x264 - 4K - 444 - 10bits

[mhsergio]

Hello everyone

I am in doubt with a new workflow in Windows 8.1 64 bits, 32GB Ram, 2 x Intel Xeon™ E5-2630v3 8 Core 2,4GHz

I have tons of 4K .mov AJA RGB uncompressed (R10K) from Adobe Premiere and Da Vinci, and my ideal target is convert these files in to x264/4K/10bits/444 files.

Handbrake nightly, give me 420 10bit
Xmedia Recode, 444 8 bit
Virtualdub + QT plugin + FFmpeg plugin + x264 VFW, crash
AVANTI with line yuv444p10le, crash
MEGUI, 420 8 bit

I know I'm a beginner in this forum but I have tested a bunch of GUI's (x264 Komisar, TX264, FFmpeg GUI, Staxrip...) without success.

Is it possible to encode x264/4K/10bits/444 files?

Thank you in advance, I'll really appreciate your help.

Sergio.

[smok3]

Limiting myself to ffmpeg:
According to freenode/#ffmpeg; x264 is build with only one bit depth support, so basically you need to find a ffmpeg build which was done with 10 bit.

For example to get static compile for Linux, you would download something like this https://www.johnvansickle.com/ffmpeg/ and use the one named ffmpeg-10bit (or compile your own).

p.s. A command line with -pix_fmt yuv444p (probably not needed in your case) will give me mediainfo
Format : AVC
Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile : High 4:4:4 Predictive@L5
Format settings, CABAC : Yes
Format settings, ReFrames : 4 frames
Codec ID : avc1

Color space : YUV
Chroma subsampling : 4:4:4
Bit depth : 10 bits
Scan type : Progressive

[shekh]

try this https://sourceforge.net/projects/vdfiltermod/files/VirtualDub%20pack/version%2013%20preview/

I dont promise anything about performance but it should work
If you provide sample I will see what happens

[Blue_MiSfit]

Hello!

What's your use case?

Unless this is just for archival, you will probably have issues with compatibility. You might be better off using ProRes 4444 or DNxHR for this.

[benwaggoner]

Hello!

What's your use case?

Unless this is just for archival, you will probably have issues with compatibility. You might be better off using ProRes 4444 or DNxHR for this.
Yeah, the compatibility hit is so bad you might as well use HEVC, which can be a lot more efficient for near-lossless mezzanine encoding.

In my tests (getting on a year old), With medium-GOP I was able t get similar quality to ProRes 4444 at 25% the bitrate, and with IDR-only at about 40% the bitrate. H.264 would be quite a bit higher, as it isn't as efficient for 4k (only 8x8 blocks, while HEVC does up to 32x32) and no --cu-lossless, which actually can reduce bitrate by finding blocks that are small encoded losslessly that would be bigger as quantized lossy. I doubt you'd be able to get real mezz quality with x264 at less than 50% the bitrate of ProRes 4444.

But either way, you're losing compatibility with a whole lot of tools and workflows. Maybe the latest Premiere or After Effects on Windows with a Pascal GPU or something, so you get DXVA decode. But in most cases you'd be trading much longer encoding time and substantially longer import/rendering time for not super huge changes in file size.

[mhsergio]

Thank you all for your support. My case is just a personal challenge and for archival purpose, keeping quality and minimal store space.

It's seems that the easy way to find a FFmpeg that has been compiled for WINDOWS with the 10bit depth property enabled, but most FFmpeg distribution are compiled with the 8bit depth (which is the default for FFmpeg, right?) and then set the pixel format to YUV444p10le.

I have found that https://sourceforge.net/projects/ffmpeg-hi/ but doesn't work.

May be its time to change to HEVC 10-12bit 444

[benwaggoner]

May be its time to change to HEVC 10-12bit 444
You definitely will be able to get "near lossless" quality lower than with H.264, particularly at 4K.

Feel free to open a thread in the HEVC forum if you'd like to discuss further.