HDV & MXF for Mac & Win with ClipWrap & Calibrated

Note to self...

ClipWrap rewraps m2t, mts, and m2ts files into QuickTime movies, faster than transcoding and wothout generation loss. ClipWrap works with most HDV, AVCHD, and AVCLite camera files; Final Cut doesn't need to be installed (they now leverage Perian).

You also can use ClipWrap to transcode files to Apple ProRes (decoder) or Avid DNxHD -- both have Windows playback codecs that can be downloaded and installed for free. To playback HDV rewrapped QuickTime files, you'll need to purchase an HDV codec from Calibrated Software.

Calibrated Codecs were discussed by Adam Wilt on PVC; they let you use use MXF media natively in FCP and on Windows, and use FCP media on Windows and non-FCP Macs:

"Need to use MXF media (P2 DVCPRO/50/HD and AVC-I, IMX, XDCAM) natively in Final Cut Pro, or in Windows NLEs? Need to play FCP-captured or FCP-generated Quicktimes with HDV, DVCPRO50/HD, or XDCAM/HD/EX content on Windows machines, or on Macs without Final Cut Studio? Check out http://www.calibratedsoftware.com/welcome.html.

Importers and codecs available singly or in bundles, from $60 - $110 (with free, watermarked demo versions so you can see if they solve your problems before you spend your hard-earned). I haven’t tried ‘em myself but thought I’d pass on the info, because if this is the sort of thing you need, you really need it."

A plug-in developer's thoughts on AE CS5 64-bit

Stefan Minning posted A plug-in developer's thoughts on After Effects CS5 being 64-bit ...

While Stefan isn't a major developer he fills niches and is raising a question on many minds. The side effects on AE filters of Adobe's move to 64-bit is worrisome to users (see the Toolfarm survey results) since AE filter development across platforms and OS updates is often asymmetric.

One example of problems (elsewhere) has been with QuickTime on Windows. Since there's no 64-bit version of QuickTime, import/export of QT files haven't been available in the 64-bit Windows versions of Nuke, Eyeon Fusion, or Syntheyes. On the Mac, Apple does provide technology that passes 64-bit Quicktime requests to a 32-bit server process, but it's slow and codec-limited. There's likely little incentive for Apple to develop for authoring on other platforms and maybe even other applications. See Philip Hodgetts Why is QuickTime X like OS X? for a more optimistic view, and John Siracusa for more technical explanations of the delay in the Quicktime sections (page 6 and page 16) of his Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: the Ars Technica review.

While Adobe does have a good history of development and support to leverage, for example with QT and other formats in Premiere timelines, we'll have to wait to see how they adapt to the problems of QT in 64-bit Windows -- and if they end up providing some slow, short-lived, and expensive-to-develop emulation for 32-bit AE filters.

Update: see Stefan's comments below on simple software bridges to inexpensive 64-bit audio apps. Another example is jBridge.

Offered for your consideration: Codec Wars 2009

While QuickTime X (more here) may just take time to unfold, as it did during the initial transition from OS 9, QuickTime as we've known it could end. It's odd to say since Mac users enjoy the benefits of many codecs and formats that can be used without a hitch.

It's pretty confusing when you step just beyond the world of Apple, and not just because of the gamma problems posed by QuickTime. Since there's no 64-bit version of QuickTime, import/export of QT files haven't been available in the 64-bit Windows versions of Nuke, Eyeon Fusion, or Syntheyes. On the Mac, Apple does provide technology that passes 64-bit Quicktime requests to a 32-bit server process, but it's slow and codec-limited. It's really an industry problem, not just an Apple problem -- but one made apparent by the dependence on QuickTime, as noted last year by Mark Christiansen in Why QuickTime is the US Dollar of Digital Video. Some remain optimistic, like Philip Hodgetts in Why is QuickTime X like OS X? and John Siracusa in his Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: the Ars Technica review (QuickTime is dealt with on page 6 and page 16 of like 23).

On the distribution front, Adobe Flash video versus HTML 5 video is developing news. Apple is embedding video with HTML 5 style; see, via MacRumors, Apple goes live with HTML5 video. For background on HTML 5 video, see the latest overview from Mark Pilgrim and an AEP post from July, HTTP video: reports on Firefox and Apple. Meanwhile Microsoft seems content to block DivX from Windows 7, and only Google knows if the VP6+ codecs gained by gobbling On2 can compete with MPEG-4.

On the post production side, one might have hoped that Adobe would be a cross-platform savior and buy Cineform to trump Apple ProRes and Avid DNxHD and solve millions of small time intermediate codec headaches from compression, bit depth, and color. Unfortunately there's no one decoder ring to rule them all, and not likely to be in a competitive environment despite the whining, but there's not even an updated OneRiver Media Codec Resource Site. There are some good discussions though, like Codec Wars 2009: Lossless and virtually lossless codecs (eg, ProRes and Bitjazz, which lets you author on Windows) and various threads on REDUser.net.

Snow Leopard, AE, QT, and Quartz Composer 4 [updated]

Adobe guys Michael Coleman and Todd Kopriva are tracking After Effects and Snow Leopard, the 10.6 version of Mac OS X. Besides upgrading to AE 9.02 for multiprocessing, there's not much up. For Photoshop & other products, John Nack is a good source of information.

As a precaution, deactivating AE (or any CS4 app if you have a bundle) might be a good idea since you could avoid dealing with customer service if there's a problem with the OS install.

[update: it turns out that Snow Leopard requires 9.0.2, and you do lose an activation credit so deactivating is advised]

Only time will tell if the QuickTime gamma issue is really solved with current versions of the QT players and other software and old files, etc. While it doesn't get too specific, there's even a Compatibility Wiki by Wikidot for many Mac apps.

Update: CDM has an initial but in-depth review of something new in Snow Leopard -- Mac OS X 10.6: Quartz Composer 4.0 Hands-On Review, New Features.

Update: See the Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: the Ars Technica review by John Siracusa -- QuickTime is dealt with on page 6 and page 16 of like 23 (via johnmontfx).

Chris Meyer has more in Snow Leopard: Hopes, Misunderstandings, and Gotchas, as does Studio Daily in What exactly is this QuickTime X thing anyway?

Particle Halftones + AE filters & scripts

Note: this post mentioned work by David Van Brink, Todd Kopriva's AE region of interest feature on him, as well as his free Omino After Effects Suite. Content was updated on PVC...

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A halftone is an image or printing technique that "simulates continuous tone through the use of dots varying either in size, in shape or in spacing." In the Illustrator and Photoshop worlds, there's long lists of halftone filters, swatches, and compositing techniques used for printing and newsprint, comic, retro, and other effects. But the fun of After Effects is animation, and some techniques may not be immediately apparent without built-in filters.

There's something new and some things old in Halftone techniques for After Effects at Pro Video Coalition.

Fix for QuickTime renders that stop after 10-minutes

In January 2008 Jonas Hummelstrand recommended users to Avoid QuickTime 7.4 for Now and later noted QuickTime 7.4.1 Fixes Rendering Bug. Some people still experience bugs in QT similar that one, which may be due to errors in memory manager or permission flags, or other problems that may be difficult to reproduce on all systems.

Easy to forget in the excitement of upgrading is this workaround from Todd Kopriva's notes on the After Effects 9.02 update, and remember the end note:

"There's now a preference (in the Preferences text file) to control the interval checking done while rendering QuickTime movies through the render queue. By default, when using the render queue to render a QuickTime movie, After Effects flushes the rendered frames to disk every 10 minutes. This is done to preserve as much of a completed render as possible in case the application crashes unexpectedly. However, incompatibility with certain versions of QuickTime can cause the render to stop at this 10-minute mark. If this occurs, you can change the following new setting in the Adobe After Effects 9.0 Prefs (Mac OS) or Adobe After Effects 9.0 Prefs.txt (Windows) file to 0 to turn off this check:

["Misc Section"]
"Flush RQ Rendering Every X Seconds (0 = off)" = "0"

Note: Turning off this check (by setting to 0) will no longer preserve a portion of the completed render, but can allow the render to complete without stopping. Also, this setting will not appear in the preferences file until you render with this version of After Effects 9.0.2, but you can add it manually before launching After Effects."

Convert H.264 Quicktime to mp4 without recompress

Prolost shows you how to Convert H.264 Quicktime to the PS3 format without recompressing.



Update: Untested but seemingly useful comments on the post include,

• You can use a lot of freeware to bring MOV to an MP4 container, they are pretty close. For example YAMB.
  
• I can take a quicktime H.264 with aac audio, simply rename it with a ".wmv" extension, and it plays on my xbox360 just fine. Windows Media Player on my computer won't play it, but the xbox does.

ProRes QuickTime Decoder for Windows

Apple has posted a ProRes QuickTime Decoder for Windows, which requires Windows XP (SP2) or later and QuickTime version 7.5 or later.

General Specialist adds: "...for true cross-platform goodness you'll still be better off with the free (and in size and quality similar or better) Avid DNxHD codec that also supports an alpha channel." With that and other codecs you can also write not just decode files on Windows.

QTGammaStripper for OS X PPC and Win32

Fuel International has free unsupported apps, both called QTGammaStripper, for OS X PPC and Win32 to strip QuickTime gamma tags. Look under the Software link.

The problem and other solutions were discussed in QuicktimeGammaStripper utility for Windows and elsewhere.

Why QuickTime is the US Dollar of Digital Video

Mark Christiansen expounds on the why in QuickTime is the US Dollar of Digital Video.

You really do have to wonder if Apple fired all the QA employees or what. And things may evolve but with the transition to Snow Leopard and the iPhoney-QuickTime X, it seems like the bumpy ride won't end too soon. It's an opening that Microsoft is unlikely to fill and Adobe is just getting going with Flash MPEG-4 and CinemaDNG.

By the way, the Windows stripper utility for the QT gamma tag is around.

QuicktimeGammaStripper utility for Windows

Besides the usual gamma differences and Windows graphics acceleration, gamma tags in QuickTime files can change appearance of files across platforms. There's more on this in a previous post, Quicktime Gamma Stripper.

Frantic Films Software "created a small tool that strips the 'gama' tag out of offending quicktimes. It's a very simple tool which operates on all the file names and folders given to it."

This QuicktimeGammaStripper utility (for Windows) disappeared in the last few months, but it popped up here; I'm not sure if or when the link expires.

Update: Some websites directly copy postings (cf. here & Windows Live) and/or hide their sources, but at least some of them give something if only to keep viewers from leaving their site. In one case, The DV Show follows but at least posts the utility as QTGammaStripper.

QuickTime Pro gamma fix

Video Copilot posted another workaround that's been kicked around for well over a year to fix the QuickTime gamma wash out; you'd need QT Pro though:

After rendering into a QuickTime/h.264 file, open it up in QuickTime and select “Show Movie Properties.” Highlight the video track then click on the “Visual Settings” tab. Towards the bottom left you should see “Transparency” with a drop-down box next to it. Select “Blend” from the menu then move the “Transparency Level” slider to 100%. Choose “Straight Alpha” from the same drop-down and close the properties window and finally “Save.”

Update: More in comments at Video Copilot, "VisualHub users can circumvent the problem by selecting “Force: FFmpeg Decoding” when compressing H.264 material. StaxRip and MpegGUI are great Windows H.264 encoding solutions that also don’t exhibit the issue on files they produce." ...and... from Geoffe "Now what I have found certainly does work is export the Quicktime as a 100% Motion-JPEG encoded movie, and then from Quicktime Pro export that as h.264. This looks pretty much just like the original (gamma-wise)." The Animation codec would work too.

Convert QT <-> AVI without recompression

TRMOOV is an old Windows application for converting back and forth between the QuickTime and the Video for Windows (AVI) file format without recompression (via Phil Spitler). It's connected to the original developers of QT for Windows (backstory 1, 2).

The source and target codecs must be present on both platforms (for example, DV or Cinepak) and sampling rates should be the same. File names have to be 8 characters (or less) with 3 more for the file extension.

Caveats are at Download Recordings, and Bob Currier of Synthetic Aperture discusses TRMOOV in Converting Between QuickTime and AVI, but I still have a question.

Does PremierePro CS3 on Windows have to conform an AVI DV file made from a QT DV file? Here's a sample AVI rewrap if you can test it in Premiere...

Update: I have a reliable report that the rewrapped AVI from MOV doesn't import into Premiere, though it does import into AE.

Enable Legacy Codecs in QuickTime

from Creative Workflow Hacks:

"Lost your Quicktime export options?

If you updated to the latest version of Quicktime you lost some of your export options like Sorenson (You take the good with the bad with the beneficent dictatorship that is Apple UI design)."

To restore them, check Show Legacy Encoders in QuickTime preferences. One way is in QT Player> Edit> Preferences> Advanced.

Quicktime Gamma Stripper

Besides the usual gamma differences and Windows graphics acceleration, gamma tags in QuickTime files can change appearance of files across platforms.

Frantic Films Software explains: "Quicktime has a feature, mostly hidden from users, which is designed to adjust the display gamma of quicktime movies on different machines to compensate for display difference. Deep within the file, there is sometimes a little tag called 'gama' lurking which tells the Quicktime player what gamma correction the file was encoded with. While this is well-intentioned, motivated by the difference in display gamma between PCs and Macs, the Quicktime player offers no way to view this tag and change it.

To work around this issue, we have created a small tool that strips the 'gama' tag out of offending quicktimes. It's a very simple tool which operates on all the file names and folders given to it."

There's more info as well as the QuicktimeGammaStripper utility at Frantic Films Software. It's for Windows but there appears to be instructions for Mac too.

Adobe has a technote for strictly After Effects-related issues: QuickTime movies exported from After Effects CS3 are darker or lighter than expected.

Update: this utility appears to be missing from Frantic; I'll look around for it.

Update 2: File found on internet; see QuicktimeGammaStripper utility for Windows.

Update 3: Some websites directly copy postings (cf. here & Windows Live) and/or hide their sources, but at least some of them give something if only to keep viewers from leaving their site. In one case, The DV Show follows but at least posts QTGammaStripper.

Update 4: Check out updates QTGammaStripper for OS X PPC and Win32 (another gamma stripper app) and Brightness Issues with H.264 QuickTime, a survey and x264 solution by Chris & Trish Meyer.

New QuickTime preferences

finalcutpronews notes Some new QT features -- well preferences at least -- for hi-quality, timecode, and color compatibility. I haven't checked them out because I haven't taken to the latest update yet.

Update: whoops, this preference panel goes back to QT 7.2 at least.

Working around with QuickTime 7.4

Some of the problems with QuickTime 7.4 are getting a lot of attention (for example here) but the solutions are not. Options include a downgrade to improve (links to installers, plus updated info) the situation, or the Carpia.TV idea for Working around QT 7.4 After Effects error.

Update: fxguide adds some meaty thoughts with Pro Living in a Consumer QuickTime World.

Update 2: the QT 7.4.1 update gets the official go ahead.

Definitive answers on QuickTime and gamma

As noted in 2 previous posts, there have been concerns about unexpected color shifts when looking at movies in QuickTime Player and other apps like AE and FCP.

Over on the AE-List, Todd Kopriva (keeper of AE LiveDocs) announced a new technote on QuickTime, gamma, and After Effects which provide "the definitive answers" from Adobe Technical Support. The technote is titled "QuickTime movies exported from After Effects CS3 are darker or lighter than expected" and is also available at http://www.adobe.com/go/learn_ae_quicktimegamma.

Gamma gamma QT

Mark Christiansen, whose new book Adobe After Effects CS 3 Professional Studio Techniques is nearing release, posted Fun with Gamma and Quicktime which briefly touches on file display issues in various apps. Hopefully Mark, as well as Trish and Chris Meyer, will have much more to say on the subject of color management in their new books and web postings.

An earlier post here, FreshDV notes Apple's 'color compatibility', attempted to summarize the same issue from the armchair.

Update: on the AE-List 3 Nov 2007, Chris Meyer alerted users to a not ready for primetime link to that should clarify things,
http://www.adobe.com/go/learn_ae_quicktimegamma
"... will be updated _significantly_ in the next week or two with specific instructions of what to do in various situations, and what to expect as a result."

Batch process Quicktime movies adding Fast-start header

Over Final Cut Pro-L, Mel Matsuoka answered his own question and dropped a useful script for QTCoffee, a set of command-line Mac OS X utilities for manipulating QuickTime readable media:

"...is there an easy way to batch process over 200+ H264 Quicktime movies which don't have the Fast-start header in place?

Answering my own question...I figured out a way to do it using the always kick-ass QTCoffee, and a horrifically ugly Bash shell-script I wrote. Here it is, for anyone to use as they please, and for real coders like Andreas, Bouke and Darrin to laugh...

#/bin/bash
#
# qt_add_faststart. sh
#
# description: uses QTCoffee (http://www.3am. pair.com/ QTCoffee. html)
'modmovie' command
# to add fast-start headers to all .mov files in the current working directory
#

# replace spaces in filenames with underscores

for filename in *.mov; do
filename_clean= $(echo $filename | tr ' ' _) # translate spaces
to "_", assign fixed filename to $filename_clean
[ ! -f $filename_clean ] && mv "$filename" $filename_clean # if
$filename_clean does not currently exist, then rename original
filename to $filename_clean
done

# create outfile name for QTcoffee 'modmovie' command
(originalfilename_ faststart. mov)

for filename in *.mov; do
faststart_fname= $(echo "$filename" | sed -e 's/\.mov/\_faststar t.mov/
g' )
echo "Adding fast-start header to $filename... "
modmovie -o $faststart_fname -self-contained $filename
echo "Backing up original .mov to $filename.original. .."
mv $filename "$filename". original
mv $faststart_fname $filename
echo "Done. Now get a life."
done

The original post and thread is over at the Final Cut Pro-List, in case there are format errors here. You could also check out QT_TOOLS by Dave van Brink.