[Tim Burgess]

If you can do your required conversion on the command-line with ffmpeg, then it is certainly doable to provide that as a web service.

You would simply wrap a web framework (and there are many many web frameworks! e.g. Django, Ruby on Rails, JSP, etc.) around ffmpeg. The facing page would simply take the file and the selected format options and pass that to ffmpeg and then make the result available as a file).

[Tim Burgess]

My camera codec is AVCHD (so H.264) at 24Mbit and it does produce very nice images. However as I submit footage for stock purposes, my end customer requires MotionJPEG (or what Apple calls PhotoJPEG). This seems to be pretty standard throughout the stock industry.

To date, I have been doing an ingest into ProRes422, then doing a mild color grade in Color and then I go via Compressor to get output. But looking at some of my clips, I’m beginning to suspect I could get better quality (i.e. eliminate some slight noise) by using ffmpeg to go to MJPEG, then color correcting (and maybe some noise reduction) in After Effects and then exporting to MJPEG. I’m aware I may be simply coming up against AVCHD limits but am keen to see if that is the case.

[Tim Burgess]

Thanks for the info Michael!

I suspected it was related to the qflags but was uncertain how to set them. I will know for sure when I view the transcoded MJPEG files in detail on my HD monitor but it seems to have reduced the noise somewhat. I guess that any codec change will inherently up noise and so maybe I need to think about running some noise removal after my color grade in my delivered clips…

Cheers, Tim