YUV444 high quality movie output

#1

Im having trouble deciphering the multitude of movie codec choices in aftereffects.
I have had great success using ffmpeg to make superb quality H264/x264 compressed movies with 10bit YUV444 color bandwidth.

Here are the arguments I use for ffmpeg to get movies that are compressed but show no color banding and fantastic detail. The incoming image sequences are 16bit png.

ffmpeg -i images.%04d.png -pix_fmt gbrp10le -vcodec ffv1 -an out.mp4

I see 10bit YUV422 but nothing with the words YUV444 in the description.

I dont want to use animation codec because although it is pristine its way to large. It seems that the H264 codec in aftereffects produces YUV420 movies which although they are small they are terrible quality. Is there a way to convince AE into making YUV444 H264 movies?

There is a sticky posting on this forum, that I read through but it seems the conclusion people have come to is that you have to use an external app to get high quality compressed movies.

I would appreciate recommendations using AE.

#2

Is there a way to convince AE into making YUV444 H264 movies?
No. AE’s H264 encoders don’t support High 4:4:4 profile and personally I’m not aware of any software that can do so either.

#3

Perhaps its ffmpeg’s x264(h264 lookalike codec) that is managing YUV444, but I assure you it is creating a YUV444 movie.
Here is VLCplayer’s codec assessment of a movie I made with the options I supplied earlier.

Codec: H264 - MPEG-4 AVC (part 10) (avc1)
Decoded format: Planar 4:4:4 YUV

This link is where I found the recommendations to use the options.

http://forum.videohelp.com/threads/361133-Lossless-(10-Bit-RGB-444)-and-(10-Bit-YUV-422)-Compression-Codec-s?p=2290331&viewfull=1#post2290331

#4

these simplified ffmpeg command line options create a high quality YUV:4:4:4 movie

-r 24 -pix_fmt yuv444p -qp 0

so if you had a png sequence like render.0001.png to render.0100.png

the full command would be

ffmpeg -i render.%04d.png -r 24 -pix_fmt yuv444p -qp 0 render_yuv444.mp4

Im not a aftereffects expert but I understand that there is a addon encoder package that is a companion to AE.
Is that right? and will that package make this type of movie?

#5

Im not a aftereffects expert but I understand that there is a addon encoder package that is a companion to AE.
There is Adobe Media Encoder as part of Adobe’s former Creative Suite and a few other encoding softwares like Compressor, Episode, Mpeg Streamclip or Sorensen Squeeze, but like I said before, none of those allow that specific profile(at least I’m not aware of).

This ffmpeg thing looks interesting, though I’m a bit lost because I don’t know how to compile or whatever stuff I’d need to do to get it working. Any shell scripts that I can run from a command line?
I can probably hack together a crude GUI with Automator, but I’m completeley lost about how to set this ffmpeg up at all in the first place.

#6

I guess the codec options that come with AE have not been updated in years. That’s frustrating.

ffmpeg is an open source project that has been going since 2000 Here is a link describing it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FFmpeg#History

Assuming you are on windows. I recommend starting with a open source player like mrviewer which includes a precompiled version off ffmpeg.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mrviewer/

The mrviewer download is just a zip file of the mrviewer folder and its application content.
Other than mrviewer.exe you will find ffmpeg.exe in that folder.

If you are familiar with running command line scripts its pretty easy to do.
The main complication is knowing how to apply the full paths of footage files.
so if you had a png sequence like render.0001.png to render.0100.png
in a folder called c:\user\scrimski\image_sequence

on way would be to cd to the extracted mrviewer folder and type the following

ffmpeg -i c:\user\scrimski\image_sequence\render.%04d.png -r 24 -pix_fmt yuv444p -qp 0 c:\user\scrimski\image_sequence\render_yuv444.mp4

If you say you can create a GUI interface with Automator even better.

#7

No Windows, Mac here.

Will figure something out in a free minute.