WebM plugin for Premiere Pro Released

[newpball]

From the website:

Download our free Premiere plug-in for WebM, the open movie format created by Google. WebM is the HTML-5 standard video format that relies exclusively on open source and patent-free technology. It uses the VP8 and VP9 video codecs together with the Vorbis and Opus audio codecs, wrapped up in a Matroska container. Like WebM itself, this plug-in is completely open source.

Designed with video professionals in mind, the plug-in exposes more advanced VP9 features such as 4:4:4 video sampling and 10/12-bit pixel buffers. For minimum clutter, only the most important encoding parameters have interface controls, while dozens of other settings can be adjusted using the custom arguments text field.



http://www.fnordware.com/WebM/

[sophisticles]

OMG! This is so awesome. I'm trying it out right as I type this with a 1080p source and AME and it's not slower than molasses or anything.

Now take the exact opposite of what I just wrote. It's only loading up my 8320 to 50% and the estimated time to completion for a 25 minute source is just a very reasonable 6.5 hours <-- please note the sarcasm.

Even if they optimized it so it was 4x as fast it still would be significantly slower than real time. VP8 is faster but still the estimated time is about 3 hours and in both VP9 and VP8 case the max bit rate is limited to 10mb/s for video.

On the other hand the quality is outrageous, taking a 12000 kb/s VC1 source and converting it to 2000kb/s WebM/VP9 results in a surprisingly high quality video.

It's really too bad that it's so slow, maybe Nvidia or someone will release a hardware VP9 encoder soon.

[fnordware]

Even if they optimized it so it was 4x as fast it still would be significantly slower than real time. VP8 is faster but still the estimated time is about 3 hours and in both VP9 and VP8 case the max bit rate is limited to 10mb/s for video.

On the other hand the quality is outrageous, taking a 12000 kb/s VC1 source and converting it to 2000kb/s WebM/VP9 results in a surprisingly high quality video.

You're actually not limited to 10 mb/s: you could type --target-bitrate=20000 in the custom options field if you wanted. But for most uses 10000 kb/s is already overkill so the slider limits were set up with that in mind. As a delivery codec you expect the image to look way better than VC1 for a given bitrate, just like with H.264.

Yeah, I wish it were faster, but that's what the libvpx library gives us. The benefit is that even VP8's quality was much higher than H.264 in my testing, at least compared to Premiere's encoder.

To get faster encoding, you could use VP8, uncheck 2-pass, and put --rt in the custom options field. You will see a significant quality hit though.

Probably the best way to speed things up is just to shrink the video size. If you were going to be introducing artifacts anyway, some blurriness from the up-scale may not be worse than the other compression artifacts, and processing fewer pixels will really speed things us.