Lossless codecs for Premiere Pro on a Mac

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Anicsi
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Lossless codecs for Premiere Pro on a Mac

Post by Anicsi » Tue Aug 27, 2013 3:54 pm

Soo, I finally made the jump from Final Cut to Premiere. I'm getting accustomed to it, but I've been running into trouble when trying to export losslessly to import my video to AE and do the final editing. I'm aware that I could use dynamic link for that, but for some reason AE doesn't show the footage of that particular amv I'm working on.

Either way, I looked around and it seems the only options to export lossless is in a .mov container with png or animation codec.
I'm not too happy with that, so I was wondering if there are other options that would let me export in an .avi container with huffy as codec or something like that? If it's possible, how do I install it?

I'm on 2,5 Ghz Intel Macbook Pro 13'', OS X 10.8.4, using Premiere Pro CS6.

Here are some screenshots:
Spoiler :
Image

On a side note: is it normal that the size doesn't say 1280 x 720, even though that's the input? Is it some sort of flagging thing?

Container options:

Image

Codec options:

Image

And lastly a comparison between the original source (left) and lossless Animation codec (right). Terrible banding and the colors are completely wrong, even though I didn't use heavy color correction.

Image
I hope someone has a piece of advice. Thanks a bunch!

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Re: Lossless codecs for Premiere Pro on a Mac

Post by Qyot27 » Wed Aug 28, 2013 12:16 am

Do you have Ut Video installed?
http://umezawa.dyndns.info/wordpress/?p=3987

I'd think that it might show up in Premiere if x264 does.

The color issue is probably related to color matrix stuff. For HD video, you'll want to use one of the Ut Video options marked BT.709 (depending on whether you want to export as 4:2:0/YV12 or 4:2:2/YUY2). If you're exporting as RGB, then that doesn't matter.

To be honest, I'd let it export in MOV, and then if you absolutely must have it in AVI, you can use something like ffmpeg to remux it into AVI after you've exported it. But on a Mac, the programs are probably expecting the stuff to be in MOV. So I'd let Premiere export as MOV (albeit using Ut Video), and then let AE import said MOV.

I'm sure there's a GUI solution for remuxing it from MOV->AVI, but any advice I might give will be for the command line (if you want to, I'll lay out the necessary steps for that, though; 99% of it is set up and only needs to be done once).
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Anicsi
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Re: Lossless codecs for Premiere Pro on a Mac

Post by Anicsi » Wed Aug 28, 2013 4:05 pm

Thanks for the reply! So I installed the codec you suggested, and exported the video twice, using different settings (once ULH0 and once ULGR). To be frank, I have no idea how these differ from each other, I just wanted to test if it works. I could export without problem, but once I tried to view them with quicktime, I got an error message, saying that it's a codec missing for video playback.

I installed the codec in the quicktime folder, though, so I really don't get it. Or is there anything else I have to do? :?

About the remuxing: Let's get to that once we get the export working properly :)

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Anicsi
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Re: Lossless codecs for Premiere Pro on a Mac

Post by Anicsi » Wed Aug 28, 2013 4:07 pm

Ps: Oh, and I will never understand while all videos seem to play just fine in the video preview in the Finder, but once it comes to QT, I run repeatedly into trouble...

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Re: Lossless codecs for Premiere Pro on a Mac

Post by Qyot27 » Wed Aug 28, 2013 8:43 pm

I'm guessing that might be an issue with differences in Quicktime (which folder did you actually copy the .component file to?). I can't verify at the moment because I don't have access to our Mac right now (and we're still on 10.7, so if whatever it is broke sometime between 10.7 and 10.8, I wouldn't see it anyway).

Does the error only happen outside of Premiere (when trying to play the file on its own in a regular Quicktime instance) or does it happen inside of Premiere or After Effects when trying to import and use the video(s)? Because I wouldn't worry about it if you can handle it correctly inside of Premiere and After Effects. As I mentioned before, it'll be possible to use ffmpeg to convert it to a more compatible format afterward (and if Quicktime is running into Pro registration errors because of a conflict between Quicktime 7 and X, or something like that, then using ffmpeg may be the only solution here).

If it works fine in Premiere and After Effects but not Quicktime, you could always just use a different video player. VLC or mpv-player, for instance.
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