Found a very good 5D2 transcoding solution.

[Yang Wen]

Download Super C SUPER © videos (scroll to the bottom)

What you have is a universal video converter. Capable of converting your 5D2 clip to many formats.

Drag your 5D2 MOV files to the application. For output video format, I've had good luck with MJPEG at 720P resolution. You can also encode to H.264 720P with little quality drop.

Give it a try..

[Mark Hahn]

Originally Posted by Yang Wen

Download Super C SUPER © videos (scroll to the bottom)

What you have is a universal video converter. Capable of converting your 5D2 clip to many formats.

Drag your 5D2 MOV files to the application. For output video format, I've had good luck with MJPEG at 720P resolution. You can also encode to H.264 720P with little quality drop.

Give it a try..

Can you output to 1080p with less compression, i.e. bigger files? 720p isn't acceptable. I'm only converting to make it play and scrub faster in Premiere.

I'll give it a try. I use VLC a lot and it plays 5D2 files better than any other player I can find. It also converts to other standards, but I haven't tried that yet. I'll compare the two and report my results here.

Edit: I downloaded it and found that the maximum output bitrate is 10 mbits. This would be a giant loss of quality (from the 40 mbits of the 5D2) even going to the same h-264 encoding. This is really weird since even vanilla HD is 10 to 20 mbits.

[Mark Hahn]

Originally Posted by Mark Hahn

Can you output to 1080p with less compression, i.e. bigger files? 720p isn't acceptable. I'm only converting to make it play and scrub faster in Premiere.

I'll give it a try. I use VLC a lot and it plays 5D2 files better than any other player I can find. It also converts to other standards, but I haven't tried that yet. I'll compare the two and report my results here.

Edit: I downloaded it and found that the maximum output bitrate is 10 mbits. This would be a giant loss of quality (from the 40 mbits of the 5D2) even going to the same h-264 encoding. This is really weird since even vanilla HD is 10 to 20 mbits.

I tried it with motion jpeg output at 1080p 30fps. It ignored the output bitrate setting of 10 mbits and put out a 30 mbits file. I then tried it in Premiere Pro and it played and scrubbed perfectly.

Now I have to figure out how much quality was actually lost in going from 40 mbits to 30 mbits (290 mbyte file to 200 mbytes). Considering that MJPEG is much (MUCH) less efficient than h-264, I suspect a lot of quality was lost.

It sure is a lot cheaper than Cineform though. I could definitely use it for editing home movies. When it comes time to produce something to sell I will have to pop for Cineform.

[Yang Wen]

Mark: I didn't see a 720P option in Super C for MJPEG.. How did you do it? can you provide a screen shot from your Super C with all the options setup as you've described? Thanks.

[Mark Hahn]

Originally Posted by Yang Wen

Mark: I didn't see a 720P option in Super C for MJPEG.. How did you do it? can you provide a screen shot from your Super C with all the options setup as you've described? Thanks.

Yang needs to answer this. I did everything in 1080p. The quality was never good enough though. The best results I got were 30 mbits/sec for mjpeg, which should have been 200 mbits/sec (mjpeg has 5 times the bitrate of h-264 and the 5d2 is 40 mbits).

[Jon Fairhurst]

Originally Posted by Mark Hahn

(mjpeg has 5 times the bitrate of h-264 and the 5d2 is 40 mbits)

Mark, I'm not saying that the M-JPEG coding under discussion is good enough, but...

There's h.264 and then there's h.264. If you do multiple pass encoding, sub-pixel motion vectors and a slew of other encoding tricks, h.264 is incredibly efficient. The encoding in the 5D MkII is much more modest, given that it works in real-time on battery power. I'd guess that a top notch h.264 encode could match or beat the 5D MkII encode with about 10 mbps. If you apply the 5:1 ratio, then a good M-JPEG encoder would need only about 50 mbps.

Anyway, you've got to take these encoder efficiency comparisons with a large grain of salt.

Again, I don't mean to imply that this 30 mbps M-JPEG encoder is near good enough. If your eyes say its not, then it's not.

[Rich Castro]

Are there any samples that we can look at using the mjpeg compression?

[Ben Curtis]

Personally I like Handbrake - loads of options for transcoding, free, open-source, and cross-platform.

HandBrake

[Yang Wen]

Ben, does Handbreak work with 5D2 footage?

Rich: I'll put up a short clip online tonight.. I'll also do a A/B comparison of MJPEG transcoded and straight out of camera.

Okay.. here is the screen shot comparing the two.. I see minimum drop in image quality. Playback speed is about 17fps consistently in Vegas as opposed to the out of cam footage which is about 5-6fps. Althought I've just realized that transcoded video now exhibits the crushed black problem.. Hmm any idea why? I'm assuming Super C is not reading the MOV using quicktime.. Is there anyway to reconfigure it to read it with Quicktime?

[Mark Hahn]

Originally Posted by Mark Hahn

I'm going to use cineform which is the best of all worlds and I'm counting on it only costing $129.

And I can now officially say that you really can use Cineform with 5D2 for only $129. This is the ultimate solution.

[Mark Hahn]

Originally Posted by Yang Wen

Ben, does Handbreak work with 5D2 footage?

Rich: I'll put up a short clip online tonight.. I'll also do a A/B comparison of MJPEG transcoded and straight out of camera.

Okay.. here is the screen shot comparing the two.. I see minimum drop in image quality. Playback speed is about 17fps consistently in Vegas as opposed to the out of cam footage which is about 5-6fps. Althought I've just realized that transcoded video now exhibits the crushed black problem.. Hmm any idea why? I'm assuming Super C is not reading the MOV using quicktime.. Is there anyway to reconfigure it to read it with Quicktime?

It is really hard to compare the two with the crushed blacks. I found the same problem comparing my mjpeg with the 5D2.