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4K Quicktime PNG smooth playback?

Posted: Sat Feb 01, 2020 3:56 pm
by Welsh Jester
Is anyone here able to get smooth playback? I can't even with an SSD.

PNG sequence seems to be mostly smooth. Quicktime PNG plays like complete trash however in both VLC and on the Vegas timeline as well, plays best in the Quicktime player but it's still skipping a lot of frames and it looks about the same imported to Moho.. Any solution? Or is it just the way it is?

Re: 4K Quicktime PNG smooth playback?

Posted: Sat Feb 01, 2020 4:30 pm
by synthsin75
Uncompressed formats are meant for editing, not smooth playback. And your editor is likely skipping frames to play closer to real time, like Moho does. You can disable frame skipping in Moho, at the cost of playback being slower.

Re: 4K Quicktime PNG smooth playback?

Posted: Sat Feb 01, 2020 7:05 pm
by Greenlaw
Do you mean smooth playback in Moho or in another program?

In Moho, it's not likely because Moho doesn't cache video data. For interactivity, you might consider using a JPEG sequence as a proxy and swap it out to a higher quality render for final. JPEG is poor quality but it streams well and is frame accurate. For highest quality at render time, I use a PNG sequence.

Personally, I prefer to use a lower quality/lower res JPEG as a proxy in Moho, which I'll disable at render time, and then composite to the highest quality version of the sequence in a compositing program like Fusion, Nuke or After Effects. It's faster and more flexible to work this way, and I'm also able to work in higher bit-depths, which isn't possible when using Moho alone. (They REALLY need to improve that in Moho.)

For Vegas, I've been using MagicYUV in an .avi. MagicYUV is an efficient lossless codec that plays smoothly for FHD, and It should work for UHD too but I don't have much experience with 4k.

Generally speaking Vegas accepts almost anything, which is why I like using it. The one exception I've found is .mov files; for some reason, this format has always been unstable in Vegas. ProRes is fine in Vegas, the problem is specifically the old QuickTime .mov container.

If you mean rendering 4k from Moho and editing elsewhere, while I don't have experience with that, I would render to a PNG sequence and then compile to a video format that works well with your editing or compositing program, and then use these video files for editing.

That was essentially my workflow way back when I made 'Scare Plane' in 2014. I wasn't rendering 4k for that project but since I was working on a tiny laptop with only 4GB of RAM, even rendering for 720p was a challenge. For that project, I would render PNG from Moho (called Anime Studio at the time,) and then batch process my scenes in another program to create lossless codec .avi video clips for Vegas. (This was in 2014 so I was probably using the Lagarith codec; nowadays I use MagicYUV for editing.)

Hope this helps.