by claude.rivet » Wed Jan 27, 2016 10:14 pm
It is worth mentionning that ffmpeg can output .mov containers, I do it now and then and it works wonder.
The strong points for ffmpeg are as folow:
-Deals with way more format (included or potentially includable by compiling your own version)
-Is FAST, very fast and very flexible
-Can include many processing, relative or absolute (crops, pix formats, padding...)
-Most important to me I can write a batch file in windows, make the proper registry entry and you can now right click a file in windows and encode the target directly from there. In my right click menu I now have options like "convert for VLC", "Convert to m4v", "ectract audio to WAV", and obviously I would add "Convert for Coolux - transparency", "Convert for Coolux - HQ" and "Convert for Coolux". In a show the client or producer comes with a file, I copy to manager then right click it and choose "Encode for Coolux" and it produces a HAP file in a .mov container. I could even resize to HD and add padding if necessary, or 4k, or whatever. Usually I leave the size untouched and just convert to HAP.
-If it is included in ffmpeg it also means the encoder tool in Pandora Box will be able to output it directly.
Hap is great but it does require people to install a quicktime component and output via a quicktime compatible exporter or worse use the quicktime player (version7). So rather than right-clicking and encoding right away you have to open QT Player, open the image sequence or movie (which is very long with large files), choose export in the menu, choose quicktime sequence, go in options and select HAP... it's not that it doesn't work but it's both time consumming and inneficient from a live show standpoint, especially because you can't batch it from QT Player. Note that in this case the person programming the media server and the content creator are not the same person often located in different offices working on different systems. We now usually just tell our content creators to output bmp sequences or very high bandwith mp4 files and we encode properly ourselves. In this very case HAP via QT player or Adobe Encoder is just a hassle and it cost money. FFmpeg is both free and far more powerful and fast than QT even to encode to QT container files.
One last note, HAP hates dithering, all artefacts I had were when dealing with sources containing dithering which is just not processed and reverted to banding. There is a workaround and I hope it will help people here:
-Use ffmpeg to output the video as an image sequence, it will bake the dithering in the files so when you convert to HAP from that image sequence it won't display the banding, I only had one file where that process failed so it is a decent workaround.