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  1. I'm trying to figure out what is a native file format that TPMGEnc Authoring Works 6 will accept for Blu-Ray Disc authoring which won't trigger a recompile as part of the authoring process.

    I had been using Encore all these years but as I noted in another thread Premiere Pro/Encore CS6 doesn't work correctly for me now that I'm on Win 10 1909. Consequently my projects had always been built using the H.264 Blu-Ray export setting in Premiere Pro CS6 which resulted in split .m4v/WAV files for each clip. Encore would then basically take those files with minimal transcoding and burn them to disc relatively quickly. A <25G disc would take under an hour depending on the size.

    After flaming out trying to make Vegas work for my needs, I tried Authoring Works. Tough package with way too many power user hostile lockdowns and restrictions but after some false starts I was able to duplicate the kind of setup I was using in Encore in terms of Menu design and functionality. That just left rendering out the disc.

    My project was 18G and start to finish took nearly two hours. All signs point to Authoring Works recompiling the .m4v files; thus the significantly longer disc output time compared to Encore which only spent time rendering motion menus and not transcoding the .m4vs prior to the disc burn. The Authoring Works export resulted in a noticeable (to me anyways) loss of quality in the final rendered video.

    So, as when I was trying out Vegas, I started looking for a file format/Multiplexer that wouldn't cause Authoring Works to recompile the video.

    With Vegas, they were very clear in the documentation what formats wouldn't trigger a video recompile. Unfortunately, while I came up with an AVC export setting using the TPMGEnc AVC exporter plugin for Premiere Pro 2019 on 720p, I couldn't find an AVC export setting for 1080p that Vegas would allow through without a recompile. I blame Vegas for this failure and not the exporter plugin because that setting should have worked.

    However the documentation for Authoring Works is...well...I'm trying to come up with a description that doesn't include several well placed four letter words in it. I spent a lot of time looking but have not been able to spot anything definitive in the documentation that tells me specifically what file format/Multiplexer won't trigger a recompile.

    I did find this listed in the Blu-Ray Output Specifications section:

    MPEG Format MPEG-2 / H.264/AVC

    But it's not clear whether that means if I choose to go with H.264 AVC, probably using TMPGEnc's own Premier Pro plugin, that it won't trigger a recompile or not.

    So I'm putting this out there in case someone might know the answer. Is there a video file format/Multiplexer that Authoring Works will take for an imported video and not trigger a recompile when you export to Blu-Ray disc? If I can find that, then I can use Premiere Pro 2019 to convert my existing .m4v files (and render natively to the new settings in future projects).

    It may turn out that Premiere Pro will degrade the quality doing a conversion anyways, which may be likely if I use TMPGenc's own algorithms in that exporter plugin; algorithms which presumably are already in Authoring Works. But I absolutely know Authoring Works will degrade it if I don't change things as they currently are so I need to see proof that Premiere Pro will also degrade the video. In which case I'll just make do with how things are and not convert the existing .m4v files.
    Last edited by dswalen; 27th Mar 2020 at 17:13.
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  2. Your words far exceed your information.

    What is your source footage, Blu Ray rips?

    What NLE are you actually using -- you've already said Premiere and Vegas fail?

    Take a short segment, render it in various formats and see if it works in TMPGenc. If you have Premiere 2019 as you suggest, this is very easy to do in Adobe Media Encoder which is part of the Premiere package.
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  3. Fair point on the information...probably because I'm not entirely sure which information is relevant and which is gratuitous.

    The source footage AT PRESENT are .m4v files and .wav files that were output from Prempiere Pro CS6 and exported using PP's H.264 Blu-Ray setting. This was the workflow I had been using for over a decade since I was using Encore for the authoring. But as I said, Encore is FUBAR for me now.

    So the problem is, at present, I have all these legacy PP rendered .m4v files I need to get to Blu-Ray. I didn't know that Encore had been hosed after my last Windows upgrade so I kept rendering stuff out of Premiere Pro CS6 for five months according to my old workflow before I tried rendering those .m4vs with Encore and saw that it wasn't working right anymore.

    In the future I would prefer to use Premiere Pro 2019 (I'll download 2020 eventually) to render out the footage to a format that won't trigger a recompile in Authoring Works when rendering out to Blu-Ray, which .m4v seems to.

    And, yeah...if nobody knows the answer to my question...I'll just try a bunch of different Premiere Pro export formats in Authoring Works and try to figure it out the hard way. I was just kinda hoping someone had already gone through this, knew the answer, and could save me the trouble.

    I went through that process with Vegas over a period of 10 hours of non-stop experimentation but only managed to find a Premiere Pro export format that worked for 720 footage in Vegas (and didn't trigger a Vegas recompile) but not 1080 footage. So I was forced to give up on Vegas as an option as a result.

    Does that clear things up or is there something more specific you need?
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  4. Tried it. It wants to recompile any video which was not rendered to BR spec and by TMPGEnc Video Mastering Works. Such team
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  5. Sorry to read that. I'm still going to try the TPMGEnc's Premiere Pro AVC exporter plugin on the chance that it contains the same algorithms so maybe Authoring Works won't do a recompile if I used that plugin render video out of PP.

    It turns out that I was seeing things earlier when I thought I saw image degradation from the Authoring Works recompile. I compared various versions of the same clip at the same frame from each version...including the MTS file Authoring Works produced during the Blu-Ray export. Zoomed in to 200% in Photoshop there's was pretty much no difference from the .m4v version exported by Premiere Pro, the original .MPEG version that was imported into Premiere Pro, and the .MTS version that Authoring Works converted from the .m4v file during its recompile.

    So now that I apparently don't have to worry about image loss, it's all about speeding up the process which eliminating the recompile in Authoring Works would certainly do. A faster machine would help there (this one is 8 years old) but that's just not in the cards.
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  6. Originally Posted by noemi7 View Post
    Tried it. It wants to recompile any video which was not rendered to BR spec and by TMPGEnc Video Mastering Works. Such team
    Then TMPGEnc Video Mastering Works will write a marker into the rendered video. If so, all you need to do is find the marker and patch it into the m4v files.
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  7. I have the solution now.

    Using TMPGenc Movie Plug-in AVC for Premiere Pro I was able to render out .m2t files which Authoring Works rendered out to Blu-Ray with no extra encoding step (unlike the .m4v and .mpeg files I tried with AW). I tried both 720 and 1080 video and both skipped the encode step in AW. And I didn't need to do anything other than use standard settings with the TMPGenc h.264 export option in Premiere Pro (installed by the plugin).

    The only oddity of going this route is that rendering video with this plugin is producing a 1 frame shift in the exported video. I can't account for where this shift is coming from but it's not making the overall length of the video one frame longer or shorter. But if this is the worst collateral damage I encounter from using this plugin I'll take it as I now appear to have a functional workflow from video to Blu-Ray again.
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