This program is a really nice converter and the support is great: does the same stuff as the post above but way cheaper.http://cliptoolz.com/convert.html

cliptoolz is the follow on to the AW Pro tool listed in the previous Prores thread.

SCRATCH Lab - Apple-licensed ProRes software encoding on Windows
Price is $5,990

yea, but Wayne has put a lot more stuff into it and it's much faster

ClipToolz Convert utilizes ffmbc for all conversion processing
Cinec utilizes ffmpeg

Thanks guys.

So basically, it's just the reverse-engineered, questionable-legality codecs... or just buy a MAC. :-)

Thank you again for the responses and links!

The client just got back to me and said that DNxHD is NOT and acceptable format... although they had been willing to make an exception and take an H.264 .mov file. I'd like to try to deliver the best quality I can.

Here's information provided by Apple:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5959

They don't say that there are legal consequences of using FFMPEG, they just say it might not work well. True, it might not, but this sort of statement is just boilerplate intended to discourage you.

I'm not sure I'd worry about the legality of using it but the apple link provides an email address. You could ask them.

Rob

yea, but Wayne has put a lot more stuff into it and it's much faster

Great to hear about the active development!

Thanks again guys! I sent an email off to Apple. Hopefully they will get back soon.

You can also rent SCRATCH Lab for 1 day for $50.
For a one off job seems a pretty fair price to me.

Bob.

"The client just got back to me and said that DNxHD is NOT and acceptable format... although they had been willing to make an exception and take an H.264 .mov file. I'd like to try to deliver the best quality I can."

A bit of effete snobbery from a Mac user? I can't imagine . . .
DNxHD at its worst is better than h264 at its best. And every bit the equal of ProRes.

That being said, you can rename h264 MP4 to MOV and it will work just the same.

We recently spend $50 and bought the new ProRes codec from Miraizon. With it, you can create ProRes files on Windows directly from programs such as Sony Vegas (and presumably Premiere and After Effects, etc). We've only tested it on two videos so far, but it seems to work fine. There is a 30-day guarantee.

Their website: http://www.miraizon.com/products/codecsoverview.html
Our webpage on this issue: http://benkadie/meta/ProResOnWindows/

Ben,
link to your webpage is broken. I tried to find it through your home page but no link there. Sure looks like you're doing some great work, keep it up.

Bob.

musicvid10 +1

Here's the cleaned up link:
http://benkadie.com/meta/ProResOnWindows/

As far as I can tell the issue is using a "legal" Prores encoder. I'll assume we mean a licensed Prores encoder. I can't tell if Miraizon's is licensed but I suspect not. Don't know if it makes a difference, or if it will make a difference in the near future. If you deliver media that's supposed to be ProRes and then Apple manages to lock out your media 6 months later you might find yourself in a sticky situation with the client.

> "SCRATCH Lab - Apple-licensed ProRes software encoding on Windows Price is $5,990"

What are you willing to spend? How about 1/10 of that price ($648) for a "real" ProRes batch encoder?

How you may ask? Buy a Mac mini for $599 and Apple Compressor 4 for $49 and for $648 you have workstation that you can use for batch encoding to ProRes. You can even set up a "watch folder" with Apple Script and just have the Mac mini sitting on your network looking for files to show up in a folder on your LAN and encoding them automatically for you in any format you'd like without tying up your PC.

Alternately you can pick up a 8-core Mac Pro on eBay for around the same price. I just picked up a 2008 Mac Pro 2.8Ghz 8-Core Xeon with 16GB memory, 128 SSD boot, 2TB RAID 0, and ATI Radeon HD 5870 for only $740! So for less than the price of my $800 Quadro 4000, I bought a whole 8-core Mac Pro with a GPU that renders "faster" in Vegas Pro than my new Core i7 3.2Ghz 6-core/12-thread + Quadro 4000!!! (and I have the Vegas Pro benchmarks to prove it) ...but that's a whole 'nuther thread. ;-)

BTW, ProRes does NOT come with QuickTime Pro on the Mac. You can only get ProRes buy purchasing Final Cut Pro X, Motion 5, or Compressor 4. The codec ships with those professional products only (it is not free and it is not sold separately). Otherwise you won't have ProRes on the Mac either.

~jr

[I]"What are you willing to spend?"[/I]

As it turns out SCRTACH Lab can only encode ProRes on a Mac anyway, it does pay to carefully read the specifications

A simpler and free approach is just to tell clients as a professional you don't support the use of proprietary non SMPTE registered codecs as there's no certainty of ongoing support.

Bob.

Outsource the job, mark it up, and be done.

A simpler and free approach is just to tell clients as a professional you don't support the use of proprietary non SMPTE registered codecs as there's no certainty of ongoing support.

SMPTE would include DNxHD, aka VC-3, and soon Cineform, aka VC-5.
...and VC-1, which is a Microsoft WMV codec no less.

Here's another thought.
Even if I bought a Mac or sent the job out it has to be rendered to something that can be read on the systems that's going to handle the conversion. That means another codec between our final render and what gets sent to the client.

Now I'll accept for this that both DNxHD and ProRes are very good codecs and footage can be re-encoded through them several times with no visual loss. This is different, as we've seen over the years here not so good H.264 can suffer very badly when encoded to MPEG-2.

I have had an issue that maybe an example of this. The online of a movie was sent to me as ProRes, looked fine but I had the same issue as others have had with long ProRes files, Vegas could lose the audio at around the 60 minute mark. So to make my life easier I transcode the ProRes master to DNxHD and all was good...I though.

I struck a number of copies to go to potential distributors complete with watermarks to SD DVDs, look very good. Then I thought I should give the producer a BD copy, seemed crazy to have shot the movie on a F900 if it would never be seen in HD, even by the producer. Well then the fun started. The opening shot was a very early sunrise shot in an alley with no additional lighting. The original F900 didn't do gain very well and the shot was always noisy but the BD encode turned that noise into very ugly sparkles. The rest of the movie was fine apart from one other low light shot that suffered the same problem.

By then I was so over the movie that I wasn't even getting free meals for my time on, I threw the BD disk in the trash and gave up on the idea of giving the producer a HD copy. So I cannot say for sure what was going wrong, all I can say is I think we need to be a little careful with all this transcoding, I'd like to see some stress tests done before I'd say it's 100% goof proof. I know it's fine with pristine footage but we're not always blessed with that.

Bob.

Thanks everyone, for the helpful replies!

I wound up getting a friend with a Mac to convert my DNxHD 444 file into ProRes 422 HQ with Apple Compressor.

I am seriously thinking about getting a Mac myself now, and due to the lack of expandability and high price of the iMac and Mac Pro, JohnnyRoy's suggestion about the Mac mini and Apple Compressor looks very good.

I'd like to get a new Haswell-E system when it comes out, be able to put in as many internal HDDs as I want, and be able to fit it with any Nvidia cards I'd like (the soon to be released EVGA GTX 780 6 GB looks really nice). This is something I can't do cheaply (or even at all?) with the iMac/Mac Pro.

@musicvid10: "That being said, you can rename h264 MP4 to MOV and it will work just the same."...I did not know that; I'll have to give it a try! Thanks for the advice.