garageCube

[Robbie the Robot]

When rendering videos from Final Cut and After Effects to be used in MadMapper, is it better to use H264 or ProRes to achieve optimal performance? Or if there is an even better codec than these?

Thanks in advance.

Rob

[balamsoto]

the hap codec is promissing
http://hap.video/

[Robbie the Robot]

Thanks for the suggestion. The HAP codec does seem to be a good choice.

[mad-matt]

Windows or macOS ? What's the resolution ?

On macOS, MadMapper 2.0 & later support hardware decoding of HAP codec. On my MacBook Pro mid-2013 I can play a 10.000x5.000 pixels HAP file at 30 FPS (I still haven't tested the limit, I just realized I could play that file we've been using for a 28 miniMAD synchronization test...)

On Windows, we're about to release a beta for it, but at the moment h264 is the best choice. For info on a good computer I can playback a bunch of 4k movies before getting frame drops (I don't remember how many, maybe 6 or more).

[Robbie the Robot]

I'm running a 2016 MacBook Pro 2.9 Ghz Core i7 with 16GB of RAM and Radeon Pro 460 graphics. I will be projecting a range of HD files (mostly 1920 x1080) to 3 projectors. There will be about 3 or 4 quads with textures for each screen as well as some mesh warping.

[mad-matt]

HAP is the best codec in any case if you have a fast hard drive. h264 is another option, you can activate or not "Use Hardware Acceleration" on h264 to dispatch the processing to CPU (without HW acceleration) or GPU (with HW acceleration). Test and see. I can run smoothly 8x fullHD 1080p/30fps movies on my MacBook Pro mid 2013.

[Robbie the Robot]

Thank you. I have transcoded most of my video clips to HAP and the performance seems to be much better (less fan noise). I'm running off of an internal SSD so no problems playing back multiple streams. A minor gripe is that I cannot preview the videos in the Finder and Final Cut and Compressor don't seem to support the HAP codec.

[mad-matt]

You can get QuickLook working by installing this: https://github.com/lov/QLVJ
Copy the file in /Library/QuickLook and reboot

[Robbie the Robot]

Thank for that, Matt!