MAC Neo 4k After Effects and Remaster encoding bad quality

[David Newman]

Wavelets add nothing, no to banding, and no dirt, all it can do is soften, so what you are seeing is 8-bit YUV. Also I already mention you can't directly output 444 from Remaster, it seems AE is broken (remember I asked you to contact support on that,) so you are not comparing the same thing. I've already tested your files, and they are 4:2:2 not 4:4:4. Export out from AE at 10-bit RGB DPX, convert those to CineFom 444 with Remaster -- see the difference? We have already filed the bug report with Adobe on their QuickTime handling -- we know that will take a while so doing a Mac exporter for Adobe might be the solution, but we have other ideas to test. The 601 vs 709 issue fixed in the next build.

[Martin Guitar]

I tried 10Bit DPX Sequence and converted to CF 444 with Remaster. The file played in Quicktime looked terrible with banding and all and when imported in AE it was smooth like the ProRes 444.

The Cineform 444 rendered from AE looks terrible in Quicktime Player and After Effects. ProRes looks fine everywhere.

I will give it some time and come back to CF when things stabilize. Thanks for looking into my issue.

[David Newman]

We know QuickTime Player is not great as it askes for 8-bit YUV from us, and that is what we provide. We don't not consider that to be a bug. However the direct AE export is a bug, that is a higher priority.

[Morten Carlsen]

Hi David,

I am playing around with the beta you guys released today.

The problem is not only After Effects. It pertains to all adobe exports. Be that AE, PPRO or Adobe Media Encoder.

PPRO and Adobe Media Encoder offers two ways of exporting to Cineform

1) Via the Format Drop Down (Cineform MOV File
2) Via the Format Drop Down 'QuickTime' and the selecting the Cineform HD/4k/3d codec

But encodings are providing results far inferior of that of Remaster.

1) This is the best way to go but there are considerably more noise in the output than in the input and the visual loss is much greater than that of ProRes4444. Much more noise is present and that although FilmScan2(100%) is selected. Using 50% is visually impossible.

2) Using this format will lift the blacks considerably. And it will keep lifting. So after 3 generations of encoding the image of the movie is more or less white...

I believe all this has to do with Adobe's way of using quicktime. Because if I open an H264 movie directly in quicktime and transcode that via the Q7 Pro Player to Cineform the result is good. Not so when using adobe PPRO, AME or AE.

I get great results (even after 4 generations of test re-encoding using Apple's Compressor, MPEG Stream Clip and remaster....

The only problem is that as of now I have no way of using ANY of adobes encoding possibilities to export/transcode to the Cineform codec. And that is a problem for me... As I am working in the Adobe Suite.

One way and might I add the only and highly circumstantial way is to export to another codec from within adobe and then use Remaster to again transcode to Cineform.

[Morten Carlsen]

Hi There,

I was just experimenting with Motion (Latest Version) and OS X Latest Snow Leopard....

Trying to export directly to the Cineform Codec crashes the application...

Here is a string copied from the crash report:

Thread 117 Crashed:
0 com.cineform.CFHDCompressor 0x49c5c7c2 ConvertYUVAFloatToFrame_RGBA4444_16s + 292


Hope this helps !

[David Newman]

That information needs to go to support, not here. Support will forward it onto the appropriate engineering staff.