[Andrew Johnson]

Quality is not strictly the issue to be honest, I’m trying to make a multi-angle DVD so I just want a low-ish bitrate file that DVD Studio Pro can encode and that requires control of closing the GOP and the bitrate itself, which AME does not give you. Encore might have to be an option, you’re right. I’m just not sure you can do multi-angle DVDs with Encore…

[Andrew Johnson]

Thanks for your response. If the GOP is not necessarily closed, then I can’t be sure it’ll work in DVD Studio Pro 4 so it doesn’t really justify waiting for an encode.

I have tried many MPEG2 formats but with those I don’t seem to get any control over the actual Mbps bit rate, just the arbitrary AME 0-100 Quality slider, which is essentially meaningless in terms of DVD Studio Pro 4’s requirements of an actual bit rate.

Am I looking in the wrong places to adjust the output VBR/CBR in AME?

[Andrew Johnson]

Okey doke, thanks for this.

Here’s an avi from AVI Generator of the same .264 which I converted from a .264 into a DNxHD 36 .mov in HD Video Converter here (see 6.49mins in) and I’ve uploaded the shortest .264 I can find in the whole cache for speed of use.

The Media Info of a typical example of one of these .264 files is as follows:

General
Complete name : C:DAY 06ch00000000000001-130220-133704-135106-00p00001000000400.264
Format : AVC
Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec
File size : 202 MiB

Video
Format : AVC
Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile : Baseline@L3.0
Format settings, CABAC : No
Format settings, ReFrames : 2 frames
Format settings, GOP : M=1, N=25
Width : 704 pixels
Height : 576 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 1.222
Standard : PAL
Color space : YUV
Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0
Bit depth : 8 bits
Scan type : Progressive

[Andrew Johnson]

If I go to AVI I lose a generation and I don’t want any loss.

The only video converters I have found so far which will actually deal with the .264 files are Pavtube HD Video Converter and Cinec (which is an FFmpeg program) on the PC and nothing on the Mac will even play these .264s, nor convert the .avi files I get when I convert the .264s to .avi in AVI Generator on the PC. Compressor won’t even look at the .avi files I have obtained from AVI Generator on the PC which seems baffling to me, especially when I have installed everything to do with DivX and 3ivx onto the Mac running Compressor.

I think some of this incredible bottleneck could be due to the possibility that the .264s I have shot might be raw video streams rather than containerised clips.

The bonus with Cinec on the PC is that it theoretically spits out Pro Res 422 files straight from the .264s on the PC natively, which is exactly what I need, but the cinec.lib1.exe crashes whenever the converted file gets to about 9 gigs, whether I’m using one core or two and regardless of what drives I’m running it off.

I surmise this is because of the protection issues around the Apple codecs, or the streaming issue, or the bad coding of Cinec, but I’m about ready to hurl this godforsaken PC lemon into the street as I can’t get even one decent file from any of this mindless trial-and-error ludicrousness.

[Andrew Johnson]

Well, the specs on the website for that FFmpeg encoder certainly look like we’re in the right area. I’m going to try it now.

AVI Generator takes the proprietary .264s and spits them out as .avi and it was on the disc which came with the security cameras we bought. Try this and follow the link to ‘AVI Generator’.

with the specs on my PC (i7, GTX 650 & 16GB RAM) the conversion happens remarkably quickly, but the resulting images are soft as hell.

[Andrew Johnson]

Thanks for this response. I have tried multiple other formats that Pavtube HD Video Converter on the PC gives me as transcoding options and none of them behave in FCP as a true NLE codec should. Most of them are not editing codecs.

Basically, I’m trying to dodge proprietary .264 files from real security cameras into something I can edit in FCP on a found footage feature film.

The—immeasurably cumbersome—Mac workaround is to play them through the proprietary .264 player from the manufacturer of the cameras and Camtasia the full screen as a Pro Res 422 file, but this takes an absolute aeon, and introduces latency when other processes are going on in the operating system (literally) in the background.

I’ve gone too far down the road of the assembly cut of the feature (1 hr 20mins so far) to switch to AVID or Premiere now and I dearly want to set the separate PC I’ve just bought (i7, GTX 650 1GB GDDR5, 16GB RAM) to work on transcoding these .264 files while I get on with the rest of the edit.

The last resort option I can see is to convert the .264s into AVIs with AVI Generator 9.0 and then transcode them into DNxHD on Pavtube HD Video Converter but we’re going one generation down then, aren’t we, which is not desirable.