[Jonathan Holt]

Just noticed that it’s also outputting at 1920 x 1080 for some reason; project and export settings clearly set to 1280 x 720. What the heck is going on here?

[Jonathan Holt]

Actually, I have another question.

I’ve just been experimenting with Premiere (Pro CS3), and I’ve found that if I import a DNxHD movie file (with PCM audio in a .mov container), when I export the movie, if I choose to export as DNxHD, it takes forever to export. (Several hours for a couple of minutes of footage.)

Why is this? Is there no way to simply edit the footage in premiere (some very basic cuts) and export the movie without having to go through compression all over again? Can’t the cuts just be made “in place”, as it were?

Cheers,
Jonathan.

[Jonathan Holt]

Hello again,

Thanks for the advice Brendan and Kevin! Brilliant stuff. After compiling the latest SVN version of ffmpeg, I’ve found it supports encoding to DNxHD, the AVID codec. Having written a script, I can now convert all my files into this format in bulk; perfect.

My only problem is this: if you look at the following table, DNxHD Bitrate Settings, you’ll see that to encode 720p at 59.94 fps, I need to use a bitrate of 145Mbps. As I’m only starting with an initial bitrate of around 11-12Mbps, you can imagine how much more disk space is consumed when I convert one of these files. They increase in file size by a factor of about 10.

Is there any way around this, or do I just bite the bullet and accept that if I want to use a codec designed for HD NLE, I’m going to need a lot of space, regardless of the fact that it needn’t be so high a bitrate?

Many thanks once more,

Jonathan.