Mailing List AE-List@media-motion.tv — Message #64887
From: Stephen van Vuuren <AE-List@media-motion.tv>
Subject: RE: [AE] Visually lossless codec thoughts
Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2019 18:18:42 +0000
To: After Effects Mail List <AE-List@media-motion.tv>

We have a winner!!!

 

Thanks for the all input but we have a surprising winner. Media Encoder x264 was visually identical (checked several hundred frames out of 30,000 and 100% were all black) with the following settings:

 

Match source, CBR, 50Mb/s, max render quality, max depth everything left at defaults. Output file was 8-bit 660 Mb vs 8-bit uncompressed 60GB. This is for a 1316 x 1316 file at 30.000fps.

 

Render speed was 12 minutes a frame vs 22 minutes for compressed and appeared to speed up dramatically over time vs. uncompressed holding to original speed.

 

Not what I would have excepted especially superior results via Aftercodecs but this was special need situation. In short, if you need something HD rez or lower to render fast and perform fast in AE with minimum fuss and no external futzing, that’s the way to go.

 

Stephen

 

 

 

From: After Effects Mail List <AE-List@media-motion.tv>
Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2019 1:10 PM
To: After Effects Mail List <AE-List@media-motion.tv>
Subject: Re: [AE] Visually lossless codec thoughts

 

Chris,

 

FFMPEG won’t resize the resize the various size PNGs for direct conversion using it natively.


As for artifacts, PhotoJPEG in AE 2014 (the only version that will let me render to it is 2014, missing it all other versions), crushed the blacks, shift the colors to red which likely is causing the encoder to alter the dithering in 8-bit i.e. rounding errors on a RGB value.

 

Bottom line is very different image look where as all other codecs tried are 100% visually identical.

 

From: After Effects Mail List <AE-List@media-motion.tv>
Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2019 12:19 AM
To: After Effects Mail List <AE-List@media-motion.tv>
Subject: Re: [AE] Visually lossless codec thoughts

 

Good catch--to clarify, the command switch for ffmpeg is mjpeg, but the codec being used is PhotoJPEG. I think you have to specify 444 vs. 422 encoding, instead of it kicking in automatically via the quality setting:

 

Nick

 

On Wed, Feb 20, 2019 at 11:35 PM Chris Zwar <AE-List@media-motion.tv> wrote:

I'm not that familiar with ffmpeg, but with the older (now obsolete) Apple Quicktime codecs, the MJPEG options were different to PhotoJPEG.  The Apple PhotoJPEG codec - even when used to make quicktime files - was a standard JPEG codec.  The MJPEGA & MJPEGB codecs date back to the early 1990s, when the only way to play back video on a desktop computer was with a custom video card.  The MJPEG codes were written for those custom chips. I can't remember the exact details but it was something like MJPEGA was for C-Cube chips and MJPEGB was for a different brand, or vice versa.  The MJPEG algorithms were different to Photo JPEG and not capable of the same level of quality.  I can't recall the details but I think the MJPEG codecs were always 4:2:2 (ie colour information was half the bandwidth of the luminance) while with the PhotoJPEG codec @ 100% the colour sampling was 4:4:4.  It's all a historical footnote now, anyway.

 

FWIW HAP has it's purposes - a lot of the large scale projection projects I work on deliver HAP files - but the quality is pretty poor and it's nowhere near visually lossless.

 

I'm not sure that something exists that meets all of Stephens requirements.  Without having done personal research, if you're not happy with any of the ProRes flavours (have you tried LT?) then I don't know if there's a viable alternative.

 

 

 

On Thu, 21 Feb 2019 at 15:18, Nick Fox-Gieg <AE-List@media-motion.tv> wrote:

I've had good luck with ffmpeg's PhotoJPEG (aka mjpeg) in the past. For 8bpc also look at Hap--large file sizes, uses GPU texture compression, designed for very fast playback of > 4K.

 

Nick 

 

On Wed, Feb 20, 2019, 11:06 PM Chris Zwar <AE-List@media-motion.tv wrote:

Stephen what artefacts are you getting @ 100% quality?  I've always thought - after being directly told by an Apple engineer - that JPEG at 100% was practically lossless, and any differences were due to rounding errors and not compression artefacts.

 

On Thu, 21 Feb 2019 at 13:33, Stephen van Vuuren <AE-List@media-motion.tv> wrote:

Teddy,

 

PhotoJPEG was a fail – color & gamma shift, artifacts at 100% quality.

 

Stephen

 

From: After Effects Mail List <AE-List@media-motion.tv>
Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2019 10:59 AM
To: After Effects Mail List <AE-List@media-motion.tv>
Subject: Re: [AE] Visually lossless codec thoughts

 

Did you try photo-jpeg in an mov? Definitely worth a test.

 

On Wed, Feb 20, 2019 at 10:48 AM Stephen van Vuuren <AE-List@media-motion.tv> wrote:

X264 lossless and x265 are both fails. X264 at 10-bit, AE says is 8-bit. X265 take 10x time to render out in Media Encoder and takes an unknown time (at least 100x) to build a frame. I gave up after 11 hours – every other codec was 14 to 22 minutes a frame.

 

Adobe and x265 simply don’t play in my experience.

 

From: After Effects Mail List <AE-List@media-motion.tv>
Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2019 5:57 AM
To: After Effects Mail List <AE-List@media-motion.tv>
Subject: Re: [AE] Visually lossless codec thoughts

 

x264 has lossless compression methods and can also be 10bit.

AfterCodec has support for 10bit and YUV 4:4:4, not the lossless mode as far as i can see, but a high bitrate x264 should be better than the old simpler DCT based Prores or DNxHR at comparable bitrates

 

Now the question is if AE will import them correctly again.

 

 

Robert

 

 

Den ons. 20. feb. 2019 kl. 09.08 skrev Evan Fotis Georgoulakis <AE-List@media-motion.tv>:

Personally I have the opposite experience, with Prores producing about
20% larger files than same flavor Cineform. I tried CFYUV10bit.

On 20-Feb-19 01:07, Teddy Gage wrote:
> Chris AFAIK cineform files are even bigger than Prores at the same
> flavor.


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_____________________________

Teddy Gage

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360 VR | MOGRAPH | VFX

BKLYN NY 11215

 
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