So please speak up about the movie file formats you would like to see us support on windows.
Studio Artist V5.5 is defaulting to H264 mp4 output right now on windows.
Being historically die hard mac users, we are not heavy windows users here at Synthetik currently, (and we have tended to work with virtual machines running windows for our development and testing), so we kind of depend on what users tell us for windows specific features we should be supporting.
That said, we are getting way more serious about beefing up our windows support and testing here.
I've got a pretty beefy 10 core windows development rig with RTX Nividia GPUs on order, so that should arrive here next week hopefully. We'll be using that for Studio Artist development and debugger testing as well as in house neural net training using the Nvidia hardware.
The V5.5 stress testing marathon we've been living through here for the last 2 weeks has made it clear that debugging on windows has some serious advantages over xcode debugging on the mac in many situations.
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I do not know how useful these formats can be for SA, but I use these formats more in order:
MP4 (MPEG-4 Part 14)
for using in social network I use:
H.264 Codec & AAC audio, 30/40fps
MKV(Matroska Multimedia Container format)
MOV (QuickTime Movie)
WMV (Windows Media Viewer)
AVI (Audio Video Interleave)
For sure the following:
.mp4
.mov
.avi
But I second Sam's suggestions. Whatever you can possibly offer, as I don't know what I may need to use in the future.
How do people feel about MNG as an alternative for some applications?
Movie brushes with alpha being one in particular. Basically as a replacement for how we used to use the old quicktime animation codec (lossless and alpha support).
Never heard of it, but if this is a workaround for the Quicktime issue us Windows10 users are facing... YES!
I can't do anything video output related on SA5 right now because of QT.
SA V5.5 does output movie files without quicktime for windows being installed on your windows 10 computer.
The issue is that the movie codec options currently do not include anything lossless, and are lacking alpha channel support.
MNG is basically just a standardized container for multiple PNG images. Which are lossless, and support alpha.
We typically used to use the animation codec with highest quality (lossless), and with alpha enabled if people wanted to output an alpha channel in the movie. But that is a quicktime codec, and quicktime is no more.
So you' currently want to use image folder brushes rather than movie brushes if you wanted lossless images in your brush, or if you wanted an alpha channel associated with the brush.
Is it possible to allow use to external encoder like FFmpeg?
FFmpeg actually lives inside of the sub basement of Studio Artist V5.5. So no need to look externally.
Is there some specific feature you are talking about, or just the ability to get at mp4?
Is it possible to be on the beta/testing for 5.5 Windows X64?