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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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• Best color preservation for output to:
  • Web, OSX and Mac
  • Common applications: e.g. RV, Nuke.
  • Rec709, P3, rec2020 and HDR.
• Codec recommendations for:
  • Proxy H264 playback (e.g. web streaming), should be setup for web streaming.
  • Animation/Modelling/Layout movie playback. - somewhat lower quality playback, but should always provide smooth motion.
  • Lookdev/lighting/compositing movie playback - should have excellent color fidelity and minimal encoding artifacts
  • • Should any filmlook be baked in, or should we assume that is always applied during viewing.
    • How much should we be able to adjust color and have the image hold up? (Or rely on exr's for that?).
  • Export to editorial.
  • High-resolution or frame rate - e.g. 4k, 8k, 60fps, 120fps.
  • Stereo or VR.
• Q: Which container should we be considering: mov, mp4, mxf.

Where ffmpeg arguments, it would be great to document why we are using them, rather than ending up with a recipe. 

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For the tests below we are assuming that other tools are being used (e.g. oiiotool) to convert the rendered frames into an intermediate file (e.g. PNG) in the target color-space. 

Test Sources

SMPTE test chart: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SMPTE_Color_Bars_16x9.svg

Download image sequence from: https://senkorasic.com/testmedia/ - 

Explore netflix: https://opencontent.netflix.com/

Test Results:

taurich.org/encodingTests/results.html

Links

• An excellent starting point for this is: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/colorspace
• https://github.com/RxLaboratory/DuME/blob/master/src/FFmpeg_COLORS.md
• https://medium.com/invideo-io/talking-about-colorspaces-and-ffmpeg-f6d0b037cc2f
• https://docs.nvidia.com/video-technologies/video-codec-sdk/ffmpeg-with-nvidia-gpu/

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