Full Prores on Windows and Full DNxHD for everyone

I'm a wee bit confused, Paul. You mentioned that Cinec is free? A check on their website shows me that Cinemartin Cinec is very expensive, especially if you want the DPX version.
 
Looking at thier qtx file I can find no trace of ffmpeg (by running strings on the binary) and it doesn't appear to load anything other than the system QT Prores decoder(hooked it up under Visual Studio's debugger). It may be a very stripped down version of the ffmpeg stuff but if it is they did a really good job. However they are doing the output, I don't think they are using ffmpeg.

I don't consider $299 for Go Pro Studio a good deal if you just want the codec. But I think that may include the better version of Cineform that I guess I don't have with my older/cheaper neoscene.

My copy of UtVideo does have Quicktime codecs and I thought had a 444 mode but the files are very large.
 
cuervo said:
I'm a wee bit confused, Paul. You mentioned that Cinec is free? A check on their website shows me that Cinemartin Cinec is very expensive, especially if you want the DPX version.
Click to expand...

I'm confused too. It seems that they've removed the free one and made a commercial product. As i understood it previously they were threatened by apple and released a freeware version, the version i have been using is v1.8.7, a simple app that just batch converts.

Now the page (www.cinemartin.com) links to this full version...

Oh well, it was a wrapper for ffmpeg though, that's free but then it's a real pain to use and half the time you need to compile it.

Sorry about that misinformation there, seems it's not longer the cheap option!

cheers
Paul
 
msorrels said:
Looking at thier qtx file I can find no trace of ffmpeg (by running strings on the binary) and it doesn't appear to load anything other than the system QT Prores decoder(hooked it up under Visual Studio's debugger). It may be a very stripped down version of the ffmpeg stuff but if it is they did a really good job. However they are doing the output, I don't think they are using ffmpeg.

I don't consider $299 for Go Pro Studio a good deal if you just want the codec. But I think that may include the better version of Cineform that I guess I don't have with my older/cheaper neoscene.

My copy of UtVideo does have Quicktime codecs and I thought had a 444 mode but the files are very large.
Click to expand...

The source for the encoder is out there too, i'd considered in a moment of madness whether i should try and do a QT component because i was having no luck any other way, but the libraries they used at the time were so out of date for visual studio that just to get it to compile was a massive pain and well, i had better things to do.

That 299 does include the full cineform, any res, to the maximum quality.

This new batch of ProRes options must be fairly new, because around 6 months ago i was looking for things like this, to no avail. Something, somewhere has changed (perhaps something legal too)

cheers
Paul
 
So is anyone using this new codec? Does it support 12 bit 4444 ProRes? (the site mentions 8 and 10 but not 12)

cheers
Paul
 
I've rendered out a short clip of some sample greenscreen footage (from PHYX Keyer) that I've been playing with in After Effects using the Miraizon ProRes Codec on Windows 7-64 bit. This was done in AE CC using 32-bit float and rendered with Adobe Media Encoder. The source files are all ProRes 422. The ProRes 4444 codec has no options, but highest quality and 64-bit mode were both selected in media encoder. When I load this with Quicktime it says color is millions+ which is 8bit. After Effect's says it's trillions+. Resolve 10 lite says it's 16-bit. Mediainfo doesn't report bit-depth so it was no help. I think this is the best you can get with this ProRes codec on Windows though, you tell me if it's better than 10bit.

http://www.pontari.com/ProRes4444Test.mov
 
msorrels said:
I've rendered out a short clip of some sample greenscreen footage (from PHYX Keyer) that I've been playing with in After Effects using the Miraizon ProRes Codec on Windows 7-64 bit. This was done in AE CC using 32-bit float and rendered with Adobe Media Encoder. The source files are all ProRes 422. The ProRes 4444 codec has no options, but highest quality and 64-bit mode were both selected in media encoder. When I load this with Quicktime it says color is millions+ which is 8bit. After Effect's says it's trillions+. Resolve 10 lite says it's 16-bit. Mediainfo doesn't report bit-depth so it was no help. I think this is the best you can get with this ProRes codec on Windows though, you tell me if it's better than 10bit.

http://www.pontari.com/ProRes4444Test.mov
Click to expand...

Difficult to say from the clip because it would depend what the original depth was. I've noticed that transcoding from a 422 to ProRes 4444 does interpolate the sampling in terms of resolution but the source colour depth would be the same no matter the container.

The way to test would be to round trip a 4 colour gradient and difference it - like the post on the cineform blog shows.

The QT internals define many pixel formats, from 2vuy (422 YUV), to v408 (444 8bit YCbCr) to the one we want which is b64a (16bit RGB). But they're just containers, you can put 8, 10 and 12 in the 16 bit one. Different apps may report the pixel format or the data inside. You can take a b64a file and ask QT to read it as v408 and QT would truncate the data - down to the application in this case.

So the issue is that with QT trying to be all automagic about everything it can sometimes leave us totally in the dark as to what we're seeing unless we test...

cheers
Paul
 
I made a 32-bit AE project with the 4 color graident effect (which is only a 16bit effect in AE) and rendered it out using the Miraizon ProRes Codec with Adobe Media Encoder. In Media Encoder you can pick a bit depth of 24, 32, 48, 64 when using the 4444 codec (which seems kind of like bad labeling at best). I've rendered this with all of them. I have also rendered it as a Quicktime PNG (I would have done uncompressed but uncompressed on Windows is only 8bit) and I rendered a single PNG frame as well (though I'm not sure how many bits per pixel that would be). In AE I set the color management to Rec709 full range (all the ProRes files Miraizon makes say they are 709 so I figured this was the best setting).

From the resulting files the 64bit version (the highest Adobe Media Encoder will make) is identical to the 48bit one. The 24 and 32 bit are also the same (which makes sense, all that adds is an alpha channel). From this it appears you can get an 8bit ProRes (the 24bit and 32bit choices in Media Encoder) and a higher 10bit version (48bit and 64bit) but there is no 16bit. I'm not sure how to tell 12bit from 10bit from this test.

http://www.pontari.com/Gradient-ProResTest.zip

With some more extensive testing I can say the ProRes decode issues in AE still exist with this new version of ProRes (it's different than the stock ProRes but still happens and still totally messes up the workflow), which means ProRes will continue to be a worthless format for me on Windows. Unless Adobe fixes their software so that it doesn't return color bar frames when using multithreading with ProRes encoded files, ProRes is dead on Windows for me.
 
I'd ignore the PNG versions in that zip, since it appears they are only 8 bit even. You can reproduce the gradient in AE by just applying the 4 color gradient effect and render out whatever you need to compare with. Perhaps an EXR or DNG.
 
Matt, thanks for conducting the test. i will look at the files tomorrow. Based on your observations, the product is almost there. I was hoping to convert CinemaDNG files to 12-bit ProRes.
 
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