[Brian Lynn]

I am not worried about generation loss. I am fully aware of the different versions of ProRes and what they are for.

What I am asking about is forcing X number of bits per second.

Assuming all the video files are the same resolution and frame rate, total numbers of frames are equal, and I force CBR at 20mbps each video file should be the exact same number of bits after the render.

If I am doing this myself on my PC I have no issues. I render to uncompressed AVI or an image sequence and then encode to MPEG2 CBR and all the files have identical bit counts.

When I catch ProRes files from clients it doesn’t matter what I do: I can -never- get the final bit counts to match! I have tried rendering the ProRes to uncompressed AVI, render to image sequence, and then recode to MPEG2 and nothing seems to help.

When I control the work flow from start to finish I end up like this:
File 1 Size 149,998
File 2 Size 149,998
File 3 Size 149,997
File 4 Size 149,998

All the files are within 1 bit of each other.

When I catch ProRes files and convert them I end up like this:
File 1 Size 150,032
File 2 Size 150,989
File 3 Size 149,983
File 4 Size 149,959

These may seem like small differences but when the software is designed to process X bits/second it can throw things off after a few hours of running.

Thanks!

[Brian Lynn]

I would take a look at:

Animation->Keyframe Assistant->Convert Audio to Keyframes

And then parent the generated Keyframes to control the opacity or other parameters of an animated color layer (or any other layer) and set some blend modes.