HEVC / H265 with Alpha Support in AME

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
September 25, 2019
13 replies
38496 views

Apple recently announced support for Alpha with HEVC. This is great news. Does anyone know about it being available in Creative Cloud / Media Encoder. Looking forward to a lightweight / compressed codec that supports Alpha.

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/506/

M

midjournalist_7435

Participating Frequently

Any updates?

the_dudes

Inspiring

You could install the webm plugin from fnordware. It's enabling AME to export WEBMs with transparency. It also allows playback of WEBMs within AE and Premiere, altough it doesn't read the transparency channel there.

D

DMDI

Known Participant

Any news on when this is getting fixed?

A

Anonymous

With ffmpeg on mac, there is a possibility to encode to hevc, although the quality of transparancy is not good enough for me:

ffmpeg -i in.mov -vf scale=-1:720 -c:v hevc_videotoolbox -allow_sw 1 -alpha_quality 0.9 -tag:v hvc1 -q:v 65 out.mp4

There is also a free tool to convert video directly to hevc and vp9 by Rotato.

But, Adobe! We need you to support this! Please make AME able to encode to hevc with alpha. Just that one checkbox!

A

Anonymous

Quality of transparency issue with ffmpeg was solved by adding a filter, check the thread at https://stackoverflow.com/a/76569133/757201

LDRO

Participant

i might have a workaround! resolve can encode HEVCs with alpha and supports image sequences/prores with alpha, so going through resolve should, in theory, work

obviously it'd be ideal to have it natively but since i wanted this for After Effects, it might be possible to export directly from AE to Resolve, then from Resolve i could re-render in HEVC w/alpha

i'll keep you guys updated

P

Petrus22763505prl2

Participant

So here's something interesting. Like the rest, I was also bummed to find that Adobe doesn't yet fully support HEVC with Alpha since I've got a ton of large keyed files in ProRes taking up too much space. So I started experimenting with different codecs in AME and found this one (there might be others, but this one was good enough for now):

- JPEG 2000 MXF - RGBA 4:4:4:4: 12-bit

I just went with the default settings (there was still room to drop or increase the export quality) and the result was almost indistinguishable from my original ProRes Alpha file (unless I'm like seriously missing something stupid and this is all a big mistake on my side).

Essentially the original file was just under 15GB in size and the resulting JPEG 2000 version only about 2GB in size. Might not be as good as HEVC, but that's a pretty significant drop in file size.

Maybe try on your side and let us know on this post if you guys find similar results.

W

Warren Heaton10841144

Community Expert

JPEG2000 is a high-end delivery CODEC, not an editing CODEC.

If you use JPEG2000 as an editing CODEC, you are missing a deep peak signal noise ratio (PSNR).

A

Anonymous

Just ran into this issue today. I needed to help a remote editor do a quick key from a different program. and i needed to send the keyed footage with alpha. Davinci Resolve created and played back the h265+alpha perfectly. my remote editor who was using premiere couldnt see the alpha at all. I then had to repalce my 100MB h265+alpha file with a 3.46gb Prores 4444 +alpha file....

Time is money this took away hours of time uploading. ADOBE HEAR US!!!! We have been needing a easy compresssed way to send footage with alphas for a LONG time. whether its for keyed footage to just basic motion grpahics. PLEASE enable the option to view h265+alpha!!!!!

D

defaultmwp4gj6s6gtn

Participant

I need Premiere and After Effects to support this as well. I use it a lot, but I still have to export to Proress and then convert it to MOV (HEVC). The files are so small. Support for this Codec in Adobe apps is long-overdue.