This IS the Avid L2: Re: [Avid-L2] H.264 Avid Export with frame rate conversion takes forever?

Sunday, September 14, 2014

Re: [Avid-L2] H.264 Avid Export with frame rate conversion takes forever?

You're asking a lot and that custom QT exporter from MC is one of the worst things. You've already heard my rants about it I'm sure.

First question is - why do you want to make a 29.97 H.264 from a 23.98 master? This is not gonna look good. H.264 isn't great at preserving interlacing, and you generally don't want it, so the pulldown is going to be bad. I'd opt for staying native 23.98 for your H.264.

Ultimately, I would say you're better off (and faster) exporting a SAS QT (or ref) from MC and dropping that into Compressor. It's a much MUCH better encoder and can tailor your output with many features that determine quality vs. speed. So if you're looking for down and dirty, which you clearly are by asking for a 800K/s H.264, you can force it to do the lowest quality resize and just have Compressor hash through the thing. 800K/s isn't gonna look great anyway. And with Compressor, you can use the QuickCluster to break your source file apart and hash through the pieces with your multiple core processors to make it go even faster. (Note: going from big file to little file is the ONLY time QuickCluster is worth using, on account of the time it takes to piece the encoded file back together).

I will say this part again as I've been wont to do many times in our conversations: I hate QT Pro for any export operation. Save as is fine, but using QT Pro to encode is asking for trouble. Gamma shifts, frame rate shifts, you name it, it will screw you. Compressor is a fine tool for what you're asking for.

On Mon, Sep 15, 2014 at 1:08 AM, John Moore bigfish@pacbell.net [Avid-L2] <Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

Exporting a 23.976 timeline DNX 175X SNDX 5.5.4 OS 10.6.8. I set the export to limit bandwidth to 800Kb/sec. size is 960x540 and I set the frames per second to 29.97 so as to convert the 23.976 frame timeline to a 29.97 fps QT. At first Avid estimated 36 hours. Then I did a video mixdown and it was saying 16 hours. I've resorted to exporting a QT Ref and having QT Pro convert the ref .mov to a 29.97 H.264. This seems to be moving faster judging by the progress bar. The progress bar is an eighth of the way along after 10 minutes or so. Of course I don't know if that's accurate. It does seem like doing the export from Avid with the frame rate conversion is ridiculously long. Am I missing something or some Avid trick to speed up it's H264 export. I rarely use avid to do anything but a QT ref export so I'm a bit surprised.

John Moore
Barking Trout Productions
Studio City, CA
bigfish@pacbell.net