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Adobe Media Encoder - another hidden gem?

Multi-pass encoding

Adobe Media Encoder is also effective for, well, encoding. Although its many options to provide efficient handling of Flash video will only be of use to a minority of readers, its ability to render-multi-pass H.264 and other long-GOP formats is worth talking about, because those are typically ruined by the one-frame-at-a-time rendering approach.

The standard way to render video is to first create a frame in memory, then write it to disk, and then move on to the next frame. Formats like H.264 succeed only by compressing footage so aggressively by creating a group of pictures, or GOP structure. An excellent description of this process and how it works can be found on Wikipedia and in descriptions of formats such as HDV and XDCAM.

AME is not only able to buffer sequences of video for the purpose of creating these files, it can even do so on two passes for maximum quality with an aggressively small footprint. There is simply no way to match this with frame-by-frame renders, as they are fundamentally limited to creating and writing one frame at a time.

Queue items and track the current render.

Multi-device and multi-format support

Finally, check it out: AME extends upon the already wide range of formats supported by Adobe apps generally, and by doing so eliminates the need for more expensive alternatives. The many flavors of QuickTime are of course available, along with H.264, MPEG2 and MPEG4, MXF and P2. There are a number of audio-only output formats. And as you might hope (or even expect), the handling of Flash FLV and F4V video formats is excellent, with high quality results at aggressively small data rates and support for cue points (useful for anyone working on interactive Flash video).

What would make AME even better? It could be easier to tap into optimum output settings. The app is fully capable of creating high quality, lean H.264 media, for example, but the process of doing so is much more likely to yield straightforward good results in a tool like Handbrake. It would be really cool if settings created in the Render Queue could somehow be preserved, or if, like the Render Queue, it could at least default to the same frame size and pixel aspect as the source. To succeed with AME is to create good presets of your own, as in most encoding applications.

And to close on that note, the presets are sometimes made available online, including this starter set from Kevin Towes at Adobe. If you find other good ones, by all means, share them here.

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It might be a hidden gem except for the black pixels which seem to appear on the edges and can’t easily be cropped. Any idea about a fix for that? I cant figure out unless sq pixel.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  12/13  at  02:49 PM

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