Dear Coolux,
Please dedicate support/development resources to supporting the Hap codec family.
The attached image shows the results of my AE render Queue. The same 2048x931px 24fps 00:04:47:13 file transcoded from ProRes4444 to Hap and Clx_DDS_uncompressed.
On my 27" iMac, encoding to Hap takes about 18 minutes. The same encode to the coolux codec takes 1 hour and 18 minutes.
From my understanding (which is not complete, but fairly versed and extensive), these 2 codecs are basically doing the same thing, and have nearly identical quality profiles. I did a difference matte test and scrubbed through the results to be sure.
MPEG2/MXL doesn't hold up for quality to either of these two codecs, and for large format content, the DXT-based image formats are increasingly necessary to support quality requirements. On a recent project, we wound up having to let deliverables cook overnight to review them in the morning. An attempt to use the image converter and spreading the work across our playback machines, was abandoned when the image converter kept crashing. In the ideal world we no longer need to transcode deliverables. Putting the onus of delivering media for playback entirely on the content producers leaves us programmers to do other things (like sleep).
So for the sleepless nights on this most recent gig, this is a big *bump*. Please allow us to support Hi Quality Media formats that content producers can deliver without bringing their render pipeline to a halt. There are about half a dozen separate little utilities and gizmos packaged into the coolux installer and I really just want to let people deliver me media that I can play without having to touch any of them. That's how it works everywhere else I wind up working these days.
I would encourage users who need to invest valuable time in devising elaborate content ingestion workflows to chime in. Based on the success of the Lock-To-Time without Loop thread maybe, we'll have Hap support in 2017...
Thank you.