ProRes support in Avenue R6b3 -Windows

[KristofNys]

Are Prores files still supported in Avenue 6 beta 3 ? if i drag them in the deck , it shows up as audio only. The same files play fine in Avenue 4.6.4 on the same machine (windows10 os)

[Joris]

Yeah, that should work. If you have any problems with any file that you think ought to work, just send it to us and we'll take a look.

[Zoltán]

I created a ticket #9821.

[KristofNys]

OK, i'm wetransfering as we speak . One file has an LTC track embedded, so mute your speakers when testing !!

[francoe]

Same behaviour here. ProRes 422, proxy.. just don't load anymore. I was using the old miraizon codecs to decompress, don't know if R have his own way.

[Joris]

Looks like I jumped the gun on this.

Since we don't use Quicktime/QTKit for decoding anymore (because ohmagaa, Quicktime is sooo unsafe now ), we cannot play ProRes files on PC without a license from Apple. We requested this license several times, but we haven't heard back from them.

You can play ProRes on Windows through FFMPEG. In our testing, it wasn't very fast. Also, codec support in FFMPEG has big restrictions based on the licensing model of the host application, so it's unclear whether we're actually allowed to use it to decode ProRes at all.

So yeah, outlook not so good I'm afraid.

[KristofNys]

auch... losing Prores playback would make using Resolume as a playback/playout solution on windows (instead of Pro video player, q-lab, Playback pro etc.. All Mac based) very hard , as most content is delivered as Prores , especially last minute ,and/or big files , which would need to be re-encoded ,and checked for Audio/video sync after re-encoding ...

Keeping the "unsafe" quicktime support as an optional solution ( so that people who need Prores can install Quicktime at their own risk) won't be possible i guess ?

[drazkers]

auch... losing Prores playback would make using Resolume as a playback/playout solution on windows (instead of Pro video player, q-lab, Playback pro etc.. All Mac based) very hard , as most content is delivered as Prores , especially last minute ,and/or big files , which would need to be re-encoded ,and checked for Audio/video sync after re-encoding ...

Keeping the "unsafe" quicktime support as an optional solution ( so that people who need Prores can install Quicktime at their own risk) won't be possible i guess ?

They would have to do away with the brand new video engine then. That or make a option which is ALOT of work. It's a great idea but I bet that's super low on the to do.

[francoe]

Don't believe most content is delivered as Prores, maybe in an utopic world (and clearly not the best one).
I used to have prores proxy files for some playback tasks on windows and osx, that works like charm in resolume, but that's far from any kind of usual procedure. When I was asking myself why not use prores taking advantage of hardware decoding on mac, gets hard to find people using it as main codec.
We need to get clear about this, prores NEVER was a good option to work over windows. At least not an option for a professional enviroment. All solutions comes as messy roundtips and become sketchy in a couple of hours. Even solutions available can't provide a quality consistence (name it ffmpeg, miraizon, cineform, etc). Just scratch and nuke people have apple compatible prores files, but that's because those apps have bundled apple encoders.
You will see people editing prores on his nle, tend to avoid it and stick to dnxhd or other common intermediate codec to render out.
Having prores capabilities inside resolume is great, but not a must.

[Joris]

Regardless of personal experience with Prores, Apple really doesn't like the reverse engineering going on in FFMPEG:

Unauthorized codec implementations
In some instances, unauthorized codec implementations have been used in third-party software and hardware products. Using any unauthorized implementation (such as the FFmpeg and derivative implementations) might lead to decoding errors, performance degradation, incompatibility, and instability. If you're using or considering the purchase of a product that encodes or decodes ProRes but isn't on the list below, please contact us at ProRes@apple.com.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT200321