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Microstock Footage Forum => General - Stock Video => Topic started by: click_click on December 18, 2015, 10:04

Title: Apple Prores vs. Photo-JPG or h.264
Post by: click_click on December 18, 2015, 10:04

Is/are there benefits of uploading footage clips in Prores compared to Photo-JPG or h.264?

Title: Re: Apple Prores vs. Photo-JPG or h.264
Post by: ccbcc on December 18, 2015, 15:25

Yes, Prores is much higher quality, it will survive heavy color correction adjustments much better than the other two. It also supports 10 bit color/channel. It does however depend on which flavor of Prores you use.

h264 is a delivery codec for this reason, it's hard to do a lot of adjustments without running into problems. For blue/green screen stuff it also sucks, since it saves color information at only a quarter resolution! It fine for delivery, bad for editing.

Photo JPEG just sucks (banding issues), but some agencies ask for it anyway.

Title: Re: Apple Prores vs. Photo-JPG or h.264
Post by: click_click on December 18, 2015, 16:36

Thanks ccbcc, so far I always used Photo-JPG as I never got satisfactory results with h.264 (when rendering computer animated frames as TIFFs).

Stupid question: Would it be recommended to initially render 16-bit TIFFs (instead of 8-bit) from my 3D software in order to create the highest quality Prores video?

I'm on PC using FFMPEG applying the Prores HQ setting with 185 Mbit.

Title: Re: Apple Prores vs. Photo-JPG or h.264
Post by: ccbcc on December 21, 2015, 05:33

Yes indeed! At least 16 bit I would say. (imagine doing curves/levels on 8 bit images, you end up with a much lower precision)

But even better is OpenEXR (.exr) for 32-bit float compositing which has many benefits. Can't overstate this enough. Once you get the hang of 32 bit compositing (overbrights, linear workflow) things get nice. It's way too much to explain here, but I suggest you and anyone doing animations to delve into this. Google away!

Title: Re: Apple Prores vs. Photo-JPG or h.264
Post by: click_click on December 21, 2015, 05:41

Quote from: ccbcc on December 21, 2015, 05:33

Yes indeed! At least 16 bit I would say. (imagine doing curves/levels on 8 bit images, you end up with a much lower precision)

But even better is OpenEXR (.exr) for 32-bit float compositing which has many benefits. Can't overstate this enough. Once you get the hang of 32 bit compositing (overbrights, linear workflow) things get nice. It's way too much to explain here, but I suggest you and anyone doing animations to delve into this. Google away!

Thanks for the info! Much appreciated!