Best transcoding software?

[Martin.G]

So i like H265 on my Phantom 4 Pro because it handles compression much better, especially in ocean and stuff.

But Resolve 14 does not take H265 at all, so proxies are really wasted time. Ideally i would like to transcode into DNxHQ UHD or even 4K.

What programs are people using for these tasks these days?

Edit: Just put everything into Adobe Media Encoder and it seems it does the job. Will let it transcode for a few hours. Is this an accepted way of transcoding with adequate quality on end-files?

 

[diegocervo]

Cruncher (if you are on Windows).

 

[Greg_E]

Media Encoder should be GPU accelerated so it should be reasonably fast. SInce I don't own it at home, I bought (cheap) V6 Convert from HD Cinematics which is an ffmpeg derived tool (you need to copy the ffmpeg parts yourself). It works well and looks good getting into DNxHD (don't have UHD stuff to try) and pretty fast at about 2 -3 times faster frames per second than play speed on my computer. Been doing conversions from 1080/23.97p h.264 and ac3 into DNxHD, edit with Media Composer | First, then export back to DNxHD because the export features of Media Composer just plain suck (!), then back to Convert to get an h.264 mp4 for upload. Lot of extra work that shouldn't need to be done and most of it because of the ac3 source audio.

Need to see if I can get GPU acceleration working which might speed things up a bit on the h.264 encode side.

 

[Cary Knoop]

But Resolve 14 does not take H265 at all....

DaVinci Resolve Studio can read H.265 just fine (although I would not recommend using long GOP encodings for editing).

 

[Chris Santucci]

DaVinci Resolve Studio can read H.265 just fine

Not on a PC without ARM architecture. HEVC doesn't work at all in that case.

I'm using HandBrake for transcoding.

 

[jb.]

On Windows, Media Encoder if you have it. On a Mac, I use EditReady for nearly all my transcodes.

 

[Phil Rhodes]

I just use ffmpeg, but then I'm a nerd.

In this scenario you could get it to create basically-prores.

It's a commandline app but it's not rocket science.

ffmpeg -probesize 5000000 -i INFILE -c:v prores_ks -profile:v 4 -qscale:v 11 -chunk_duration 500000 -c:a pcm_s16le OUTFILE

This is close enough to official prores to work fine on most software; some hardware devices won't like it (don't load it on to a Ki Pro or Shogun and expect it to play properly).

If you want to batch convert a bunch of things, you need some commandline-fu. There are lots of third-party front ends for it, too.

In my view it's worth the work as you can do a huge amount of things with it.

P

 

[DustinSchmidt]

On Windows, Media Encoder if you have it. On a Mac, I use EditReady for nearly all my transcodes.

Editready here as well. It's speedy and has some nice features. Additionally, Kyno which is pretty robust and can do lots besides just transcode.

 

[cyvideo]

On Windoz if you want a standalone converter, basically from anything to anything incl H.265 with good GPU assistance and a host of other features you could do far worse than take a look at Intertake. Really it has far too many features to go into in a post, a very deep feature set. I got on to it when it first came out a number of years or so back when it was called FootageStudio4K. Been very happy with it. It's now my #1 go-to transcoder followed by Mainconcept's TotalCode Studio which I have used and updated over the years. TotalCode isn't super cheap and if starting over again I would more than likely give it a miss as Intertake does everything plus heaps more than I would ever need. Their support in the early days was great. As Intertake matured I never needed to chase support again. Both have trial versions to take for a road-test.

Chris Young

https://acrovid.com/intertake.htm

https://www.mainconcept.com/products/applications/totalcode-studio.html