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iffmpeg H.265 to ProRes NX1


Steve M.
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I don't know how many of you are using this encoder, but I did buy this, and it just seems awful slow to me. Mind you, this is running on a 2009 iMAC-i7 2.8ghz 16GB RAM. Yeah, I'm definitely upgrading this Spring to the iMAC 5K, but that's another story. Anyway, a 27 second NX1 clip to ProRes LT takes a little over 7 minutes. Same clip to ProRes Proxy just under 4 minutes. Looking at the two in QT, I can't see a difference, so, my workflow is to transcode this in iffmpeg to ProRes Proxy, import that into FCPX, and export out of FCPX to ProRes 422. FCPX transcodes from ProRes Proxy to ProRes 422 very quickly.

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Go to preferences and select 4 cores. It will now do 4 clips at once instead of waiting for 1 clip to finish and starting on the next.

2009 iMac is 6 years old now so don't expect miracles though. H.265 is many many many more times CPU intensive than exporting ProRes in FCPX. FCPX does not support H.265 yet.

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Go to preferences and select 4 cores. It will now do 4 clips at once instead of waiting for 1 clip to finish and starting on the next.

2009 iMac is 6 years old now so don't expect miracles though. H.265 is many many many more times CPU intensive than exporting ProRes in FCPX. FCPX does not support H.265 yet.

​Hey Andrew, I appreciate that information! Yes, I understand it's definitely an outdated iMAC, and I understand FCPX doesn't support H.265, no NLE does at present. Practically any MAC that doesn't have thunderbolt will not be able to handle 4K ProRes in realtime, which is why I'm encoding the NX1 footage to ProRes Proxy in iffmpeg, and letting FCPX output the ProRes 422 master file.

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Don't expect any miracles from a 5k imac on this point. As I mentioned on iffmpeg post, it is as fast (or as slow) as my 2013 macbook pro retina (15inch). And I got the imac with the upgraded processor and gpu.

​Now that kinda surprises me, but reading that assures me that iffmpeg is none-the-less, slow. I would assume you're doing the 4 cores as Andrew mentioned? 

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Don't expect any miracles from a 5k imac on this point. As I mentioned on iffmpeg post, it is as fast (or as slow) as my 2013 macbook pro retina (15inch). And I got the imac with the upgraded processor and gpu.

​Anecdotal confirmation I guess, I just transcoded a one minute NX1 DCI file to Prores in iffmpeg on a fully decked 5k iMac (upgraded processor, GPU, 32gb RAM) and it came to roughly 7 and half minutes. I find the extra time is worth it for the 4k and image quality compared to my other gear, depending on the project, but still a wait.
 

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Go to preferences and select 4 cores. It will now do 4 clips at once instead of waiting for 1 clip to finish and starting on the next.

2009 iMac is 6 years old now so don't expect miracles though. H.265 is many many many more times CPU intensive than exporting ProRes in FCPX. FCPX does not support H.265 yet.

​Playing around with this today and found out, it's not the cores that enables multiple file encoding, it's the MAX. batch threads in preferences. Set that to 4 and it will start encoding 4 files at a pop, or however many you set it to.

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I used Brorsoft Video Converter to deal with my NX1 H.265 videos to Apple ProRes. You can have a try. Good luck!

Which is Wondershare converter. Monica66, if you would, could you please encode a 1 minute NX1 file to Prores 422LT and give us a transcode time for that file. Be interested to see if there's a big time encode difference between that and iffmpeg. Thanks!​

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iFFMPEG is not slow.

H.265 is complicated.

There's not a faster converter available and there's not really the combined hardware / software support available to improve performance for H.265 yet.

Intel's performance has flattened out since 2012, they are shrinking the chips, running cooler... but they're not giving us much extra performance.

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iFFMPEG is not slow.

H.265 is complicated.

There's not a faster converter available and there's not really the combined hardware / software support available to improve performance for H.265 yet.

Intel's performance has flattened out since 2012, they are shrinking the chips, running cooler... but they're not giving us much extra performance.

​Okay, you'd know better than I would, but just for laughs, give Bigasoft's video converter a try. I'm only trying the trail version but it would seen that encodes faster.

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  • 3 weeks later...

iFFMPEG is a GUI which calls ffmpeg (a command line tool and separate download). All tools which use ffmpeg will run the same speed in most cases (where each tool is running the same number of jobs at once). GUI tools which call ffmpeg (which can't be included with the product due to licensing) can be relatively low cost as they don't need to use a licensed SDK, such as MainConcept. There's also typically a royalty required for each sale, which isn't a big deal but adds more complexity for bookkeeping (will need to review in more detail, but it looks like the first 0-100K sales there's no royalty for H.265, after that it's $.20 per copy, max of $25M per year).

There was a time when ffmpeg was the fastest, highest quality tool for H.264 (and possibly H.265). I haven't researched this much recently, however it appears that there may be much faster solutions available today:

http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/819588/Real-time-End-to-End-H-HEVC-Solution-for-Intel

http://www.strongene.com/en/downloads/downloadCenter.jsp -  Real-time H.265 decoding on mobile devices too (perhaps also on such devices which shoot 4K).

While H.265 is a lot more complex than H.264, compilers and tools are taking much better advantage of existing CPUs and GPUs: using all the cores and using them more efficiently. The Strongene encoder is only 2x slower than H.264 when encoding H.265 (likely what is used or something similar in the NX1). Decoding speed isn't listed but it will be much faster than encoding.

MainConcept states real-time encoding at 1080p30 for H.265, and faster than real-time H.265 decoding up to UHD60p (no hardware specs listed): http://www.mainconcept.com/products/sdks/codec-sdk/video/h265hevc.html

As of today, there are software technologies that can encode and decode H.265 in real-time, at about 2x slower than H.264. This means that on a machine that can encode and decode 2 H.264 streams in real-time, the same machine can encode and decode 1 H.265 stream in real-time.

If there's interest, I can research what it costs to license these SDKs (and royalties, etc.) to see if it's worth creating a custom fast-parallel-batch transcoder for H.265 to H.264 and ProRes.

 

 

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It's means that:

  1. If the licensing fees for these codecs are reasonable
  2. and there's a market to recoup the cost of licensing and development time
  3. I can relatively quickly create a transcode tool which is much faster than anything based on ffmpeg
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It's means that:

  1. If the licensing fees for these codecs are reasonable
  2. and there's a market to recoup the cost of licensing and development time
  3. I can relatively quickly create a transcode tool which is much faster than anything based on ffmpeg

​Can't we just steal it!!!!!!!!!?

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