I'm not too bright ...

Yep. Exactly what the title states. Sometimes, I brain fart and make things a lot more difficult that I have to.

Lo and behold, EyeTV has an option to output directly to QuickTime .mov files in either h.264 or "MPEG-4". I'm opting for MPEG-4 at the moment since my previous experience with h.264 taxed and put additional load on iMovie. Even when I was only doing voice overs for commentary.

And that sad truth? EyeTV outputs to QuickTime a lot faster than dumping it to h.264 native and running that file through MPEG Streamclip. So I think I found my work flow till I upgrade to FCPX.

EyeTV -> QuickTime -> iMovie -> turbo.264 HD to .mp4 for upload to YouTube.

Yep. This works for me. For now.

Visual Evidence - A picture is worth a thousand words ...

So here is the visual proof that I mentioned in a previous post. All the video clips were played in VLC and the screenshots were taken within the application.

Here is the original, h.264 "native" output from EyeTV that was recording the footage a 13.5mbps.

The image quality and clarity is what I expected when I maxed out the settings for capture.

Now, here is the turbo.264 HD export. It's cropped and the image is jaggy. Kind of confused as to why it would look like this, especially considering that it's all made by the same maker.

Clearly, there is something going under the hood that is making the output from the turbo.264 all screwy.

And here is the samples from h.264 native to MPEG Streamclip outputting to QuickTime @ 10240kbps.

Now this what I was expecting, even when compressed or at least changed into a format where iMovie could edit the file or at least manage simple edits without falling over itself. And in QuickTime, the file size may have grown a bit over what turbo.264 offered but it's still less than AIC.

This learning experience is becoming a real chore.

EUREKA! (And it didn't cost a cent?!)

The earlier post was written up yesterday but I didn't publish it since I wanted to add a couple of more thoughts, possibly comparison shots to illustrate the difference between output of various methods. But I ended up playing around with exporting different file formats last night and I finally got it "right". It's a nice compromise between file size, video quality and resource utilization when editing the files. So here is the process:

EyeTV export (native h.264/fastest option - I've set it to record at 13.5mbps constant quality) -> MPEG Streamclip export (QuickTime Movie - 10240kbps/10mbps which I'm still playing with this. I think I can lower it to possibly 8192kbps/8mbps stream and have "acceptable" video quality. The rest of the settings are the following - high quality, single pass and uncompressed 48khz stereo audio) -> iMovie.

With this process, I can edit and manage the clips in iMovie. If I want to save specific portions for a montage, I can export it out again to QuickTime to retain the video quality and keep the files in more manageable, smaller clips. If I want to export a project out for upload, I can use turbo.264 which will create the smaller file I'm looking for.

Only negative to this is the process time from MPEG Streamclip since encoding to QuickTime completely bypasses the turbo.264 unit. But I can deal with this. Whatever clips I end up capturing during a session, I can just queue up to convert to QuickTime overnight. Not a huge deal. Especially considering the upgrade in video quality. I think I prefer this compared to going HDV/AIC because from what I can tell, with AIC, I'm going to lose some quality anyway and considering the file sizes it creates, I don't feel that it's worth it at the moment. Now, whenever I get around to upgrading to FCPX and I invest in Compressor, I might try to encode in ProResLT and decide if the video quality is worth the file sizes. But that's in the future ... the question is if it's in the near or distance future.

Next blog post will be screenshots showing the difference in video quality between all the different outputs I was trying/dealing with. Stay tuned!

Shut up and take my money!

So I've been chugging along with the turbo.264 to convert the .m2ts/.ts that the Arcsoft capture software generated. It wasn't a bad system but I still needed to fire up the PC and keep my eye on it while it was capturing the stream. That and the fact that I needed to copy over those files to my Mac to encode.

I'm trying to simplify things and sometimes I forgot to hit capture on the PC and the copying process was slowing things down. An alternative was needed. Something all Mac based. Which costs money. Oh well.

There are a couple of options on using a Hauppauge HD PVR on a Mac but since I purchased this turbo.264 unit, why not get an Elgato product to complement it? So I purchased EyeTV.

Surprisingly, it's really nice compared to the Arcsoft software the came with the HD PVR (which makes sense - free vs pay). But it had features that I didn't know about like time shifting. Since it's supposed to be DVR software, it actually buffers whatever is on screen. I need to double check on how far it goes back but that's just dependent on how much disk space you give the software to buffer said stream. Pretty darn nifty.

Exports were ridiculously quick via it's native h.264 format. It dumps recordings in a mp4 container but it seems to be encoded in the same fashion that Handbrake does. Which means that editing and managing the clips created by EyeTV taxed iMovie quite a bit where as anything re-encoded by turbo.264 seems to be far more resource friendly. So I tried to export via turbo.264 from EyeTV and the results ... not so good.

It seemed to overscan the input and zoom in regardless of what I did to the settings. The exported file looked horrible. More so than the .m2ts/.ts to turbo.264 process that I was using before. I've opened a ticket with Elgato to see if this is a known problem since I couldn't find anything in the Knowledge Base. The odd problem is that if I took the native h.264 dump from EyeTV and used the turbo.264 encoding app seperately, the aspect ratio and overscan issue did not occur.

It's like a never ending struggle ...

Hell, I'll just throw money at the problem and maybe it'll fix it ...

So I've been searching for some kind of "cheap" fix to speed up production. Lead me to a couple of products but I couldn't get myself to pull the trigger. I mean, I was planning on purchasing FCPX eventually so whatever solution I was planning on using would become useless at that time. Till I stumbled upon on this:

The Elgato turbo.264HD.

Interesting device. It works with a program to speed up the encoding process. The output is pretty limited in that it's all h.264 based and I can't speed up conversions to AIC but after reading about it on Engadget, I had to try it out. And, yes, it does work as advertised.

I did a benchmark of how long it took for my PC, which was encoding streams, to reencode it via Handbrake to something that iMovie will read and let me edit (slowly but surely ...). I did the same on my Mac with the same file and Handbrake. Lastly, the turbo.264.

PC (Q6600 overclocked to 3GHz) - 7:26 (minutes:seconds)
Mac (i5 2.4 GHz 2010 MBP) - 12:02
Mac (turbo.264) - Low 7 minute mark (couldn't find a "log" where it recording exactly how long it took)

Right there is an improvement but not a huge one. I could always opt to just let the PC do the Handbrake encode and save some money. But there was more to the turbo.264 from my testing. It seemed that the h.264 mp4s that the turbo.264 created taxed iMovie less than the mp4s from Handbrake. I can't confirm this but just how the application felt was different enough for me. That and the fact that the turbo.264 also sped up the final encode/projects within iMovie too (supposedly will also work with FCPX). File size was a tad bigger than through Handbrake but I think there was only a 10% difference at most so it wasn't a deal breaker.

So this was a worthwhile purchase for me. Just a heads up to everyone that was considering one of these dongles. It really is a cool device. And ignore the negative Amazon reviews. I think those were posted when the turbo.264 first came out and the software caused issues. The latest software outputs more than acceptable quality h.264 mp4s.

Why can't this be easier?

So here is my basic workflow. What I would ideally prefer is the red line but right now, I need to process all the captured streams from my HD PVR through Handbrake before I can edit it in iMovie.

Now, I'm using a PC to capture the HD PVR stream because I had a PC lying around with a lot of storage space and it was technically free. If I opted to purchase an additional application for my Mac, it would have driven up start up cost. Plus, the application I tried didn't work quite as advertised which I will explain in a little more detail.

As you can see, I am processing the captured streams in Handbrake so that iMovie can work with the captured content. It seems that the h.264 default encode option for .mp4 ("Xbox" option) in the Arcsoft program doesn't play nicely with iMovie. My guess is that it's because it's encoding in 60fps instead of an iMovie friendly 24/30fps. It's the same with the capture program available for the Mac. Forgot the exact name of it but it exhibits the same stuttering during playback in iMovie and almost all players for whatever reason when it's converted from .m2ts to .mp4. Puzzling to say the least and I will look into this in more detail when I have more time but right now, I'm opting to output the HD PVR stream to a .TS h.264 format and then convert that .TS file to a 29.97fps MP4 h.264 file.

Now, I've learned the hard way that h.264 doesn't actually play all that nice with iMovie. Something about it being a compressed playing format instead of an editing friendly format. iMovie needs to decode on the fly while I'm editing these h.264 clips and it really makes the program feel ... laggy. I am going to try to just convert the clips that I'm going to use in the project to see if that will help but I think it's going to just do what I'm trying to avoid - use AIC and it's HUGE file sizes. After going through capturing, encoding to only reencode again to application friendly format is making me go nuts.

I believe I can skip the whole Handbrake part but that requires additional investment in my part - Final Cut Pro X. I believe it can edit .ts/.m2ts files directly and rendering those h.264 files might be a bit faster in FCPX than iMovie but I have no proof of this. That and well ... it'll cost me money. Ugh. But yeah ... right now, this is where I am now and it's driving me nuts.