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Huge roadblock outputting video for SOUND editing. Need immediate advice.


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Hey everyone, I am having a heck of a time trying to please my sound editing guy who is insisting on a ProRes 422. "That is the only codec that will express every frame."

 

Well I cannot export ProRes from a PC. Period. It is NOT supported. The only way I have found I can solve that is by purchasing some software I cannot possibly afford. I have repeatedly asked him to give me an alternative and he says he cannot because he knows of no other way to have video that expresses every frame.

 

So please, for the love of all that is Holy. Someone give me a solution.

 

I am using Premiere Pro from CC 2015 on an i7 based PC with Windows 7.

 

I need a solution because I fly Sunday night for NYC and if I don't have a solution, i am ****ed.

 

Do I sound stressed? I am. Completely.

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the sound guy's point is to have a playout with intra codec, not long gop. if you have ever tried to make a online with h264 reference you know what I mean, the edits may vary depending on the GOP position so it is impossible to know if it's in perfect sync or off by 1 frame. some images may be in perfect sync and others may be off a bit.

 

Are you going to make the sound on single pass or is it possible to have a h264 version first and send the prores later for final mix so that the end result can be checked for possible 1 frame errors? most sound guys here are happy to work this way as long as they can get a intra codec version for finishing.

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of course you can export it UNCOMPRESSED. that expresses every frame. he may have slight problems to playback it though :lol:

 

if you have a friend who has mac with the prores codecs you can just export your movie to uncompressed or other intra codec and then recompress to prores with the friend's mac.

For example Resolve or Mpeg Streamclip work for this, no need to have Premiere on that computer

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If you have Adobe CC you also should have Adobe Media Encoder (or can download it). AME has the ability to output several intraframe compressed video types like JPEG2000 and DV25.

 

The JPEG2000 codec uses intraframe compression in a MXF wrapper. That would allow you to output media where each frame of video and audio will be discretely represented. You also could export as a DV25 file. It will be very low resolution compared to what i assume is an HD format currently, but all the sound person needs is the picture to reference the audio to during his edit. You don't say what software your sound person is using, but I'd expect Avid ProTools. DV25 plays back in ProTools, JPEG2000 might be problematic playing back in ProTools. I'm not in front of a ProTools equipped workstation to check how it plays back.

 

I'd get all my media and project files backed up to an external storage device and bring them with you to NYC. That way if you run into issue you can work with them locally to get them into a format that is compatible. Don't stress-this is a learning experience, and you'll laugh about it in the future.

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My head is exploding. I can build a PC no problem, but this techno speak is beyond me.

 

I have a friend in NY with an i5 2.7 GHz iMac (I believe 12.1), but it only has 4GB of memory. I haven't used anything with less than 16GB in years so I have no idea if his system will crash. He doesn't have Adobe CC but we could always download it, get it installed and start the trial.

 

One issue, of course, is budget. I am over-budget and broke. How shocking! It's not like places in NYC are inexpensive. After speaking with a few it's clear I can't even hope to afford them.

 

I'd like to avoid low resolution since some of my project is 2k scanned Super8 and it is difficult enough matching lip movements in HD, let alone SD.

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There's a converter program called Acrok that I downloaded a trial copy of, that's supposed to be able to output Prores, although I can't actually find that in the output options.

Acrok does seem work OK. The trial version is not crippled, (at least they don't say it is), but the output files have a watermark.

I've never had any reason to look for the ProRes option, but it might be in there somewhere.

The full version is only US$39, so maybe you could see if you can get the trial version to work (with watermark) on ProRes, and if that looks OK, you could buy the registered version.

It also works in reverse, so if you don't have any other way of playing ProRes files, you could revert them to MP4 or similar and see what happens.

Acrok doesn't do anything I need to do that I can't already do with the software I already have, but it's nice to have it "waiting in the wings" as it were.

 

Edited to Add: ProRes is in the "Editing Software" tab.

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You can create prores on windows for free with ffmpeg, but it can be a bit techie.

 

I can help you do that, but there's probably a better way.

 

P

Just a cautionary note here:

One thing that most "non-propellor-heads" aren't aware of, is that FFMPEG is open source software; and what the FFMPEG people distribute is the source code (that is, the text file the programmer writes). That has to be compiled in a further step to make an executable file than can run on a PC (or Linux or Mac or whatever).

 

Now, lots of people do that and offer free FFMPEG.exe "builds", but the thing is, their versions don't always have the full "suite" of video formats available, I guess in the interests of trimming down the file size by not including rarely-used formats. (This was probably more advantageous when computers had smaller hard drives and everyone was on diallup).

 

One of the reasons people sometimes found FFMPEG so baffling is that they appear to be following the instructions to the letter, but it often refuses to run their operation, coming up with a incomprehensible command-line screen of gobbledegook.

 

Usually, that's because they've downloaded a build where the particular codec they wanted has been left out, because the build was designed by a programmer, not a video editor :rolleyes:. Ironically, people usually turn to FFMPEG as a last resort, when they can't find any other program that handles their particular oddball video format, and then find that the person offering the build deemed that format unlikely to be ever used...

 

By far the easiest way to drive FFMPEG is to use a windows program that writes a custom batch (.bat) file that launches FFMPEG.exe with the metre-long string of suffixes it needs, but many anti-virus programs now scream blue murder if any software tries to write to a batch file, so you have to make write a ".ba_" file and hand-edit it to ".bat".... Painful, but still less so than running FFMPEG directly~

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Pro Res is very processor heavy, so most audio guys prefer DV25, which can playback on the GPU and is an intra-frame codec with timecode abilities.

 

MXF wrapped JPEG2000's won't work unfortunately because the codec is too heavy for most edit bays, unless it's very small. DV doesn't have those problems.

 

The only issue you'll have with DV is being able to export a quicktime variant, rather then a .dv file. For playback within Pro Tools or Logic, you should be hanging them a quicktime.

 

Not to be a dick, but this is why the post production industry is linux and mac. If you know how to build computers, you should have zero issue building a hackintosh and running Mac OS on a standard run of the mill PC. http://www.hackintosh.com/

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OK, just as an update, I tried my trial version of Acrok out on a 3 minute 10MB MP4 file and it turned it into a 1.3GB 1920 x 1080 Pro Res file!

Apart from having "Acrok" emblazoned across the middle, it looks to be the real deal. The only thing I have that will play ProRes is iTunes, and it played it fine. Interestingly, the original had somewhat erratic sound-sync, but the ProRes playback was absolutely perfect.

 

Only possible show-stopper is that the highest resolution it does is 1920 x 1080, but they say they're open to suggestions!

 

Quicktime runs it as well, hardly surprising, as they're virtually the same program!

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I would suggest that the best place to get reasonably complete builds of ffmpeg is here, at ffmpeg.zeranoe.org. It's a widely-used resource.

 

Yes, ffmpeg is open source software and it is very poorly documented and supported, if at all, and yes, it does produce massive quantities of complex debug output - but it does, in general, work, and it's free.

 

ProRes is not particularly processor heavy - it's basically souped-up MJPEG or a bigger variant of DV. H.264 is much harder work. ProRes is a compromise between disk space, processor time and image quality that was designed to work for editing. It's useful, but there's nothing particularly technologically special about it.

 

Anyway, get the ffmpeg executable, and put the following into a file called "convert to prores.bat" somewhere convenient:

ffmpeg -probesize 5000000 -i %1 -c:v prores_ks -profile:v 3 -qscale:v 11 -vendor ap10 -c:a pcm_s16le -pix_fmt yuv422p10le -chunk_duration 500000 prores_output.mov

Put the ffmpeg executable alongside this file.

Drop any of a wide variety of files onto the converter icon to have them converted.

Alter the number after "-profile:v" for different ProRes versions:

0 - Proxy
1 - LT
2 - SQ
3 - HQ
4444 - Self-explanatory, but also change "yuv422p10le" to "yuva444p10le"
A few assumptions are made but for basic stuff this will be fine.
It is possible to render ProRes directly out of software like Premiere, but it's a bit more of a finangle.

P

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Hey gents. I have been scrambling as I try to finish travel arrangements and pack. Then we had a power outtage here NO REASON WHY! Happens a few times each summer.

 

I am out of time in finding solutions since I have to take my system apart this morning. What will likely happen is we install Adobe CC on my friend's MAC and pray it works. 4GB of ram is positively anemic, but maybe we can get away with it. I'd upgrade the ram in it if we could find it in the NYC area Tuesday.

 

Going without a true viable plan, but I'll pray I can make it all work out.

 

Anybody in NYC area with a MAC? :)

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iMac ram is pretty easy to obtain so I'm sure it will work fine. you may have to need to change all the slots at the same time though, it is harder to find memory which can be mixed with the originals, easiest way is to just update them all.

 

one possibility in situations where time consuming render is very likely to fail multiple times is to render in smaller chunks and assemble them afterwards in same or other software.

the worst case I have been in was a feature doc preview version graded in Resolve which crashed so often that I had to render it in 60 separate pieces to DPX and then assemble in other project. It is much easier than it sounds like, you just need to use markers and be frame accurate when rendering/reassembling

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Update. A friend of mine has a 2015 iMac and she said I can use hers if I upgrade her memory. So I just ordered two 4GB's for her and Amazon will deliver Tuesday. I'll use her system Wednesday. Cutting it close, but I have also ordered ram for my friend's 2011 era MAC to get it to 8GB. That'll be out backup.

 

Fingers crossed.

 

aapo that solution makes my eyeballs and ears bleed. :)

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the 60 piece doc render was super easy I think :lol: the hardest project so far was another documentary where I had to manually retime about 600 clips in Resolve for online (pretty much all of them and also manually force conform about 1/3 of them because of the difficult source material which confused the software). Some catastrophic XML error which we could not resolve any other way (FCPX was of course involved). THAT was frustrating and took a lot of time :rolleyes:

 

Just remembered that I have 4x2GB of leftover iMac 2011 memory here which I don't use anymore, such a pity that we live in different countries, not practical to send them to the States and they would not arrive on time :(

Edited by aapo lettinen
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You could take a file you already have and convert as described above, which will happily work in 4GB of RAM.

 

P

Yea, I'm confused on why memory is an issue. Premiere may not open, but there are dozens of other programs that can export Pro Res including quicktime.

 

All he has to do is open the exported file in Pro Res, hit export, do the manual control, select your Pro Res flavor and you're done.

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I don't understand why memory is such an issue either.

All you're basically doing is converting each input frame to a 1920 x 1080 (or whatever) bitmap, re-compressing to the ProRes format, and saving it a frame at a time to your output file.

With Acrok, if you press the cancel button during the transcode, it leaves whatever it's done up to that point as a truncated but otherwise operational file, so it doesn't sound like there's too much "housekeeping" going on. It's not like you need to hold several frames in memory at once, which would be the case if you were actually editing.

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Just be aware that the current recommendation is to uninstall Quicktime on Windows..

 

http://blog.trendmicro.com/urgent-call-action-uninstall-quicktime-windows-today/

So far there have been no reports of anybody actually exploiting Quicktime like that.

What Apple were actually saying is that if you don't use QuickTime they suggest you uninstall it. But you could say that about just about any program...

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Just to throw into the mix but I'm wondering if MPEG streamclip can help in this situation,

perhaps running on the mac although there is a more limited PC version too.

 

It has the advantage of being easy to use and small if it can help.

 

Freya

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The real solution to this sort of situation is for the person who's demanding prores to realise he doesn't absolutely need prores. I completely understand the desire for the familiar but it's a matter of competence at some level. If someone's lack of understanding is causing serious problems to a production, well, sorry, that's incompetence.

 

P

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Phil:

 

I tried doing what you said with FFMPEG.

If I try to run the batch file it comes up with the message "FFMPEG is not recognized as an executable file or batch file"

(I had to add a line "dir/p" to keep the command prompt window open)

But if you type in "ffmpeg" from the same command prompt window it runs, although it complains that you haven't entered any parameters.

I had this problem before but I can't remember what the solution was.

However it never occurred to me that you could simply click and drag files onto the batch file symbol; I just used to spell out the paths in full.

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In a batch file, a dragged-and-dropped file ends up as the first parameter.

 

so, if you create a batch file containing

notepad c:\myfile.txt

...and run it, assuming c:\myfile.txt exists, you'll end up editing it in notepad.

 

However, if you create a file containing

notepad %1

...you'll end up editing any (ideally text) file you drop on it.

 

Anything you refer to directly, as "ffmpeg" rather than "d:\foo\bar\ffmpeg" needs to be alongside the batch file (or in the system path, but that's complicated). The present working directory of a batch file is the folder it was launched from.

 

To make windows stay open, use "pause". You'll get a "press any key to continue" sort of prompt.

 

P

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