Morgan MJPEG2000 vs. Cineform

[lordtangent]

@tcindie

Yeah, that screen grab is not the same software I'm talking about. You want "MJPEG2000" it's still at version 2 (2.5 actually) You might have downloaded the wrong demo. Morgan also makes a regular motion jpeg codec. Don't buy that one!

JPEG2000 is wavelet based. It's basically a totally new format and has nothing to do with regular JPEG short of the name. (They should have come up with a new name for what is essentially a new format, but they guys at JPEG don't seem to be too creative in that department) Short of the "Wavelety Goodness" a couple of differences I spot right off the bat from your screen grab are MJPEG2000 has a 4:4:4 mode and a lossless mode. That right there should be enough to get you rev'd up.

@Frank

How fast is you machine? 1440x1080 is a pretty big buffer for anything but a fairly buff machine to work with, even if the decoder is fast. It might also just be an issue of being I/O bound on your HD, especially if you are compressing to lossless (even though the HD doesn't not need to transfer all the data, the codec still needs to seek though the data. If your seek times suck, then you still wont get smooth playback) Have you tried going with lossy? (When you check on "lossless" it is literally lossless encoding, which makes the files larger) I swear, there is no perceptible visual loss even at 10:1, which if you look at my little table should cut down the data rate by at least half again. You should give it a try and see if it's worth the trade off for you.

If you still can't get realtime, an option might be to make "proxy" res files for editing and also high-res files for final render. With Premiere at least, it's easy to switch out media by just changing the path to the media in the file system.

So, for example if you out your media in a dir called:

z:/my_media/LossyVegas_Trip/MEDIA

put identically named proxies in a dir called:

z:/my_media/LossyVegas_Trip/PROXY_MEDIA

Point Premiere to the stuff in the MEDIA dir.

Now by changing the name of the MEDIA you can swtich in and out the proxies

z:/my_media/LossyVegas_Trip/MEDIA becomes... z:/my_media/LossyVegas_Trip/OFFLINE_MEDIA

and z:/my_media/LossyVegas_Trip/PROXY_MEDIA becomes... z:/my_media/LossyVegas_Trip/MEDIA

It's not the most elegant solution, but it works. And you can get smooth playback when editing.

@Ian-T

It's straight forward to make templates for HV20Pulldown.exe but it's hard to describe. SSudzick has some pointers on his site. I intend to share my templates once I'm happy I have them working totally correctly also.

[Farnsworth]

If you still can't get realtime, an option might be to make "proxy" res files for editing and also high-res files for final render. With Premiere at least, it's easy to switch out media by just changing the path to the media in the file system.

Holy crap, that WORKS? I've been searching and searching for a good proxy editing solution for my Premiere/After Effects workflow. So far the best I could come up with was editing with low-res clips, opening the Premiere project in AE (for onlining), importing the high-res clips, and then alt-dragging them one at a time over the low-res versions. Pain in the butt.

But if I can just change the path for the Premiere media, all my problems are solved!

I know this has nothing to do with your thread topic, but I had to express my enthusiasm. I never thought of trying anything that obvious.

[lordtangent]

Farnsworth,

All I know is it worked for me when I tested it. I honestly thought it was a long shot myself, since I assumed Premiere must be storing info about the media like resolution and stuff. But it does work! Give it a try.

The only caveat, which I find annoying, is I couldn't figure out how to change the project resolution. I had to start with the resolution that matched the full-res clip size because I couldn't change after I created the project.

[Indigo]

Very interesting lordtangent. I was thinking of getting CineForm NEO HD for my next project but I'll certainly try Morgan first. You mentioned in another thread being limited to DirectShow prgrams in order to use the variable playback resolutions -- is that sorted out now? Are you using this in Premiere with a choice of playback performance? Another thing I'd like to know: I accept the limitation of 8-bit depth, but NEO HD also changes your HDV from 1440 x 1080 to 1920 x 1080 (square pixels), which is a useful feature. Do you get 1920 x 1080 square pixel output with Morgan?

Great software find...

[lordtangent]

Indigo,

Yeah. Some of my early criticisms of the software were due to me not totally understanding how to use it. (Primarily a result of the zero documentation it has) The variable quality on decode is not a feature that relies on direct show. The sub-resolution decoding DOES. But I've found, at least on my machine (AMD 4600+ 64x2) , I don't need it. Decoding the first few layers when I need top speed is good enough.

That doesn't seam to be the case for everyone though. Slower machines still don't get smooth playback even when decoding just one or two layers. ( Some people here are mentioning they are having problems.) 1440x1080 pixels @ 24fps is a lot to push around in real time, regardless of how light weight the codec is. Even just a slow graphics card could throw a monkey wrench in the works for some people.

Premiere can handle non-square pixels and there is no sense in up-resing your HDV footage until the final render step. (It would just slow things down). I just keep it at 1440x1080

If you want to do your final render to 1920x1080 out to Morgan, it doesn't have resolution limits so it's not a problem. The thing is, you are probably NOT going to be able to play that back in real-time at full quality on anything but the most buff machine right now. Unless you mean to make a high quality archive master, it's not the best choice for your final output. For the last step, I assume most people will be transcoding to something meant for distribution and real time playback (MPEG2 or h264). Morgan MJPEG2000 is meant to be used as more of an intermediate codec, like Cineform.

[Frank]

@Frank
How fast is you machine?

Tangent,

Thanks for your suggestions. It may well be my computer that is the problem.

I have a 2 1/2 year old PC with:
P4 3.2 GHz
4 GB RAM (really only 3 practically)
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GTO graphics card

I already am using proxies when convenient, but I liked the idea of real-time playback with full quality.

I will try the lossy settings.