Problem with h.265 footage - "broken GOP"?

phynesse · Mar 16, 2017

h.264 @ 100Mbit is already a much needed upgrade over previous 60Mbit, however in challenging scenes (fly over forest thats mostly in shadows e.g.) even 100Mbit h.264 is quickly at its limit. Thats where h.265 should come in. At least so they say, i havent really tested enough

Secondly, the critical part for h.265 playback is the GPU, not CPU. It needs to support HEVC hardware decoding properly. AFAIK only NVIDIA 10xx series, latest AMD cards and internal GPU inside KabyLake can do this. I upgraded from 970 to 1080 last week and I went from slideshow to buttery smooth (no CPU change!).

Before this upgrade, filming h.265 wasnt an option because my workflow just suffered too much. I never found satisfactory h.265->ProRes422 transcoder which would have helped.
Now that i ve upgraded (CPU also yesterday yayy), i ll go back to trying some h.265.

in the meantime, anyone can point to any good comparisons that show effectiveness?? I cant seem to find any.

Cheers,
Sebastian

Mier · Mar 16, 2017

phynesse said:
Secondly, the critical part for h.265 playback is the GPU, not CPU. It needs to support HEVC hardware decoding properly. AFAIK only NVIDIA 10xx series, latest AMD cards and internal GPU inside KabyLake can do this. I upgraded from 970 to 1080 last week and I went from slideshow to buttery smooth (no CPU change!).

What processor do you have? I have a pretty old i7-2650K with an overclocked Nvidia 1070 GPU. I've recently taken to massively overclocking my CPU and it did allow me to edit h265 files more easily. I should point out that I've always been able to play them though Win10 could take the native file and play them without any issue through Win10's movie player.

phynesse · Mar 16, 2017

i5 3550 until yesterday, now i7 7700K
Your 1070 should handle h265 fine, even with that CPU

Mier · Mar 16, 2017

phynesse said:
i5 3550 until yesterday, now i7 7700K
Your 1070 should handle h265 fine, even with that CPU

Well it plays fine in the Movie app. In Premier Pro it doesn't but I've overclocked and it does better but it will still pause quite a bit while it's buffering it seems. Now unless I missed a setting somewhere it's using the CUDA to render in the app but I'm not aware of anything else that needs to be set.

I may try that proxy trick but I have a question on if it will display properly when I color grade.

phynesse · Mar 16, 2017

Yes, Adobe has the questionable talent to produce applications that turn the nicest hardware into a turd.
Biggest disappointment since my significant upgrade - only negligible performance gain in Premiere. Still no chance to work with 4K clips on a timeline after 2 filters are applied.
So don't put your hopes too high with overclocking :\

smiller · Mar 16, 2017

Mier said:
I may try that proxy trick but I have a question on if it will display properly when I color grade.

I have an i7 6700, GTX 1070, and 32 GB or RAM and H.265 still doesn't always play smoothly in PP. I think you might need a true workstation if you want glass-smooth native H.265 processing.

But proxy files work great, and when set up properly you can switch back and forth between the camera and proxy files with just a single click, so it's easy to temporarily switch to the actual H.265 footage when doing color grading (although from all I can tell you don't really have to.) Final rendering always uses the camera H.265 files so no quality loss.

Curt · Mar 18, 2017

trwalp said:
I'm flying a new Phantom 4 Pro+. Yesterday I shot some footage using H.265.

I soon discovered that actually viewing the resulting footage is not so easy on a Mac. I tried VLC but it just shows a still frame. Scratch freezes. I gave up and decided to convert the footage to ProRes 422 using EditReady. One file converted fine but several others froze the program at some point. Divergent Media's superlative support promptly responded with:

"we've seen a few of these issues. It seems like the phantom sometimes writes a broken GOP (we're guessing due to SD card problems) which hangs up editready."

They sent me a link to a special build that continues to process the file despite encountering a "broken GOP".

Here's a screen cap of what the footage looks like one frame before the failure.

And here's what (I assume) a broken GOP looks like.

I'm using a new SD card that I'm pretty sure DJI recommends for the P4P+:

"Samsung PRO Select 64GB 95MB/s MicroSDXC Memory Card (MB-MF64DA/AM)"

Is this a known issue with the P4P? Do I have the wrong SD card (or could it be defective)? Any suggestions?

Thank you!

Yes format your SD card using the formatting from your drone.

ElGuapo · Apr 4, 2017

KayJay said:
My MacBook is about the same, have 8gb ram and struggle with DaVinci at 2.7k. ,Ishtar try an ssd and see if it helps

I do not know that much about DaVinci, I primarily use FCPX and iMovie, but is DV capable of editing 4K and output it in that resolution?

ElGuapo · Apr 4, 2017

tjenvy said:
Now that being said. Most macs using final cut made in the last 5 years, use intel quick sync for h264 single pass encoding. My machine sucks it's so old. But a MacBook Pro can take a 20gb pro res 6 minute clip and encode to h264 in less than 60 seconds and doesnt break a sweat.

I agree with the above.

My MacBook Pro is not even 6 months old, it came with a 2.9GHZ Intel Core i7 , 16GB onboard memory RAM, 2TB PCIe-based onboard SSD1 and a Radeon Pro 460 with 4GB of GDDR5 memory. The other day I enconded a 10GB file to h264 in less than a minute..

I am still trying to define an smooth work flow to edit H.265 (HEVC) files.

ElGuapo · Apr 4, 2017

RobertK said:
I have a Mac and use the same card and have no problems.

I record in h265 MP4. If you recorded in MOV, just change your file extension to MP4.

I then use Adobe Media Encoder to encode to prores.

You shouldn't have any problems.

I am going to give this a try, ideally I want to shoot in H.265 (HEVC) in 4K @ 30fps, then enconde to H.264 and then edit either in FCPX or Adobe Premier CC.

chrisking · Sep 12, 2017

While H.265 is preserving more data and thus, can deliever better image quality, none of the top editors like Adobe Premeire Pro / Apple Final Cut X or popular media players like QucikTime, VLC handle H.265 files well. To get either package to smoothly play the H.265 files, we need to transcode (convert) Phantom 4 Pro+ H.265 files to something more usable. For our goal of maintaining maximum image quality while providing the smoothest playback experience, we will want to transcode the source H.265 to H.264.

Raptorman0909 · Sep 12, 2017

chrisking said:
While H.265 is preserving more data and thus, can deliever better image quality, none of the top editors like Adobe Premeire Pro / Apple Final Cut X or popular media players like QucikTime, VLC handle H.265 files well. To get either package to smoothly play the H.265 files, we need to transcode (convert) Phantom 4 Pro+ H.265 files to something more usable. For our goal of maintaining maximum image quality while providing the smoothest playback experience, we will want to transcode the source H.265 to H.264.

Anytime your transcode you lose quality -- this is not something that can be avoided as every time you do that you add another generation of LOSSY compression. If your PC can handle H.265 it's better to process that file instead of transcoding first. Prosres maybe pretty good and you may not notice the image degradation but it is there. Every generation of lossy compression introduces more artifacts and reduces quality.

I use Premiere Pro CC with a desktop PC I built 19 months ago and PP handles H.265 OK, not great but OK -- playing the raw H.265 file using Windows Media Player is painful though. The latest gen Intel CPU's and the latest gen GPU's handle H.265 natively so when people upgrade to newer PC's the problem should largely go away.

Brian

smiller · Sep 12, 2017

While it's true that any lossy format will theoretically lose quality, a transcoded format designed for post production such as ProRes or ProRes HQ looses so little that it's virtually impossible to detect for any practical purposes for our kind of work. That said, ProRes intermediate files can be so huge that you just end up trading one problem for another. I find the best solution is offline editing, i.e. transcode to proxy files for editing and then create final output with the the original camera files (thus the quality of the transcoded files don't affect the final output.) Programs such as Premiere Pro make this pretty easy.

jdharrin · Sep 12, 2017

My output is always HD 1080. But I record in 4K specifically to give me more editing options in zooming around the 4K video...

Raptorman0909 · Sep 12, 2017

smiller said:
While it's true that any lossy format will theoretically lose quality, a transcoded format designed for post production such as ProRes or ProRes HQ looses so little that it's virtually impossible to detect for any practical purposes for our kind of work. That said, ProRes intermediate files can be so huge that you just end up trading one problem for another. I find the best solution is offline editing, i.e. transcode to proxy files for editing and then create final output with the the original camera files (thus the quality of the transcoded files don't affect the final output.) Programs such as Premiere Pro make this pretty easy.

Again, and as I stated in my prior, the degradation may not be noticeable but it is unavoidable. If your PC chokes on higher bitrate files or H.265 then by all means transcode to your hearts content, but there WILL be a loss in quality and that's my point. One of the main reasons to shoot still images in RAW is to avoid the lossy compression of jpegs -- most cameras that shoot RAW permit the RAW file to be losslessly compressed which gives some of the reduced file size benefit without loss in quality. I choose to keep the quality as high as I can. Many people that transcode have a workflow that includes transcoding and then saving the transcoded file and deleting the original -- not me, I save the original. If my current PC is less than terrific at handling high bitrate video, particularly H.265, my next will be just fine. So, having the original for me is the way to go.

Ultimately when you render your final video you are producing another generation of lossy video and in my case that would be the second generation -- if you transcode it will be the third generation or worse.

All too often people see tools like Prores and think there's something magic about it that makes the original unnecessary -- I'm not one of them.

Brian

gastone360 · Aug 31, 2018

I'm reading this post now and it is very interesting. I've always shot on h264 but I would like to try h265.
Could I assume that recording in h265 and than editing this video and export the final footage in h264 could be a right choice and better quality instead of recording from the beginning and exporting in h264?
Or should I record and export in h265 to get maximun quality??

thank you very much for your help.....

GadgetGuy · Aug 31, 2018

gastone360 said:
I'm reading this post now and it is very interesting. I've always shot on h264 but I would like to try h265.
Could I assume that recording in h265 and than editing this video and export the final footage in h264 could be a right choice and better quality instead of recording from the beginning and exporting in h264?
Or should I record and export in h265 to get maximun quality??

thank you very much for your help.....

H.265 preserves more data and creates smaller files than H.264, but is very difficult to edit without first creating proxies. Even playing 100mbs H.264 4k 60fps will choke most computers, let alone editing it. H.265 is worse. If you have the horsepower to edit H.265, you will still likely want to output to H.264 because others won't be able to view your output, and I don't believe YT can handle H.265 uploads, unless something has changed. YT compression will destroy most of the benefit, especially when YT's Auto Quality dumbs down the quality of your 4K video stream for viewers to 360p, 480p, or even 720p, instead of 2160p!