Blackmagic Forum

NICE!!!!

are you on a MAC or WIN system? studio or free version? because i cant find ProRes in my saver settings

Mac and free!

That's a function of QuickTime, not Fusion, right? You can use those codecs anywhere QuickTime is used?

I would like to know more about fusion's relationship to codecs. The picture is confusing for at least me and probably for anyone coming in to this from 3d. Where is a good place to read up on this stuff?

thanks

Fusion supports high bit depth and alpha for QuickTime, but the actual codecs aren't handled by Fusion, they're handled by QuickTime. That's a good thing, other than the lousy support that Apple gives QuickTime.

ronviers wrote:I would like to know more about fusion's relationship to codecs. The picture is confusing for at least me and probably for anyone coming in to this from 3d. Where is a good place to read up on this stuff?

thanks

You 3D guys normaly do output stillframes ? But us videoguys we like to have it all in one file

A quicktime file can hold so many stuff, as can MXF and AVI containers as well. But what counts it the codec used inside a container. There are a lot good and a lot of bad stuff out there. Some has alpha's and some support multiple CPU when coding, and some are Long-GOP and some are full frame.

a quick intro:
http://www.redsharknews.com/technology/item/3081-all-you-need-to-know-about-quicktime,-avi-and-containers

Fusion doesn't preserve anything from a multiframe file though. Everything will be converted to individual frames in Fusion anyway. Using a multiframe format with interframe compression just makes Fusion slower with no benefits at all. No information from the compression is utilized across multiple frames.

This is much different than how an editing software works, of course.

It's possible to get SOME benefits from a multistage format that does not use interframe compression, but it is a corner case. Like you could encode the raw pixels into a massive array and load frames from an intermediate cache by just doing an offset, but that's only worth the effort if you have a very read-heavy comp, like optical flow, rotoscope, etc.

So the general takeaway is its never a good idea to work with multiframe formats in Fusion.

Thanks Helge. That was an interesting and helpful article. I find that working through some ffmpeg examples and just playing around with it generally has helped a lot too. Quite a capable utility.

Thanks for the additional info Chad. Never guessed i would need to know so much about formats.

Chad Capeland wrote:Fusion doesn't preserve anything from a multiframe file though. Everything will be converted to individual frames in Fusion anyway. Using a multiframe format with interframe compression just makes Fusion slower with no benefits at all. No information from the compression is utilized across multiple frames.

While I understand the concept of containers versus codec, I'm not sure I follow this.

If I use an array of uncompressed still images, e.g. bmp, tiff, etc., one way it gets saved is as a collection of files with a common name and an incremental suffix. I would imagine that to be good for quality, but a bit messy on the hard drive even if stuck in a folder.

With that in mind, I would be inclined to use something like a Quicktime wrapper with the images as the data / codec. Is this what you meant by a multiframe file? And if so, are all such files inherently compressed, or were you just talking about cases where they were?

Don't wish to appear stupid, but sometimes it's unavoidable.

Inherently compressed? No. Inherently lossy? No. Are any of the ones you typically have on your computer compressed and lossy? Yes.

But even if you did have something like that, there's no benefit, really. It's going to be a lot slower and there's greater chance of something going wrong.

Thanks, Chad.

So if I understand properly, I'm going to take a performance hit from a container, and thus the optimal approach would be to use an unwrapped collection of (uncompressed) images?

That's correct.

Chad Capeland wrote:That's correct.

Excellent.

Thanks, man - it's nice to hang out with people who know more than me.

Chad,

A related question - which format would you recommend for the images?

Generally speaking, OpenEXR is the safest format to use.

Chad Capeland wrote:Generally speaking, OpenEXR is the safest format to use.

Thanks, man. Appreciate all the advice.