ProVideoCoalition on should you be uploading 4K Video to YouTube

Nick Lear at the ProVideoCoalition has a must read article on if you should upload 4K video to YouTube.

I do love that since YouTube re-compressed everything you should basically upload in your editing format, since they don’t have upload limits like Vimeo. It is pretty funny that Adobe Media Encoder’s YouTube settings are H.264, but I guess it saves your bandwidth.

Davinci Resolve 12.5.1 Supports Quicktime ProRes on Windows, death knell for Quicktime

BlackMagicDesign’s Davinci Resolve 12.5.1 has been released and it includes Quicktime ProRES decoding on Windows! You can check out all the new features here.

With Apple having ended Quicktime support for Windows, and now Adobe and DaVinci adding Quicktime Pro Res playback on Windows, that basically means that you can use all the old ProRes files you have, but it is time to move on. And it is unfortunate as ProRES HQ had really become a great intermediate format and ProRES 444 is an awesome alpha format.

And it looks like it is time to move to AVID’s DNxHD format, since like ProRES it is pretty much visually lossless at higher bitrates.

Adobe has licensed Apple ProRES playback for Wndows

Adobe today announced that they have licensed playback of Apple’s ProRES, so it will be natively supported within Adobe Creative Cloud, without having to use Apple’s Quicktime to do so (since it has been killed for Windows). Now it won’t be able to write out to ProRES (so Window users will need another format), but it will be able to be read, and should be out soon.

They are also adding export support of mov wrapped DNxHD and DNxHR as well as playback of AAC audio and PNG compressed frames, and the native reading and writing of the legacy Animation format.

At least this gives ProRES a lifeline, though it is really too bad that it won’t be able to write it as well, as ProRES is a great format, that looks to be in decline from now on.

I love that Adobe is doing this, but I still can’t wrap my head around Apple’s thoughts on this. Sure it saves them money in development, and in licensing fees, but to have a really pro format it needs to be cross platform!

Honestly with Apple’s history with Pro Products (constantly making them great then killing them), and with the MacPro not being customize-able or upgrade-able at all (and not having been upgraded since it release in 2013), it looks to me like Apple is moving completely out of the high end pro market, and I worry that any of their high end software may not survive either!

Apple has killed Quicktime for Windows, and this could be a big problem for ProRes!

So this is a scary thing, Apple has killed Quicktime for Windows, and it currently has major security flaws in it, so if your computer is attached to the internet you should uninstall it.

The problem is that there are many video formats that require Quicktime to run. This includes all forms of ProRes, which has even become a major camera format, as well as Animation (a major format for After Effects) and DNxHD/HR.

Now Adobe says they are working on it, but will likely have to license components to get these to work, so if it ever does it will take a while.

Overall while this seems like a very Apple thing to do, it makes me once again worry about Apple and it’s future in Video. The thing is even if you are not going to release your software for Windows, you want the video to be able to run for cross compatibility, like AVID always released versions of it’s drivers for people who didn’t own AVID. And ProRES is such a great format that it has become a defacto standard across a lot of the Post Production industry, but with this action ProRES will slowly be relegated to a sidestory, In the future cameras are going to be less likely to support it, and eventually it will be a FCP only format (that is if Apple even keeps developing FCP X in the future). Other than the short term why would Adobe support it, if it is literally only able to work on a Mac, that is less than half it’s market, so why bother.

This just shows me how out of touch Apple really is.