[Chris Brooke]

The destination is not quite straight forward as this is a test for an augmented reality project and the video will play via a bespoke smartphone app developed by another company – hence I’ve been trialling different codecs for final delivery. The media was fine in Premiere I was just curious as to what was causing the difference between the two codecs playing back in a media player.

It seems that Media Encoder is causing the issue in this instance (as I’ve mentioned in a post below). Exporting ProRes 4444 directly from the source media in AE with premultiplied alpha plays just fine in QT Player.

I can only assume Media Encoder does something with the alpha channel when transcoding. Shifting from premultiplied to straight? Just a guess…

[Chris Brooke]

Actually the Animation export from AE was premultiplied. The prores export was done through Media Encoder which doesn’t seem to have an option to select straight or premultiplied.

Whatever Media Encoder was doing seems to have been the problem. Exporting prores 4444 with premultiplied alpha (the default option) direct from from AE plays perfectly fine in QT Player.

[Chris Brooke]

Hello Dave,

Thanks for the response. If that is the case though why does the Animation export display just fine in both VLC and QT Player but the ProRes 4444 version does not. I have attached an image (ProRes is on the left).

Thanks.

[Chris Brooke]

Hi Bob,

If you read my post you would see that I don’t list price as a concern. I cite Drobo as being a possible solution to two issues based upon my own research. As I stated I do not know a huge amount about this area. If you can advise I would be grateful of that.

Best, C.

[Chris Brooke]

Thanks for this, Michael. Does that require a two machine workflow? One for input one for output?

[Chris Brooke]

Thanks for responding, Michael. I have found results in Avid Mix and Match to be patchy when dealing with different frame rates, often with ghosting being a problem.

Is there any form of hardware based solution for converting multiple files of differing rates in to one format on the market?

Compressor is slow and causes problems with audio pass through when dealing with certain codecs like pro-res.

One thing I haven’t tried is Sorenson Squeeze, I’m wondering if anybody out there has tried it for this type of workflow?

[Chris Brooke]

Just wanted to add my voice to the ‘hold option key when opening premiere’ solution to ditch the prefs.

Running CS5 on OSX Mountain Lion and it worked a charm.

Cheers folks!

[Chris Brooke]

Hi Bob,

Thanks for this.

I’ve been having an interesting chat about this with some peeps over on DVInfo.net

Here;s the link if your are interested https://www.dvinfo.net/forum/open-dv-discussion/514482-archiving-solution-advice-drobo.html#post1780295

In summary to this discussion I am now leaning towards the initially cheap and cheerful option of buying a USB SATA Doc and backing up that way.

In response to the DVinfo thread I wrote:

I think I should have been more clear about defining what I mean by storage and backup.

A backup on an LTO tape is just that – a backup. It’s not a way to store data in a way which is immediately accessible.

There are many reasons why I often need to tap in to my archive at a moments notice. It may be because a client needs an update to a video (e.g. a new logo), a complete re-edit of existing material, or maybe I want to dig out an old after effects composition which I think will be of use in a current project. Therefore whatever, storage solution I choose needs to let me quickly access individual files.

Maybe what I should be looking at is having my archive on HDD, and a taped backup of those (kept off site) rather than a simple HDD copy of the original.

Bob, are you aware of any possible problems using individual large SATA drives (2TB+) as storage (one original, one duplicate) rather than RAID? I have also heard they should be plugged in once in awhile to keep them ‘alive’….

[Chris Brooke]

Hi there,

Sorry, I didn’t explain myself very well. The gaps caused the creation of three separate masks which I need to just be one mask.

I found a work around by copying the paths into Illustration and using the Join Vertices function to close the gaps by highlighting the two points I wanted to join. I then copied the path back in to AE.

I find it a bit odd the AE doesn’t seem to have this function. Hey-ho.

[Chris Brooke]

Hi Rafael,

Thanks for your post.

The 100 selected films for the festival are being selected from over a thousand which have been submitted on DVD.

The laptop solution won’t work for us because we have several venues screening different selections of films simultaneously over three days and, unfortunately, there isn’t the budget to invest in several laptops with video cards.

What I am trying to do here is establish a standard for submission which will make for an easier workflow our end and allow us to encode different selections of films into an appropriate format for screening (whether DVD, BlueRay etc) while compressing/converting from a high-quality source.

You come up with a very good point about ProRes not exporting from PCs though. I was under the impression that with the latest version of Avid MC5 that exporting ProRes was fine but, alas, I have now been living in Apple-land for so long now it hadn’t event occurred to me that this can only be done with Avid on a Mac.

I suppose we could insist on Quicktime files encoded with either ProRes of Avid DNxHD (I can read both)?

Would appreciate your thoughts.