Bluray 'legal' h264

[Guest]

Thanks for posting this. I'm on a mac, editing in FCP and authoring blurays in encore ( the only option for bluray authoring on a mac ). Compressor for mac exports legal blurays for encore but quality is average. Adobe media encoder quality is worse. Handbbrake does better quality but encore will NOT recognize any of the encodes, no matter what preferences I set, without wanting to transcode them again. I've examined hardware encoders and the buzz on the discussions is similar, encore wants to transcode hardware h264s. Does anyone have any idea what exactly encore is rejecting in hardware h264s and handbrake h264s

[Stan Jones]

I remember this being asked, but I don't recall any good answer. If you can post a small file, I'll look at it.

[Guest]

thank you for that offer. I'll post a small clip when I'm back at the editing suite.

[Guest]

Stan just to be clear are you asking for a small clip form my source material ? Or my failed h264 encodes. My source is 1440 i 'unsqueezed' on my fcp timeline to 1920. Exported as 422 prores qt. As I said compressor does it everytime, no failed h264s. In handbrake I'm exporting the video and audio separately of course. The file gets a .mp4 extension and I tried giving it a h264 and m4v ( think I remembered that one correctly ) but no change.

[Stan Jones]

I was thinking of the file you are importing to Encore. But a short source clip plus the exported files you bring to Encore would be better. I could export from PR/AME and see what characteristics vary.

Are you saying that you are getting an mp4 and renaming to m4v?

[Guest]

Thank you Stan, yes the handbrake encodes have a .mp4 extension, just for the heck of it I tried changing the extension to h264 and m4v to see if it made any difference.  (Just remembering compressor's extension for bluray h264 is .264). I don't really expect it to make much difference changing the extension but I have found that to work in my 3d design projects. ( i do quite a bit of CAD/ Jewellery design ). What sort of file size would be suitable

[Stan Jones]

Just not too big a download. Dropbox or the like?

[Guest]

OK good, I have dropbox. I'll do it on monday when I'm back at the desk, thanks again

[Guest]

OK Stan here's a dropbox link to a source file. I'd be very interested if you could get this 'bluray legal' out of handbrake. If you can I'd love to see your settings.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/21685719/trial%20clip.mov?dl=1

let me know if the link doesn't work. Dropbox changed the way they handle links to movies.

[neil wilkes]

The trouble here is that H.264 is not a format in itself but like AVI or MOV just a container type, and for Blu-ray we are looking at a subset of H.264 and this needs to be correctly encoded. As you are well aware not all H264 encoders are created equally.

I would HIGHLY recommend a specialist plugin for AME/Premiere to do this job. The AME version as you say simply is not very good (possibly heresy around here but truth is truth) and there is much better available for very little money.

If you are on a budget and ONLY need Blu ray H264, you will not go wrong with the TMPGEnc 264 encoder and best of all this is seriously cheap at a mere $75. It does have one major drawback though, and that is encoding a 264 for computer playback as this outputs a file that simply does not open in Quicktime (although it is fine in VLC and even Windows Media Player) so if this compatibility is important then you will need to buy perhaps the best encoder I have ever used - the wonderful x264 Pro plugin.. It is a fair bit more at $300 but the output is simply gorgeous.

Sorry if this is not what you wanted to hear but you will need a plugin for best results here

[Guest]

Thanbks Neil. I got the x264 plugin for Quicktime but it produced jumpy playback ?? I'n on FCP so Premier plugins aren't viable. I also downloaded Openshot as it uses x265 to try it for exporting bluray legal files but it's 64bit and won't run on my mac pro. Always something getting in the way.

[Stan Jones]

Not a handbrake user. A main difference in the AME/Encore transcode is that it is interlaced. Regular settings in Handbrake do not allow interlaced output, and I did not follow the options I found on line that suggested there may be a way.

BD Legal PAL 25fps 1920x1080 is only interlaced.

[Guest]

That's interesting, never thought of that. I'll dig into it a bit more, thanks

[Stan Jones]

Let us know!

[Guest]

OK,  from the lads over at Handbrake.

( QuickTime uses an MP4 feature called "edit list" which isn't correctly supported by our MP4 demuxer.

The workaround would be to remux the file using Mkvtoolnix (there are also tools that can do MP4 to MP4, but I don't know which of them support ProRes video tracks), before feeding it to HandBrake. )

So there you are, not worth the hassle, god knows what else is tucked away in a handbrake encode that encore doesn't like. . I'll settle for Compressor after hearing that.

[Stan Jones]

Thanks for reporting.

Keep in mind that what Encore likes best are demuxed files (m4v and audio). Encore must demux a muxed file before building the combined files that follow the DVD/BD specs. That probably doesn't help your delimma.

[Guest · Accepted solution]

As an update Stan, I salvaged a 'legacy' product from ebay, Matrox Mini Max, a hardware h264 encoder. It connects seamlessly with compressor, encodes h264s at almost realtime with it's own Matrox presets and is indistinguishable from the best compressor can do. And it slips into encore without transcoding . happy days. So all the trawling was worth it. This little beauty is cutting my encoding workflow by about 80%

[Stan Jones]

Excellent!