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FFmpeg is frequently used by different studios for encoding their media, however the documentation for ffmpeg is often poor, or cryptic so its often harder than it should be to come up with a good starting point. We are aiming to come up with recommendations for different scenarios as well as document what the different flags are doing with the aim to make this easier to get to a good baseline.

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NameTarget UsageSourceffmpeg flagsDescriptionSize
libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420pProxy playback, for web review, and non-color critical workflows, e.g. animation, modeling, etc.

This should be a lightweight compression, capable of supporting HD with a reasonable bit-rate, hopefully supporting a wide range of web browsers.
Final review, e.g. lighting

libx264 -pix_fmt yuv444p10leFinal review, e.g. lightinghttps://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/colorspace-c:v libx264 -preset placebo -qp 0 -x264-params "keyint=15:no-deblock=1" -pix_fmt yuv444p10le -sws_flags spline+accurate_rnd+full_chroma_int -vf "colorspace=bt709:iall=bt601-6-625:fast=1" -color_range 1 -colorspace 1 -color_primaries 1 -color_trc 1

libx264rgbFinal review, e.g. lighting

This is a variant of the above, its essentially using x264, but not converting to YCrCb.
libx265

-c:v libx264

Prores 4444For delivery to editorial
-c:v prores_ks -profile:v 4444 -qscale:v 1 -pix_fmt yuv444p10le -sws_flags spline+accurate_rnd+full_chroma_int -vf "colorspace=bt709:iall=bt601-6-625:fast=1" -color_range 1 -colorspace 1 -color_primaries 1 -color_trc 1

-profile:v 4444 is equivalent to -profile:v 4
shotgun_diy_encode
https://support.shotgunsoftware.com/hc/en-us/articles/219030418-Do-it-yourself-DIY-transcoding',-vcodec libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p -g 30 -vprofile high -bf 0 -crf 2

DnxHD

For delivery to editorial



Prores 422 HQFor delivery to editorialSome FFMpeg commands I need to remember for converting footage for video editing. http://bit.ly/vidsnippets · GitHub

-pix_fmt yuv422p10le -c:v prores_ks -profile:v 3 -vendor ap10 -sws_flags spline+accurate_rnd+full_chroma_int -vf "colorspace=bt709:iall=bt601-6-625:fast=1" -color_range 1 -colorspace 1 -color_primaries 1 -color_trc 1



Note the -vendor ap10 part below is only needed if working with Final Cut, but it does no harm otherwise.

-profile:v 3 is equivalent to -profile:v hq

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h264

Key flags (see https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/H.264 ) 

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  • Suggestions for max-bitrate?
  • Suggestions for preset - ? slow
  • Suggestions for tune

h265/HVEC

Support: https://caniuse.com/hevc (or https://www.chromium.org/audio-video ) currently no support for h265 on chrome or chromium based browsers.

links:

VMAF

I did explore using VMAF - Video Multi-Method Assessment Fusion as a way to quantify the compression, the notes for setting this up are below, however I think we are going with a fairly high compression factor , so I think this is probably not really going to help us much.

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