Video output codec options

I recently discovered that the encoding settings that I’ve been using for at least a year were producing some fairly bad results. I had switched over to GPU-based H264 because the files weren’t gigantic (and I’ve been running low on storage space) and recording them didn’t cause a massive framerate drop.
This has led me to try to figure out which video codec I should use to record from my TD systems.
As far as I have experienced:

H.264 - records fast, produces small files, and looks fairly bad, especially with dark colors

Animation - massive framerate drop

Photo/Motion JPEG - massive framerate drop

MPEG 4 - massive framerate drop

HAPQ - records fast, looks great, and produces very very large files in a format that most things can’t play

GoPro/Cineform - requires a Pro license so I haven’t tested it

Am I missing something? Is there a better way to to this? Or is it just a matter of getting massive amounts of storage to handle 50GB HAP files?
Possibly sending everything to spout and using something else to record?
Is it unreasonable to try to record at 4K?

well, storing lots of video always has, and still means, you will need big drives.
And storing good quality video certainly means big filesize, until a magic compression will be found.

I guess it all depends what you want to do with your recordings later on.

  • If you want to edit them ever again, I would always choose a lossless format such as animation.
  • if you want to play them back at 50FPS with 10 layers HD simultaneously, this means you will need to play them as HAPQ files, so you can just as well already encode them as HAPQ
  • if you only want to record your video in TD with the realtime flag on, you need to choose a codec & computer that can do that.

On the other hand a 4 TB disk is less than 100 euros these days…so why go through the pain of seeing your beautiful art mangled by bad compression :wink:

Like Idz said, codecs are all a balancing act. When the file size is small, it usually comes at the trade off of more CPU/GPU usage, or if the CPU usage is low, it is probably because it will have a high storage read/write requirement. etc etc.

Best way to approach it is to figure out what your absolute requirements are and what your goal is, then work backwards. If your goal is lossless recording but you also have an absolute requirement that it needs to be recording in real time, then you’ll try some options vs others. Depending on how the network is dropping frames, you could try using Spout to send the output from one instance to another instance that just records (if it’s mainly a CPU usage issue).

yeah… I ordered at 6TB drive. So that should help for a while. I’m often generating 100+ files (mostly under 2 minutes) per week. So it’s going to add up, but at least HAPQ records efficiently. Playback and file management is a pain since there’s still no good standalone player that’ll handle them correctly. Adobe Bridge can sort of sometimes preview the files but it tends to crash a lot when attempting to do so.

I’m almost always attempting to record realtime, trying to lose as little quality as possible since most of it ends up being reencoded into things like DXV3 for Resolume, or editing in Premiere, etc.

Ya, I’ve found Touch is the best HAP player, generally easy to drag files into a blank project and watch them. But I think VDMX could work as well as a quick player to throw files into?

Im not im premiere that often with HAP, can it work with them?

Maybe a setup you can try is rendering from Touch in HAPQ since it’s efficient, and then make either a quick adobe media encoder preset or setup a quick touch patch that you can drag files onto and have them converted into something else better for editing. Or make an ffmpeg script you can run that converts the HAPQ directly into 2-3 other formats for editing, playback, etc etc