[Craig Seeman]

Using the X70 both HD and UHD on 6 core MacPro Tube. Generally works well although I haven’t done multicam. I do get an occasional bad frame (macro blocks) which goes away if I slide the shot back and forth or trim a frame back and forth.

[Craig Seeman]

Quality lost is NEVER regained. If you’re a professional you keep masters at original quality for future work. Hard drives are very cheap. Of course if you’re not a professional and saving space is more important than future use…

[Craig Seeman]

While Compressor is certainly lacking for CBR, the need for it is become less frequent. One common use is for HTTP in which the bit rate changes based on the user’s internet connection speed. There’s a need for CBR in some live streaming situations but that wouldn’t involve Compressor.

I’m not sure what Adobe Media Manager is or why it would require 100% CBR. I’d think if any Adobe program needs CBR then Adobe Media Encoder would support it.

Both Vimeo and YouTube request 48kHz audio. Facebook used to request 44.1kHz but I’ve noted they’ve dropped that requirement recently.

I have absolutely no problem setting Compressor H.264 encoding to 48kHz. I’m surprised that you say Adobe has an issue doing that. Certainly Compressor doesn’t have this issue. Most of my H.264 encoding is at 48kHz in Compressor.

Compressor has made major improvements in the last couple of updates. I don’t doubt that the ubiquity of Compressor and Adobe Media Encoder are factors in the end of life of Episode. Compressor’s H.264 encoding, once near the bottom of the quality rung is now very close to x264. Adding High Profile and CABAC entropy was another big improvement. Also the ability to take advantage of Intel QuickSync has made it very fast (and why you may find Quad i7 Macs faster for encoding than MacPro Xeons).

Episode sales stop and the end of January 2017 and support will continue until the end of January 2018. Telestream now offers Cloud encoding. Of course this relates to an issue you note about having to create an intermediary. Episode has a plugin for Premiere Pro so I don’t think an intermediary is needed in that case.

[Craig Seeman]

There should be a law that requires people to preserve camera masters. Just my strongly felt opinion. Hard drive space is cheap. Lost quality when masters are gone is priceless damage.

YouTube has recommended compression specs including 4K

[Craig Seeman]

Depending on the need you could mail the files on Hard Drive, SSD drive (more expensive but more durable for mail) or SD cards (small enough to fit in a standard envelope).

[Craig Seeman]

I then did an encode targeting the same data rate in Telestream Episode which actually allows me to select CBR. It’s the bottom added data rate chart. Note the difference. Episode, which can be set to CBR, is closest to CBR.

It does not look like Compressor supports CBR very closely.

[Craig Seeman]

I tested Paul’s method with QTComponents, my suggested HTTP Live Streaming modified setting, Video Sharing Services 1080 modified. Same source file for all. I set data rate for 1500kbps. Paul’s method looks the same as HTTP but with very slightly lower peaks. Video Sharing Services has the widest swings.

[Craig Seeman]

I don’t know of any heavily compressed format than maintains the alpha at a “small” file size.
List of Video Formats with Alpha

VP6 (FLV) supports Alpha but you’re not going to want to do post production work with it. Since web browsers have moved to direct HTML player support it’s not used much on the web theses days.
I’m not sure how big video PNG with alpha would be.

I’m not sure why you’d want to try anything not widely supported. Even a free DropBox or iCloud account can support up to 5GB. You can send the files one or two at a time.

Personally I’d use ProRes 4444

[Craig Seeman]

Although I haven’t tested myself, try using one of the “Prepare for HTTP Live Streaming” presets unaltered. Generally it’s recommended that those be CBR so Apple might have built it in (non uncommon for how they handle things).

[Craig Seeman]

[Steve Connor] “FCPX is stagnating at the moment”

This seems to be the modus operandi for Apple in “our market” (depending on how you want to define that).
They make great innovation and then it sits there for a long while with improvements but nothing that’s radical new. Arguable this is even being proffered even in their consumer products.

With MacPro, as it is, there’s not even interim speed bumps to the CPU or GPUs. If one buys at the beginning of the life cycle one gets at least a somewhat competitive piece of technology. A year, or even two later, not only have the not updated the technology, there’s no significant drop in price either.

With FCPX there was some major innovation and, while there’s been feature updates, some have been on our wish list for years. Of course a big update is coming (just as one might anticipate with the MacPro) but the pattern is frustrating.