How to transcode Canon 5D mark II H.264 video into something editable?

Charles,

One major correction that I need to make to my above comments, re: Render times is that I had tested in an SD Project (just happened to have it handy). I created a full HD Project and then the Render times went up fairly dramatically, but still within reason. I had not even considered that difference, when I first posted - DUH!

As for QT, I still have 7.5.5 installed. Had been about ready to go with 7.6, then saw that some Premiere users were having problems with it. I'll wait to see how that one sorts out. I still recall the 7.4.x problems from not that long ago.

I have not gotten to them point of Exporting anything from the Canon. Do not have Blu-ray, so I would be Exporting to an SD delivery format.

I was just happy to get some of these files to experiment with, as others seem to be having problems and I had no test footage to explore. Now, I just need to get some of the MJPEG files from the Nikon D-90.

Thanks for the comments. I also just recommended FCP to the photographer shooting the Canon, especially as he's on Mac for everything.

Sorry about the bogus Render times,

Hunt

Malcom,

The issue of proper color has been solved by Apple with the release of QuickTime 7.6.

Note that FCP had the same issue.

Bill, I agree that rendering the MOV clips works. I still tend to transcode to mpeg-2 and like this better. Right or wrong I feel I can do more precise color work with transcoding than with rendering.

Malcom,

I just received 5 .MOV's from a Canon 5D MKII. As I only have PP2 to work with, I Imported these into an HD 16:9 Project. UnRendered, they were a tad choppy, but after Render, they played very smoothly. There did not appear to be any Audio sync issues (mentioned in some other 5D threads), but then I didn't have a slate, or any closeups of speech, so maybe I missed something there.

Judging from some other threads, I expected there to be problems, but found none. The Render time (Core2 Quad 2.6GHz w/ 3x 200GB SATA II's) was longer than for equal SD footage, but not that bad. I'd estimate that it was about 1:2 taking 5mins. to Render a 2:04:00 Clip).

I only had hummingbirds with natural background, and the lighting was early AM, so fairly harsh, but colors looked "decent" on the laptop's 17" monitor - no NTSC calibrated monitor here.

I know that this does not address many of the issues, that you are finding, and is not a complete test, by any means. Just wanted to throw out a few limited observations.

Hunt

Getting very frustrated with this - after a host of different tests with various codecs I can't get the result to play smoothly - its ok on static shots (camera locked but with movement within the frame) but any pan or tilt introduces slight (or not so slight) jerks (and this has nothing to do with the camera operator as the files play back smoothly when played from the camera through an HDMI cable to a monitor.

The other issue is the colour. This seems to be a bit of an elephant in the room around here, but as I understand it there is a problem with the H264 codec as quicktime and software that uses the quicktime codec (like CS4 and Vegas, but not FCP) reverts to sRGB which does not use the complete 8-bit colour range (0-255). The QT decoder only uses 16-235. You can see this easily if you take a MOV file shot on the 5D and change the file extension to (say) MPG - play it along side the original file playing in the quick time player - the colour difference is startling - as are the blacks/shadows. Unfortunately while players such as Media Player are completely taken in by this (the change in file extension) - Premiere isn't and won't allow the import of the "corrupted" file (damn!)

So as I understand things, to get around that issue we cannot (at the moment) use any Adobe product to compress/change the format of the original file without unacceptable loss of picture quality. We would need a third party solution to do this (one that did not revert to using the faulty QT codec)... then import the result into CS4 ... then try to edit and export a smoothly playing, high quality result (that the Mac equipped, are showing the camera is capable of producing!)

Either that or we wait for Apple, Adobe or Canon to provide a workable solution ...

Anyone got a cheap Mac they aren't using? (he says through gritted teeth! - I gave them up about 10 years ago)

Transcoding to EX1-style MPEG2 is the best solution out of the box. Final Cut users are doing the same thing with clips from the 5d MkII.

First, I don't know your camera model. Second, we edit all H.264 in Final Cut, but author the Blu--Ray in EncoreDVD; H.264 is the standard asset for Blu-Ray.

- I have no clue why PremierePro can't handle any Quicktime, could be that you have to install some additional plug-ins from MainConcept.

I receive all sorts of Quicktime video made in AVID, Final Cut, with Blackmagic quicktime codecs, transcodes made by ProCoder etc., none is working in Premiere, Premiere can not even re-import Quicktime video made by Premiere itself. The problem is that the import of Quicktime takes forever; once it is importet it works sosolala, but often the Premiere simply crashes.

- For a temporary solution, so you can edit, you can use HuffYuv v2.1.1, an older codec which compresses to 50% of fully uncompressed. That way you can at least preserve most of the MPEG-4 picture quality for editing, and then render a master in whatever delivery codec. But you still have the problem how to transcode the H.264 to any other codec, in this case HuffYuv.

- Another possibility would be AVI, simply create an AVI preset with 1920x1080 and the required fps (framse per second). Always control square pixel versa quadratic pixel. Normally a H.264 video is square pixel. I don't know what pixel ratio your camera is recording. Also here, you still have the problem how to transcode the H.264 to AVI.

- Another possibility is installing the MainConcept H.264/AVC, or the MainConcept H.264/AVC-PRO plug-in:

http://www.mainconcept.com

because I think Premiere still doesn't support natively MPEG-4 , also I don't know if this plug-in makes Premier work with H.264, see manual:

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/PremierePro/4.0/WS01FCC81E-8CF6-437a-AAD7-A2D8F9175BF0a.html

.

Angelo,

What would you consider a higher-quality codec?

The point of this thread is to determine the best-case usable editing workflow on a Windows platform using Adobe Premiere CS4 for editing Canon 5D mark II video content specifically.

The low-level issue seems to be that the QT H.264 codec shipped for the windows platform isn't well tuned (to put it generously) and doesn't play nice with Premiere as you mentioned.

Any thoughts as to why QT and Premiere don't get along?

Out-of-the-box Premiere CS4 capabilities are the limits of the sandbox for this discussion. Higher-end turn-key and real-time NLE solutions are out-of-scope.

Any specific suggestions within these bounds would be greatly appreciated.

At least for me, space and disk configuration issues are paramount and uncompressed HD video just isn't an option (lack of RAID, or avail. space to move archives and re-partition)...

Transcoding MPEG-4 to MPEG-2 for editing purpose is a bad idea.

It means you lower the picture quality of an anyhow not great MPEG-4 to the even lower quality of MPEG-2.

The solution if you have no NLE to edit MPEG-4, is to transcode the camera footage to a higher quality codec; or if the hard drives are fast enough (e.g SATA-300) to uncompressed, but not Quicktime uncompressed, because Premiere can't handle any Quicktime video. Quicktime video are all video with the extension *.mov

H.264, H.263, On2 VP6, FLV, ASP, AVC, HDX4, AVC1, DAVC, X264, VSSH, AVCHD, MainConcept H.264 etc., are all the same MPEG-4 video standard. The differ by what is AVC or ASP, but an On2-VP6 flash is 100% the same video as an H.264
.

At the data rates we're talking about I suspect the visual differences would be minimal.

Based on my limited [read: casual enthusiast not professional) experience and knowledge, I think I understand there to be two conditions to consider on the theoretical level:

When transcoding VBR content to CBR, any loss of frame data caused by the original coding algorithm to allow the drop in bit-rate would remain in the CBR re-coded version. (valid when VBR instantaneous bit-rate is lower than your CBR setting) Recoding to a constant rate would provide no additional quality or playback benefits under this specific condition.

For sections of the video that had been VBR encoded to data rates higher than your CBR limit, the codec would have to optimize and compress as it normally would when down-sampling. The sections of video that benefited from the maximum rate of 41.5 mbps would now lose some level of fidelity (noticeable or not) to meet the 38.5 mbps rate. Assuming that the original MOV files exceed 38.5 mbps as QT Player reports.

Considering that my 41.5 mbps VBR MPEG2 files are larger than the original MOV files, I wonder if the MPEG2 stream is simply more bulky than the H.264 original, or if the increased maximum data rate is padding out the file with extra data.

I might try both CBR and 2-pass VBR at 38.6mbps (max) and see how things turn out in terms of visual quality and transcode render times.

Rizzo,

I got the 38.6 from the specs in the original Digital Photography Review. This reads: "1920 x 1080 (16:9) up to 12 mins (Quicktime 1080p H.264; 38.6 Mbits/sec)". This is not Canon official, have never seen the Canon spec, but DPR is normally an accurate source. Don't know whether the "up to" implies VBR or not; I've assumed it is CBR.

I've been using 38.6 mbps CBR mpeg transcoding for several weeks now and getting good color and detail all the way to Blu Ray. But I would switch to VBR if it's technically correct. I agree, I had seen varying rates during MOV playback but I decided I didn't have the tools to accurately measure this.

I guess a question, if I transcode at 38.6 CBR and the source video is VBR, varying up to 41.5 mbps, what effect might I see in the transcoded video?