ProRes support? Need your voice!

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
41

A couple of years ago I was working on a project where all the raw footage was @streamlined@ by outputing to pro res. as a working file… really wanted to use the VSE but couldn’t as it would be churlish to take all teh source files and convert them to frame sequences to use in blender, edit and then convert back to prores again. In the end I just used FCP and After Effects.

On mac it’s pretty much THE de-facto standard for video work.
There are lots of edits i wanted to do in the VSE but couldn’t.

i often work places where everyone in the team is using prores and yes it may affect the reds but given its prevalence and popularity (on the mac) as an intermediate format it would be EXTREMELY valuable to have as an option in blender.

Anyone that doesn’t need it then fine, but for those of us that do a one line change in the code gets my full support.

42

I need ProRes 422 (HQ) and CinemaDNG Raw at work so would be nice to have these two in Blender.

43

I never EVER used anything other than images sequence as outputs (except when doing quick edits on the VSE, then I used MPEG4 with high bitrate), and when a format isn’t compatible to import in Blender I have softwares that are specialized in transcoding videos.

Now I don’t work inside a team full of Mac or Final Cut users, but as an Apple anti-fan, and because I don’t use codecs in Blender, I don’t really need the ProRes format.

44

this x1000.

For independents who work in their own little vacuum, pro res support probably isn’t that important. But for the rest of us who need to
be able to input/output formats that work within an existing pipeline (like almost all post houses out there, large or small) then pro res support is extremely important.

45

Now four years later. Where is ProRes in Blender!?

It may be debated that it is a shitty format and you only should use image sequences but you’re often not the one to decide. Your client is.

It is needed for pipeline workflows.

Rendering to sequences and then converting is just stupid and a time hog.

Please, give us ProRes rendering in Blender.

Regards,
a frustrated animator who has to deliver a shitload of clips to post in ProRes, having to spend hours to convert them because someone thinks ProRes is not needed in Blender.

46

with the hardware de and encoding on the new m1 pro and max chips for prores , it will now become the dominant codec in the world.

but stable interchange formats are not divx, theora , mpg1 , mpg2 ,DV, FFMPEG codec 1 or huffyuf, which are still in the list.

The DNxHD option didnt render for quite some time.

Huffyuff was long ago advanced by lagarith.

the other ones are also just dinosaurs.

We need at least one good interchange format with alpha support video codec. ProRes 4444 and 4444HQ are the main intermediate formats clients ask for becasue its so well supported on mac, and now with the m1 pro this situation will even widen as they have now hardware de and encoders on their chips and everyone will use them so maybe the situation should be revised on how important this codec is.

The other great option is the cineform codec , its on par with prores 4444 basically , supports alpha channel, 12 bit, and 3d , absolutely stable , the files size is smaller than png and performance is amazing, its opensource too, its on par with prores imo. The best option for any home producer.

The common modern delivery codecs are AV1 ( Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc.) VP9(youtube), h264(), h265() Possibly with nvenc support(becasue many blender users have a gtx or rtx card).

The list should have a seperator between intermediate/interchange codecs and delivery codecs. The list could be smaller than now but much cleaner with better options.

Then theres the last big problem: Mux Rate , Mux Packetsize, buffer … those are values which shouldnt even be touched. ffmpeg does this internally.

max and min Bitrate is also a bit oldschool as the codecs all come with stable and representative presets ,

an important setting is color space(4:2:0,4:2:2,4:4:4, rgb(a), (a)yuv which isnt exposed through the UI.

The last thing is, now that Blender has set a priority on making the VSE a competitive video editor, it would even be good if people could render directly to their own installed codec , many TV stations use specific pre-delivery codecs , being able to render to their own codec from blender vse with convinience instead of writing a script to render to images and then convert via command line or watchfolders is imo important, especially for a video editor. The dnxhd bug should also be fixed for the upcoming vse overhaul. also a very common format need in tons of productions.

One look into the Davinchi Resolve or Adobe Media Encoder Export presets should give a pretty good glimpse into the important and common formats. Not everything but most of it can also be achieved with ffmpeg(although the list could be smaller).

47

Just remember that Video based outputs for blender, are piped through FFMPEG… So look at FFMPEG for what is / isnt supportable!

48

ProRes is supported in FFMpeg, I use it often through the FFMpeg libraries. ProRes is now fully supported in Adobe Premiere Pro on Windows, and it is such a fantastic codec to edit. Buttery smooth, includes several flavors, and though not the most efficient (obviously, being an intraframe codec) it is high quality, and easy to use. The question about adding it to Blender when the devs talked seriously about it in 2013 came down to whether it could open up Blender to lawsuits from Apple.