Hi all,

Just wondering if anyone has made an ffmpeg export to prores in tops?
I need something that will be render at a nice res and be very vanilla mac compatible for my client.
Out of all the standard presets only libopenh264 works and it's very compressed.

Thanks,
Pete

On macOS, hffmpeg has ProRes built into it, but it would crash when I attempted to use it, so it's not exposed in the UI. ProRes is not provided on other platforms.

You could try using your own external version of FFmpeg and see if it's been fixed in a newer version of FFmpeg. The encoder I was attempting to use was prores_videotoolbox. There are two others, prores-aw and prores-ks, but we don't ship them. You can tell the FFmpeg Encode Video TOP to use an external FFmpeg installation.

More information can be found here: https://academysoftwarefoundation.github.io/EncodingGuidelines/EncodeProres.html [academysoftwarefoundation.github.io]

I did some testing with Houdini 20.5.522 - M1 (macosx_arm64), and have got decent results.

The prores_videotoolbox encoder works in this build (ffmpeg version sidefx_6.0.0-10). Though using the FFmpeg Encode Video TOP with hffmpeg, and a custom command results in an error. I assume the node checks parameters to reject certain options?

I can successfully encode a video with a Shell TOP using an equivalent hffmpeg command line, so I reported the error as a bug. Pete is testing an HDA I put together using that. It's fairly limited at the moment, but I can share if anyone could use it.

I've also tested Homebrew ffmpeg, which works as expected in FFmpeg Encode Video TOP. Though I'd recommend it, it's much easier to just use the builtin. However one limitation I've found with hffmpeg is that it doesn't encode alpha in 4444/4444 XQ profiles.