ProRes -> DPX, ffmpeg?

Perry Paolantonio · January 19, 2015

It doesn't come up often, but occasionally we get a ProRes file that we need to convert to DPX. In the case of the current situation, it's a ProRes 422HQ 1080p file, but we need DPX for our restoration system. Normally I'd do this in AfterEffects, but I'm wondering if there's a better/more efficient way to do it, say with ffmpeg? Since we don't have AE installed on the restoration system, doing it on one machine and then moving the files means a lot of waiting for file copies to complete. So I'd like to be able to do it right on the restoration PC to save some time.

Googling mostly brings up conversions in the other direction: DPX->ProRes, but that's not what we want here.

My main concern is avoiding any color-related issues when using ffmpeg - gamma shifts, color space changes, etc.

Any suggestions or recipes?

Thanks!

-perry

Dirk DeJonghe · January 19, 2015

ffmbc will do what you want. Test on a small sample first. There is a front-end that makes it much easier to work, I believe it is called AnotherGUI. Both ffmpeg and ffmbc are excellent tools. You will need to put some effort in learning the command line, but with AnotherGUI you can tweak the command line and store for future use.

Perry Paolantonio · January 20, 2015

Thanks. I think the command line ffmpeg with the default settings out lined here seems to do the right thing, at least with the prores file I tested with this afternoon - reasonably quick, too- about 11fps reading and writing from the same disk.

I tried AnotherGUI, but it seems overly complicated for what we need to do - the command line is so simple, that's just easier. Ultimately, I'll probably do what we do for most of our in-house tools and build a simple GUI for it for our own use, but for now, this seems to do the trick.

Thanks!

-perry

Dirk DeJonghe · January 20, 2015

The advantage of AnotherGui is that you can easily do batch processing where entire directories are converted overnight. Once the proper command-line is established, it is stored as a preset and an non-technical person can do the job. It takes a bit of learning but is well worth it.