MXF. If you want to edit Infinity’s output using Adobe products with any reasonable workflow in its native format you’ll need to wait for Matrox Axio’s implementation. This will happen, as Matrox has just signed on as a GrassValley partner supplier, but I don’t know how soon that is liable to happen. Be aware that Matrox will deliver Axio drivers for all flavors of Sony and Panasonic MXF very soon, so they are very MXF aware. Perhaps we’ll have some indication at IBC. Tim will know whether Cineform will support the Infinity files, which would be another way of editing them with PPro, but of course that’s a transcoding, not native, solution.

The one thing that you can be almost certain of is that Canopus will have the first native solution, but only when you edit* with Edius. All Apple or Avid Infinity file editing solutions will involve some degree of transcoding or file preparation, although Avid’s could be a quasi-native editing solution, i.e., not truly native, but happening in real-time.

Ron Shook

[Tip Mcpartland]

Thanks Ron. I was on the phone the other day with David Newman at Cineform and he said they are basically nowhere with JPEG2000 support, but are members of the Infinity group so someday they will work something out.

The Infinity is very important to me because it fulfills the promise of affordable first-tier HD. That is the Holy Grail that was just not quite found with HDV, I know, I just sold my HD100 and 3.5×13 lens. Although the post issues are still a bit perplexing with the Infinity’s JPEG2000 codec, I have learned about two companies, previously unknown to me, who are working to provide solutions.

MainConcept and Morgan Multimedia who are both pedal to the metal on JPEG2000 products.

I talked to Dirk Peters at the MainConcept California operation, and he was very informative. MainConcept (German with US subsidiary) is the biggest “codec company” in the world with 80 full-time codec engineers. They provide Adobe with all their video codecs, for example. But, the have not yet provided Adobe with a JPEG2000 implementation.

Perhaps this is because of the Morgan Multimedia Premiere plug-in. You can read an alluring reference to this if you go the Adobe Premiere forum and run a search for JPEG2000, which is how I found out about Morgan in the first place. They are motion JPEG specialists with an extensive line of products in this area including a JPEG2000 Windows codec (https://jpeg2000.qarchive.org/) that may be at the heart of the Premiere solution. Unlike MainConcept who charge hundreds for their solution, Morgan sells their Windows implementation for $50.00.

On the other hand, MainConcept’s solution will almost certainly enable editing Infinity footage, but not as native JPEG2000. It is a software encoder that will turn JPEG2000 files into any codec you want, although you have to buy a module for each output codec, for example one would be DVCPRO HD and another uncompressed avi.

Now I’m not sure I’d want DVCPRO HD because I think it’s resolution challenged, but maybe that’s just in its Varicam iteration. But to grab select files off the Revpro drive with the MainConcept software encoder and save them to your hard dive as uncompressed 1920×1080 HD might work very well for me. Better yet would be going to Cineform Prospect, but we’ll have to wait for that.

Hopefully when it is released, there will be in place software support so that Infinity will provide that Holy Grail of affordable first tier HD (okay, you got me, maybe 4:4:4 is first tier now).

Tip