Hey,

in my precious companies there always was some in-house tool that converts all our pretty pixels to all kinds of formats. From images to video and the other way round. exr, tif, jpg, mp4, gif etc.

I've already seen and used the your two current ffmpeg TOPs which work great. But every now and then I would like to have more options. Quality, annotations, gifs, frameranges, startframe. I can do this by looking up the correct flags on the documentation, but it gets overwhelming quite fast evertime and I end up just throwing the towel most of the time.

Now to my RFE to be discussed:
Instead of only having combining and extracting images as ffmpeg features within TOPs, it would be great if SideFX would ship a whole ffmpeg utility with all kinds of flags exposed to the user on the interface.
The main things being:
From/To images/video; formats; options.

This could be really helpful for studios looking at PDG as their core pipeline tool, as image conversion is happening in so many places.

Before subitting this RFE I wanted to discuss this with a wider audience than just colleagues/friends.

Thanks,
Manu

Yes, I absolutely think this would be a great addition. Procedurally generating slates would be a very important feature for anyone that considers using PDG as the core for a pipeline, like you mentioned.

I haven't used ffmpeg much yet, have only been playing around with imagemagick so far, which is also a third party implementation. And I agree with you, I guess if the community express their interests towards specific features SideFX is able to prioritize or plan implementing them.

Thanks, and cheers.

Agreed here as well. Some of these stock nodes needs another pass. We’ll take a look at this request before H18.

Awesome Ken, that's great news.

Hi Manuel,

Can you file individual RFEs with support for features that you would like added to the PDG ffmpeg utilities?

Thank you!
- Brandon

Hey,
yes I will get on that ASAP. I'll also post them here so people can discuss them.

Before I add the RFEs, how granular would you like them to be?

I'll do a general list here in order of relevancy (how I think anyway)

-


Conversion (video includes gifs)
-Convert from video to video
-Convert from video to images
-Convert from image(s) to image(s)
-Convert from image(s) to video

Options (all where applicable)
-All imaginable formats (jpg,exr,dpx,png,tif,tga,mov,mp4,gif….)
-Codec options
-Quality options
-resolution options (0.5x, 0.25x, custom)
-Ability to easily add new flags (some kond of search?)
-Framerange options (for conversions and other)
-Framerate options
-Annotations (multiple at once?)
-Overlays (multiple at once?)
-Luts
-Flipping/morroring
-Only every x frame
-

QoL (some UX stuff that came to mind)
-Presets (default shipped ones, easy to add new ones)
-Easy toggle on/off of options/flags
-Preview of output (?)

I'm sure I missed lots of important stuff. Not everything is important on this list, but I think it gices you guys a good idea.
LMK what you think, if you have any more ideas and how granular you would like the RFEs.

Thanks again dear SideFX PDG people that you're so proactively communicating with the community and looking for feedback.

Thanks!

Thank you for creating this list!

As far as filing RFEs, I mainly wanted to avoid a list of features all being put into a single RFE. Feel free to file however it makes sense for you.

Hey Brandon!
I've created ‘couple’ of RFEs for you! I wrongly submitted some of them as bugs (hope that can be fixed on your end)

Main:
#98339 ffmpeg utility node that combines all ffmpeg functionalities

Features:
#98340 ffmpeg utility | conversions
#98341 ffmpeg utility | as many possible media formats as possible
#98342 ffmpeg utility | Codec and Quality options
#98343 ffmpeg utility | Framerange, Framerate, Resolution options
#98344 ffmpeg utility | Annotations
#98345 ffmpeg utility | Overlays
#98346 ffmpeg utility | LUTs
#98347 ffmpeg utility | Vertical/Horizontal Flipping/Mirroring
#98348 ffmpeg utility | Only convert/consider/respect every X frame
#98351 ffmpeg utility | easily add new flags via UI

QoL:
#98349 ffmpeg utility | QoL | Presets
#98350 ffmpeg utility | QoL | Changing between controlling the UI or the ffmpeg command itsself
#98352 ffmpeg utility | QoL | Option toggles
#98353 ffmpeg utility | QoL | Preview of Output

Cheers man. If you need any more, please LMK!