MKV for adobe premiere pro CS5

[Pwolf]

I'm not sure what's worse, that you're solution to get over your inability to transmux it into an MP4 container was to utterly rape the footage by re-encoding it, or that just demuxing the stream using mkvextract or something didn't occur to you... o.O Premiere does natively support .264 files afterall and it's what I did for simplicity's sake. How about you give that a shot and report your results?

I did use mkvextract. It didn't work. I'm not an idiot. I tested loading the .264 file directly. Still didn't work. I'm telling you, this AVC encode does not work in premiere. The only way I was able to get it to work was to re-encode again which is a terrible idea to begin with but helps prove my point further.

I experienced no issues with frame accuracy in my case.

That's awesome but doesn't prove anything. If anything it proves my point even more. It works fine for you because the way it was encoded works. You cannot assume they will all be encoded the same which is why you shouldn't automatically assume all AVC/H264 streams are going to work. Which, in turn, is why I advise people to go Lossless. It works every time. It's been tested. You can't screw it up. If there is an issue, it's not an issue with the codec. Which so far, can't be said for AVC.

You didn't by chance transcode a 10bit fansub to 8bit did you? I've noticed that some software for such conversions actually mess up decoding the 10bit encode and hardcode all sorts of garbage into the outputted file. I've had this issue when trying various software when looking to re-encode 10bit to 8bit so that material will playback on my HTPC.

This is premiere's decoder not the encode. All videos I remuxed/re-encoded play perfectly fine without issue except for one (4:2:2). Since that one didn't playback correctly, it wasn't used in the test example. The original source is 8bit.

Anyway, I think I have proved my point.

[DJ_Izumi]

So, what fansub did you use? I'd like to give it a shot myself.

[DJ_Izumi]

I don't completely condemn AVC editing hey, especially if it's intra-only. I just want it to be encoded with settings thought out for editing, though. Really, in the end editing speed is everything to me and a boost in decode is gonna be a saviour. Now, 1 TB space limit could be troublesome without clipping, but I can get over 300fps decode speed with 720p predict median utvideo, and I just can't get that far with avc without it getting to bloat more than utvideo predict median ends up being (lossy intra-only ends up bloating a lot more to preserve quality compared to lossless in my testing, so yeah).

Now, I admit things aren't quite as bad as they used to be with direct lossy non-intra-only decoding, but there are a number of reasons for which lossless encoding is still a superior choice, hence why it should be encouraged at all costs.

Also, as far as custom effects go: I say downscale. A good AMV should try to merge the custom effects with the anime. Having sharp and aliased effects on top of slightly blurry anime isn't as pretty as having the effects match the sharpness level of the anime, which make it merge much more. This means that editing at 720p and applying a slight blur or lowpass filter to the effects as well is the best way to amalgamate the two.

File size is the major reason I never switched to UTVideo, Lagarith remains vastly superior in terms of compression and I'll accept the CPU expense to save disk space. Cause, even if storage is abundant, 1080p RGB exports get big quickly.

But as for the resizing, what about additional loss from resizing up and down and up agian? Even if some assets in the animation are below 720p, often backgrounds are high resolution and some characters, depending on scaling and positioning can be. Even if assets in the source material are scaled up, it was interpolated to scale it up and information was lost. To scale down to 720p agian, some information will be lost as is tosses out information as it scales down. Finally, since most displays are superior to 1280x720 (Though, admittidly, not all) you're scaling up agian on playback. So I submit that scaling a 1080p blu-ray down to 720p for AMV editing is a lossy process and additional detail from the blu-ray will be lost.

[mirkosp]

The backgrounds are much less often of higher resolution than you think they are. In fact, quite rarely if at all. Really, text in credits are about the only recurring 1080p element in anime. Also, resizing is sure lossy, but with high quality kernels that is not much of an issue when the original content was upscaled to begin with. Figure out what is best for your source, resamplehq has a ton of them on offer. Actually, you're talking about converting to RGB! The loss from the colourspace conversion is possibly bigger than the loss from the resize. Shamefur Dispray!
Lastly, I always watch videos windowed on my PC because I can't stand upscaling even on playback. I'll tacitly accept it on my HDTV when watching old DVDs because there's nothing I can do to change its behaviour, but I sure as hell won't be willingly upscaling when I can avoid it.
Also, if compression is all for you and you don't care about speed, you should just stick to FFV1 when you want lossless.

[DJ_Izumi]

The backgrounds are much less often of higher resolution than you think they are. In fact, quite rarely if at all. Really, text in credits are about the only recurring 1080p element in anime. Also, resizing is sure lossy, but with high quality kernels that is not much of an issue when the original content was upscaled to begin with. Figure out what is best for your source, resamplehq has a ton of them on offer. Actually, you're talking about converting to RGB! The loss from the colourspace conversion is possibly bigger than the loss from the resize. Shamefur Dispray!
Lastly, I always watch videos windowed on my PC because I can't stand upscaling even on playback. I'll tacitly accept it on my HDTV when watching old DVDs because there's nothing I can do to change its behaviour, but I sure as hell won't be willingly upscaling when I can avoid it.

Ehn, I still think it's a needlesslyh lossy process. Besides, this way, no upscaling on my PC's displays, they're all 1080p, so 1080p video plays at 1:1

Also, if compression is all for you and you don't care about speed, you should just stick to FFV1 when you want lossless.

No Alpha channel support. D:

Though if UT Video's compression improves, I would switch, if only because it's different color space modes are on seperate codecs. No using one pre-set and wondering if Lagarith is currently set to match the colorspace of the preset.

[mirkosp]

So what are you going to do about the black borders and junk on the edges? Just keep them?