DSLR h.264 Transcode

Just getting started with a Canon 60D after having previously used only tape-based cams…and finding the h.264 files make Compressor extremely sluggish. When transcoding the h.264 files to Pro Res, everything in Compressor slows to a crawl with recurring beach balls even with a simple command like selecting a job. Transcoding three clips about 50 seconds in total took about 9 minutes.
Did the usual things like repair permissions with no noticeable effect.
In contrast, MPEG Streamclip seems to have no issues working with the h.264 and transcoded the same files in approximately real time.
Does this sound normal?
Thanks.
Russ

I was very happy with the quality and ingest speed of the plug-in from Canon.
The only thing I forgot to do was change the ingest preset from ProRes444(the default) to PR 422.
Doing this conversion in Compressor has worked fine for us but from dropping the files into Compressor to adding the presets it took so much additional time that I thought there was a problem but if I waited long enough it always worked.
I have started to dread having to ingest for edits with a large number of clips due to the amount of hand holding I have to do with Canon footage in Compressor.

Similar Messages

Changing Project Format from DSLR H.264 to ProRes

Hello...
I started a project using raw H.264 video on the timeline from a DSLR.
I got half way through the project and encountered problems with the raw
H.264 footage. (Editing in FCP7)
To resolve the problem I used Mpeg Streamclip to convert all of the clips
to ProRes. Now all of the clips are in ProRes
I was able to edit a large part of the Sequence with the DSLR H.264 formated clips..
Now half of the project is finished with the H.264 clips and I do not want to
loose my work and start over.
Is there a way to recreate or convert the project keeping all edits (and timelines) and
replacing the existing H.264 clips with newly created identical clips
in ProRes?
-Mat

If the file names of the converted clips are identical to the original clips, and you media manage an "offline" prorres version, you should be able to reconnect to your prores clips. If this isn't clear or you have problems, post back and I'll try and make this clearer.

Elements 9, DSLR H.264 - What codec is best to edit with & highest quality?

Hello All,
I have quite a bit of DSLR footage I recently shot using a Canon 5d. I have Adobe Premiere Elements 9 and it really chokes down the system. I have a PC with i7 and 8 gigs of RAM.
What would be the best file format to convert the H.264 footage for editing while maintaining the highest quality possible. The footage was shot at 24fps. Please give a detailed description of how to convert it - there are a lot of adjustable settings in the advanced tab of the share section in PrE 9.
Thanks in Advance,
Brian

Bill,
Is probably right , as he is most times when he is drinking Aussie wine.
I only have PE 4 and when you bring the H.264 mov in there you get a red line, you are better off rendering the working area as it will run smoother.
Ps. You should not be having problems with the audio, I have just finished editing 35 mins jazz from a live performance, if there is a red line from the h.264mov files as Bill said , you should render the lot. Changing the audio should be easy, but save as you go
Ah, I do not know why there are two track of video in there, you should have one video+ 1 audio track together, unless you have added another video track ?
Ps. If the playback stops and the music continues you have a problem, It has happened to me.You are running a 32 bit piece of software in a 64 bit operating system, it may help if you download Running Windows XP Mode with Windows Virtual PC as I used to lose files and windows in PP and PE, but, other experts here will tell you it is not necessary, it is worth a try ?
I would start a new project , Clean the Media Cache, bring the H.264mov clips in one by one and have no gaps , do not disconnect the audio from the video.
Good luck ( you could try Adobe Technical Service, if all else fails ) ?
Message was edited by: Bob Dix Photographer

H.264 transcoding broken in 10.5.2?

I'm working on an iDVD7 project containing five movie clips, with menus (using a 6.0 theme). My video clips are all edited and exported from iMovie 7.1.1, using Quicktime export to h.264 encoded .mov files. My last work copy burn on 10.5.1 was made at the end of january on my MBP, using High Quality on a single layer DVD. This worked fine.
Since then I upgraded to 10.5.2, and having made final corrections to the clips and menus I was ready to burn my DVD master. But! Upon completion, all the newly updated clips were jerky, dropping frames all over the place. I then tried erasing all the media files, and chose Professional Quality instead. Same result. As an experiment I tried tons of different qualities on the iMovie h.264 exports, ending up with the same results.
Transcoding one of the h.264 clips to MPEG2 in VisualHub left me with the same stuttery result.
Finally tried exporting to a .mov with MPEG4 encoding from iMovie instead. This transcoded fine with VisualHub.
Today, I tried this burn on my girlfriend's iMac G5 instead, since it's on 10.4.11. Using the original h.264 .movs that wouldn't work on my MBP, the DVD burned fine (but took almost 11 hours instead of four and a half :>)
So is this JUST ME or is this a very dumb 10.5.2 bug?
Message was edited by: Hyoushi

I'm a professional videographer/editor, and I've got the same problem, even with my pro-apps:
I've got 720p footage edited in Final Cut Pro 6, encoded in h.264 with compressor, and tried to burn it to a Standard Def. DVD with just iDVD, and it worked but ended up all jerky - looked like 10-15fps! Tried different settings and tried transcoding it back to DV with Compressor to see if iDVD would play nice with it then, but no love.
Doing it here on a Mac Pro 8-Core 3.0ghz, 4GB, couple TB's of of space spread among RAID...

H.264 transcode

hey there!
a newbie question, but i need to figure it out. is it still essential to transcode h.264 files when using final cut pro x? what disadvantages are there if i don't? the benefits?
thank you so much in advance

thailair wrote:
.... but is the video quality of h.264 better than ProRes 422? FCP X converts it to the latter, right?
usually I don't participate in any 'quality' debate ...
your h264 source looks good - on playback.
after editing it will and has to be re-encoded again - that will add 'loss' due to the compression loss of h264 (which it has) will be multiplied with its next iteratrion being compressed to h264, mp4, mp2, whatever.
therefore, the lossless intermediate codec proRes doesn't do any harm ... it's the source-to-final encoding process.
some consumer cam squeezes 'FullHD' onto 2-4GB/h, proRes can reach 80-100GBs/h (or even more) - what compresses = adds more harm to your picture?

QuickTime Broadcaster, from MPEG-2 to H.264 stream

Can QT Broadcaster connect to a MPEG-2-stream, convert it to H.264 MPEG-4 and broadcast the new stream on the fly?

I could be missing something, but to the best of my knowledge, no, QT Broadcaster cannot. It's not a transcoder; it's intended to capture live audio and video from Firewire, USB or an analog input.
There is at least one real-time MPEG-2 to H.264 transcoder available, from Media Excel, but it's not cheap; ca. $13,500 US. If there's anything less expensive that can convert MPEG-2 to H.264 in real time, I haven't been able to find it.
Your only other option, I think, would be to capture a video output stream from your MPEG-2 content to an analog or DV output, then use QT Broadcaster or another real-time compression tool to handle the H.264 output.

Video Card H.264 encoding

Do any of the video cards available for Mac Pro support H.264 encoding with compressor?
Rick

The spec on the Radeon X1900 says that it does H.264 "transcoding", whatever that means. I find it a little strange that Apple pushed H.264 for HD, but only supports the small HD size in DSP (at least as I understand it). Then to make matters worse, the H.264 encoding is so ssllooww!
Does Compressor use the X1900 for H.264?
Rick

Transcoding 1080p/60 to 1080i/30

Does the H.264 encoder in PPcc drop every other frame when transcoding from 1080p/60 to 1080i/30? Or, does the encoder extract the upper field from the odd numbered frames of the 60p video, and the lower field from the even numbered frames?

I did some testing and found the following:
Created a video with dogs running in 1080p/60 then made a 1080i/30 Blu Ray disc using Premiere Elements 12. Put it in a Blu Ray player and set the pause button on the remote to show a frame rather than a field. When I pushed the pause button during video playback I got two images on the screen showing the two fields 1/60 of a second apart.
Then I created a second video using the original 1080p/60 footage. This time I choose higher quality settings for the h.264 transcode: CBR 35Mbps, Key Frame spacing 12, and again 1080i/30. Burned the video to Blu Ray disc using Sony's DVD Architect Studio (no transcoding). During playback in the Blu Ray disc player, with the pause button showing a complete frame, there was only one very clear image and no second image from a field 1/60 of a second later in the video.
In the first video, it appears that the transcode used the odd numbered frames from the original video for the upper field, and the even numbered frames for the lower field.
For the second video, it appears that the transcode discarded every other frame and created upper and lower fields from the same progressive frame.
Any comments/insight would be appreciated.

What is the ideal RAID 5 logical drive configuration to use with editing 1080p on FCPX?

Hello,
I invested in one of the new Late 2013 Mac Pros (8-core 3GHz, dual Fire Pro D500 w/ 3GM VRAM each, 32GB RAM), along with a Promise Pegasus R6 Thunderbolt (ver 1) RAID because I wanted a fast and supremely smooth editing experience versus slow, laggy, drop frame performance I had been experienceing in my previous Mac (a mid-2010 27" iMac 2.8 GHz Quad-Core, 16GB RAM, Radeon 5750 with 1GB VRAM) that had media stored on a single 3TB firewire drive.
The RAID came pre-configured with 6 x 1TB Toshiba drives giving me a Logical Drive that has 5TB capacity, 128kb stripe size, 512byte sector size, with Read Ahead/Write Back cache policy. I've also enabled "Forced Read Ahead" using terminal.
THE PROBLEM:
Even with this super fast media storage that gives me about 600MB/sec data transfer rate, I'm still sometimes experiencing lag and stuttered playback from the timeline (In all fairness, the stuttering only happens for a few seconds then plays fine, but the lag can be frustrating when I'm trying to click through the timeline to check edits). The footage I work with is 1080p mov files from Canon DSLR that are transcoded to ProRes 422 and Proxy during import into FCPX. I never edit with camera-native formats, always with ProRes. I also always close all other applications, eventhough all the power boasted by the Mac Pro shouldn't have a problem with that. I've tested the video cards by playing multiple 1080p H.264 files at once and it played about 10 simultaneously without a hitch. I've also edited under a new user and still the issue remains. My conclusion is that the lag comes from the RAID. (I did a test project with having my library saved on the internal flash storage and editing improved dramatically with speed and responsiveness, which signals that my problem must lie with the RAID).
THE QUESTION:
Is there a preferred or recommended stripe size and sector size that would cure my problem? Is it because it's RAID 5 even though I'm using 6 disks and getting tremendous sustained data xfer rates?
OTHER RELATED INFO:
My FCPX import settings copies all files into the library and I have Optimized and Proxy checked. My projects are also saved in the same library so everything is contained in one place.
My projects are mostly 40 minute wedding videos 1080p at 23.98fps with lots of short video clips during montage segments, no more than 2 video tracks during the wedding the wedding ceremony.
I frequenly repair permissions on the internal boot drive. Sometimes trash FCPX preferences when performance gets ridiculous or other glitches happen, like audio refusing to play, or the timeline plays no video just audio.
Thank you! Any help or advice is appreciated!

Hi,
Making our tablespace in different directory does not improve the performance. See, Basic thing does if you are lauching your text file from different directory
say Drives C , D and F respectively does your hit any performance (your OS is installed on Drive C). I don't thinnk you will getany boost up performance. See Basicaltl what is happening is that, try to launch you textpad and try to open the files from any there then you file will open immediately, if you ask me the reason behind that, you application is already loaded in the Memory to give the Service (same as ORACLE Instance). That's the difference.
- Pavan Kumar N

Graphics Issues with Mercury Playback Engine (CUDA) in Adobe Premiere Pro

Brand new 2014 Macbook Pro 15" Retina, Nvidia GT750m 2gb, Premiere Pro CC2014, Cuda 6.5.37 (latest). Yosemite 10.10.1
While editing I get some glitches on the display, namely when I switch to and from the Finder, which disappear as I move the mouse.
Most annoying, however, is that the computer is crashing (giant power button logo) and restarting after some time rendering. Sometimes it's during the render. Other times is a few minutes later... The system starts to slow down and then it all freezes.
On the Adobe forums, there's a thread that started one year ago with similar problems from people with different machines (Mac Pro, iMac, Mavericks and Yosemite).
Does anyone know how to fix this?

Thanks for quick response! I'm glad everything is ok with that.
I work with DSLR footage with heavy codec h.264, so I have another question. (sorry, I am new in this).
What is the best video format for easy editing?
I was reading this tips http://graemeh.wordpress.com/2010/09/21/why-and-how-to-transcode-canon-dslrs-h-264-mov-fil es-for-editing/
Is that good way or is there something better format than DVCPRO?
Maybe something like this? http://blogs.adobe.com/VideoRoad/2011/08/a-prores-workflow-end-to-end.html but i don't have APPLE PRO RES 422.
Please tell me some secrets for best workflow.

Prores support in Premiere on MAC

(I am, as per usual, confused.)
A few Qs:
1)   I've read vague reports regarding prores support in Premiere. When I say support, I am mean being able to READ(decode) and WRITE(encode) any of the Prores flavors (Proxy, LT, 422, 422HQ and 4444). I have a Mac Pro with nothing but a clean install of 10.7 Lion and Adobe Production Premium CS5.5 on it. What do I need to install for read/write Prores support? I THINK I need to download just Motion or Compressor from the Mac App store to have access to all the Prores flavors. (encode & decode) Is that correct? Or is there a free option?
2)    If I download Motion for example, will I then see the prores codecs as an option in the Premiere export dialog or in Adobe Media Encoder as an export option? I ask this because i would like to be able to transcode DSLR H.264 footage, GoPro footage and Logitech webcam footage into a standardized intermediate codec (Prores LT) for my project.
3)    I am still confused about what the render situation is when editing Prores footage in Premiere. Will the following chain of events take place? I download/install Motion THEN > I import prores files into Premiere THEN > I drag one of these prores files onto the Create New Sequence button to create a sequence THEN > I can edit and the sequence will NOT require rendering (no colored render bar) because the sequence should match the media settings? Is this correct?
I hope I have articulated my questions well.
With respect and admiration,
El Steverino

I recommend reading the document that Tom pointed to about the render bar colors. The important thing to note is this bit:
OK, so now about those colored render bars…
With that preparatory definition out of the way, what do the colored bars mean?
green: This segment of the sequence has a rendered preview file associated with it. Playback will play using the rendered preview file. Playback at full quality is certain to be in real time.
yellow: This segment of the sequence does not have a rendered preview file associated with it. Playback will play by rendering each frame just before the CTI reaches it. Playback at full quality will probably be in real time (but it might not be).
red: This segment of the sequence does not have a rendered preview file associated with it. Playback will play by rendering each frame just before the CTI reaches it. Playback at full quality will probably not be in real time (but it might be).
none: This segment of the sequence does not have a rendered preview file associated with it, but the codec of the source media is simple enough that it can essentially be treated as its own preview file. Playback will play directly from the original source media file. Playback at full quality is certain to be in real time. This only occurs for a few codecs (including DV and DVCPRO).
Note the uses of the word probably above. The colors aren’t a promise. They’re a guess based on some rather simple criteria. If you have a fast computer, then a lot of things marked with red may play back in real time; if you have a slow computer, then some things marked with yellow may need to be rendered to preview files before the segment can be played in real time.

Premiere Pro CS6 and AVCHD - Should I upgrade or wait?

Hi All
I currently use Premiere Pro 5.5.2 on a Mac Pro and OS 10.7.3. Most of my footage now is AVCHD, from various camcorders, including Sony FS100 as well as several Panasonic and Canon at 24P, 30P and 60P at 17mb/s to 28mp/s bitrates and LPCM and AVCHD audio. I also do use XDCAM EX and Canon DSLR H.264 footage.
I'm really wanting to upgrade to CS6, it looks fantastic, however I have heard reports of various bugs that make it work less efficiently or not at all with AVCHD footage. Maybe the latest upgrades fix these issues, but I'd like to get some input from people who have actually used CS6 with Mac OS 10.7 and AVCHD files. I don't want to transcode first, this was my primary reason to switch from FCP to Premiere Pro a couple of years ago, don't want to go back!
Thanks much for any and all advice you can give me.
-Keith

The Adobe GodHead (CEO) sleeps very well at night. takes home a wonderful
salary. and takes many a vacation thanks to all of us suckers that buy into
Adobe's buggy software.
A forum is a place to let it out not hold it in. This doesn't mean foul
language, but it does mean telling it like it is.
I've heard that the AVCHD fix is due 17 June of this year; only in the CC
version.
This means that there will be a constant fire under your but to make that
monthly payment; if not. you're out; and if you had any files in the cloud,
you'll have to re-up to get em out. Ouch!
I went through all of this with Avid for a decade and in the end I was the
loser and the CEO was the winner.
Don't buy anything until you see it work.
Mike

Cineform 422 vs ProRes 422

Is there any real advantage in transcoding DSLR H.264 files to a 4:2:2 via NeoScene to the Cineform 422 coddec over ProRes 422 with MPEG clipstream or Adobe Media Edcoder?
Thanks,

Since I often am dragging my CTI over my Sequence timeline, I get far better response using i-frame (ProRes) over LongGOP (H.264). It's physics. It's the law.
Depending on how much footage in your project, it can be faster in the long run to transcode to an i-frame codec rather than editing native. For long form work, I recommend transcoding to i-frame first. It will take more time before you can begin editing, but once your timeline starts to get 30 minutes plus, you'll avoid a lot of slow-downs caused by LongGOP unpacking.
For short projects - those that take a few days - I mostly edit native. The slowdowns caused by LongGOP don't seem so bad when they're not multiplied exponentially, as in a long-form project.
For the most part, ProRes 422 works well in Pr on my Mac. I've not had as good luck with ProRes4444 (I have a thread ongoing about my issues.).
I use MPEG Streamclip to make ProRes 422 from H.264 from a digital still camera.
Here's a tip, if you have an 8-core machine: Duplicate your copy of MPEGStreamclip. Launch both, set them to use 4 Simultaneous Tasks. Then, when you batch export (half of your files to each instance), you'll see that all 8-cores of your CPU are being maxed out. This will get your transcodes done at maximum speed.

Quadro 5000 ($1,749.00) or GTX 690 ($1,270.99)

I use Premiere Pro CS6 with DSLR (h.264) and FS700 (AVCHD) footage and it's begginning to lag on my machine as my projects get more complex. I also use Adobe After Effects CS6 for motion graphics and occassionally some vfx.
I need to know what experts' opinions are on choosing the Quadro 5000 or the GTX 690?

yash-lucid wrote:
What would you do with
1x 1Tb 5400rpm (main win7 drive, footage is edited on this and programs are stored)
2x 2Tb 7200rpm (1 contains archived projects and the other is a backup of it)
2x 3Tb 7200rpm (fresh, not used yet)
and a 500gb 7200rpm (random files)
The fact that you're editing footage on the same drive as the OS is the problem: The SATA interface cannot handle simultaneous reads and writes because it is only a half-duplex interface. That is, a block of transfers in one direction must be completed before any transfers begin in the opposite direction. So, despite the fact that you have multiple hard drives installed, your editing configuration effective renders your system to have only a single work disk for absolutely everything, which severely slows down editing performance. Worse, that single 5400rpm work disk is slower than any of the other disks in your system (both sequential speed wise and random access speed wise), which means that your system is effectively slower than systems that are one to two CPU generations older than yours. (In the case of your i7-930, it can be slower than a Core 2 Quad or even a Core 2 Duo or Pentium D with correctly configured disk setups.)
Thus, I would use the 500GB 7200rpm drive for just the Win7 OS, Windows pagefile and programs, one of your unused 3TB 7200rpm disks for your media and project files, the other 3TB drive for an archive of your media and project files, both of your 2TB disks in RAID 0 for media cache and exports, and the 1TB 5400rpm drive for backups of your already transcoded files.

Error compiling movie: unknown error & Mercury Playback GPU acceleration

Hardware
2014 Mac Pro, 12GB RAM, 3.7 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xenon ES Processor, duel AMD FirePro D300 2048 MB graphics cards
Software
Mavericks (10.9.4)
Premiere Pro CC2014 (8.0.1)
I'm attempting to render out a moderately complex sequence. Raw footage was dslr h.264 MOV files. 30fps 1920x1080 from canon. It has some clips that are pulled from multi-cam sequences and a few that have warp stabilizer applied. 4 total audio tracks with some linked comps from audition. Whole thing is about 14 minutes. It should be noted that I render out similar sequences regularly without issue. However on this occasion whenever I tried to render out using media encoder ( for web h.264 MOV 720 30fps) I was getting an error at the same clip every time. Error Compiling Movie: Unknown Error. So I checked out the clip. It was one of the ones with warp stabilize. I turned that off and sent it out again. Render got further this time but hit a different clip with warp stabilize (after getting through like 2 other clips with warp stabilize enabled) and gave me the same error. I tried getting rid of cache files, saving to a local drive instead of a network drive, uninstalling and re-installing premiere even. (which btw if you check remove preferences then reinstall it def still has preferences so that's a total load.) Anyway I was doing some forum surfing and found several people going all the way back to PP 5.5 saying that the only solution they found was to turn off the Mercury Playback GPU acceleration. Tried that and it's currently rendering just fine but taking roughly 4X longer than with acceleration. The GPU acceleration is a big deal for me since our company relies on putting out a lot of volume quickly. Has anyone else experienced this problem and is it something you were able to fix without turning off GPU acceleration. Grateful for your input.

sorry I actually wrote that wrong. I am using the H.264 setting 720 30fps to create a web friendly .mp4. Alternately though I decided to watch and see if it was the same clip failing every time. It is. I went into the project and did a match frame for the offending clip. Dragged the a new version of the same content onto the timeline and copied the warp stabilize effect onto the new version. Well this time the encode got past the clip with the issue, however the next clip it hit with warp stabilize caused another error compiling movie: unknown error. I guess at this point my options are to turn off the GPU acceleration and wait for a render that takes more than 3x as long to render with software only, or to go through the whole timeline and replace the clips with warp stabilize (there are a bunch, the shooter wasn't having a great day on glidecam). Not a great solution on either end. Please let me know if I should file this as a bug report. Though it seems people have been having the same issues since version CS5.5

DSLR h.264 Transcode

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