The Truth about Pixels…

Red Camera...4K?

If you haven’t gotten a chance to read the Cow article The Truth About 2K, 4K, and the future of Pixels by John Galt then consider yourself missing out. While much of it can get a bit technical and in-depth I think it’s a great look at what is really going on inside of today’s cameras. We throw the terms HD, 2K, and 4K around without probably knowing much of what is going on to give us that resolution.

I especially enjoyed the section about the RED camera (also the Dalsa) and how he calls the RED’s claim of 4K resolution “marketing pixels.” What does he mean….well that’s just to wet your appetite. Hit the link to read the article. Who knows, it may change the way you see what you see!

Ryan

back to school…

For those who are interested in perfecting their knowledge of post-production a plethora of DVD tutorials exist. And you can’t leave out lynda as a great website for further learning, especially at a $25/month price point. That’s hard to beat. The one drawback with both DVD tutorials and lynda is the lack of interaction. It’s very difficult to get answers to questions on the software or have your work critiqued during the process. That’s where fxphd.com steps in.

fxphd is a training website geared specifically towards post-production effects. They use a simple Quicktime movie interface but offer direct contact with the professor and students of the class via forums. So while you get the same DVD quality walkthrough, you also get the chance to interact with the instructor of the course. The site is an invaluable resource for students of the post-production world because it covers industry standard software. Classes revolved around Avid, Final Cut Pro, Shake, Maya, Houdini, Nuke, After Effects, Flint, Flame, Smoke, Combustion….the list goes on forever. Through the magic of VPN you can have access to many of these pieces of software when you signup with fxphd. So you aren’t just watching someone work on software that you can’t get your hands on. Nope! You get to work on the software yourself side by side with the artist/instrucutor. This semester they are offereing 35 classes. I can’t recommend them enough as a tool for those of us in the production and post-production industries.

The only warning: it ain’t free. 3 classes at fxphd will run you $330US. The benefit is that you get in depth training and personal access to not just an instuctor, but someone who is actually a current artist working on the software in the real world. So what are you waiting for?!! Hit the link and check them out.

Squeeze It!

As I’ve written about previously our department is undergoing a massive re-encode, about 1600 files. We were previously using Sorenson Squeeze 4.5.7. It’s main problem revolved around the time it took to transcode a Quicktime movie into a .mp4. To create one mp4 took about three hours. And for each Quicktime file we need to output two mp4’s and one mp3. Now 6+ hours to get through one file is just rediculous.

It became important to take advantage of our multi-core machines, which Squeeze 4.5.7 wasn’t doing. We decided to take the plunge and upgrade to Squeeze 5 because of it’s claims to utilizing multiple cores. Come to find out that it does and it doesn’t. It does utilize multi-core machines, but only in certain instances. For example, if you important files manually it can use all the cores you have. If, however, you use a watch folder to encode files you only get one core of fun. Now that seems pretty short sighted. Watch folders, in a multi editor studio is of the utmost importance. Since everything we do is in a networked envirnoment watch folders make the encoding process much simplier.

For those who may be unaware of what or how a watch folder works, let me explain. A watch folder is a designated folder that is “watched” by the encoding software. Whenever a file of an appropriate type, say a Quicktime .mov, is placed into the folder the encoding software will transcode the file into whatever settings are specified. So from one watch folder you may have five different output formats. In other words, one .mov goes in and out comes a mp3, mp4, wmv, flv, and mpeg-2. This makes repetative tasks easily managable. And it makes repetitative taks that come from multiple editors easily mangable through one piece of software.

The upside to Squeeze 5 is when it does take advantage of your multiple cores it allows you to rock ‘n roll. Instead of doing 5 files in a 24 hour period, my 8 core machine was cranking through 26 files in the same time. Now that’s a serious time saver! My recommendation to Sorenson is to tweak their programming so that multi-core encodes happen whether you import manually or setup watch folders. The software has an extremely intuitive interface with simple, easy-to-use plugins. For the price point and its feature set, not much can touch it. Overall, I give squeeze a 7 out of 10.

So now that I’m utilizing all my cores I’ll keep ya posted on how long it takes to transcode 1600 files! Maybe one day we’ll have a faster solution to these kinds of tasks….but until then….

h.264 solution…

Last week I posted how we were in the midst of searching for a way to adequately encode almost 2000 files using the h.264 codec into some sort of wrapper. The problem was deciding what type of wrapper to use. Should we use .mp4, .mov, or .m4a?

The problem centered around how long it took Sorenson Squeeze (our transcoding software) to create a mp4 from our full quality mov. What I failed to consider was how much unnecessary work Squeeze was doing. For instance, we exported from Final Cut Pro a DV25 720×480 interlaced timeline. Squeeze had to resize the file down to our output resolution of 640×480, deinterlace the footage because we were delivering via web (and you don’t put interlaced material on a progressive display like a LCD or Plasma), and then create a new mp4 file. So Squeeze took anywhere from 4-6 hours just to do 1 file. That just isn’t going to work. I’ve seen mud move faster. Hence our dilemma.

We looked at Compressor as a solution, but it didn’t offer a mp4 file using the h.264 codec. If we want h.264 it either meant wrapping it as a m4v or as a mov. The solution: stick with Squeeze but take some work off the programs shoulders, force FCP to do much of the grunt work upfront. So when we batch export from FCP our sequences were manipulated from FCP into our target resolution (640×480) and deinterlaced. Encoding a file that Squeeze no longer has to resize and deinterlace took the transcoding time down to 1-2 hours. Much better. Still not light speed, but not as slow as molasses either.

What we learned: sometimes its easier to let FCP do the grunt work, like resizing or deinterlacing, and then let a secondary software, like Squeeze, do what it’s made to do, namely, transcode.

h.264 Anyone?

Here’s the goal: you want to use the H.264 codec to distribute video content via Amazon S3, used inside a Flash player, and playable on any iPod/iPhone. Sounds simple enough right? Wrong!

The question is what kind of wrapper you want to encase the H.264 in, mov, mp4, or the arbitrary Apple standard of m4v (to distinguish it from m4a). We have adopted a .mp4 standard at our studio. So there’s 2 ways to go about producing a .mp4 video either QuickTime Pro or stand alone encoding software (Cleaner, Squeeze, Episode, etc.)

“Not so fast,”you say! Just use Compressor. It comes with every version of Final Cut Studio…you’ll be good to go. The problem is that Compressor only creates .m4v or .mov using the H.264 codec. If you create a .mp4 you get stuck with the generic mp4 codec

“O.K. Well just change the extension when it comes out,” you say. Well the problem is that the mp4/m4v/mov gets data written into the header of the file to specify what format it is. If it gets changed QT Pro cannot recognize it

We use Sorenson Squeeze (version 4.5.7) at our production studio to encode video. Squeeze only does the H.264 codec in a mp4 wrapper. So no .m4v (Apple’s iWhatever approved format) or .mov. Plus version 4.5 of Squeeze takes about 1.5-2 hours to encode one twenty minute file on a four-core machine (that’s too many numbers for one sentence). Now consider this: we have almost 2000 videos to encode. Not the fastest solution

So we could change our format from .mp4 (what we currently use) to .m4v and just use Compressor. The trouble with Compressor is that the settings in Compressor only go down to 1000kbps. That’s almost 4 times our current data rate (275kbps). What’s a boy to do

No solution has of yet, revealed itself. I continue to research how to make a H.264 .mp4 file with speed and efficiency (Sorenson is the best option so far). Oh and in case you were wondering….QT Pro can create mp4 files with the H.264 codec, but they aren’t compatible with the iPod/iPhone. In fact there’s a specific setting inside of QT Pro for the iPod or the iPhone (it creates a .m4v file)

Bottom line: too many formats within just this one standard. This doesn’t even begin to delve into the .wmv, .mov, .flv race. It’s a jungle out there. Can we please simplify this….and soon?!!