The Only People Dumber Than The Scene Are The Industry
Long time since I’ve last posted as there is so much fail around I couldn’t think of anything special, but today I came across some comedy gold relating to video processing and encoding. I was speaking to a friend in The Video Industry this afternoon about why the hardware encoders we use suck. Now ‘Steve’ likes to think he knows a fair bit about things, as do most other video authoring type people. Unfortunately for them, they only really know the TOOLS they use, and not all that much about the content they work with.
Steve was telling me that his new IVTC machine is super awesome and capable of matching with the current, previous, and next frames unlike his old one that only did c/n matches. It’s all cutting edge in the industry apparently. He has declared that he can now compete with my own IVTC stuff now, except on a few really tricky clips we get from DVD imports. He still has no idea how I do it he says, but eventually he’ll beat me. I didn’t comment on tritical’s excellent TIVTC filters for avisynth doing what his expensive machine does for the past 6 years, or my own usage of YATTA, an extreme manual IVTC application.
Steve then gave me another GEM of wisdom. Apparently the latest AVC encoding hardware boxes have some really cool shit called FMO that my beloved x264 doesn’t have. I recalled speaking to Jason Garret-Glaser from the x264 project a while ago about the feature, where it was pointed out that FMO is only used in the extended AVC profile, which barely anything plays and nothing encodes fully anyway. What all the hardware DOES have though is pretty much everything that is stupid about AVC, and nothing that is good. x264 has CRF. I don’t even care about other features. CRF makes me happy every day. 2-pass encoding is stupid. The hardware boxes I have used all just pick a bitrate somewhat arbitrarily and then encode with it on a 2-pass program. They don’t have any fancy RDO or magic-block trees like x264, and they certainly don’t have the speed. If x264 had full BD standards support I don’t see the industry using shitty hardware and proprietary applications when they don’t have to, certainly not in small studios.
I think the point I am trying to make is that the industry relies too much on what it is TOLD is better as opposed to actually going out and evaluating different things. Quite a lot of free applications for various things insanely better than their professional adversaries. Sometimes, I hate working with these people, and at others I love the confused looks I get for using some obscure free software to do a job faster and better than their beloved machinery.
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