alt Hacker NewsThe main target for this are NLEs like Blender. Performance is a large part of the issue. Most users still just create TIFF files per frame before importing them into a "real editor" like Resolve. Apple may have ASICs for ProRes decoding, and Resolve may be the standard editor that everyone uses.
But this goes beyond what even Apple has, by making it possible to work directly with compressed lossless video on consumer GPUs. You can get hundreds of FPS encoding or decoding 4k 16-bit FFv1 on a 4080, while only reading a few gigabits of video per second, rather than tens and even hundreds of gigabits that SSDs can't keep up. No need to have image degradation when passing intermediate copies between CG programs and editing either.
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I don’t understand the spread of thoughts in your post.
The reason to create image sequences is not because you need to send it to other apps, it’s because you preserve quality and safeguard from crashes.
A crash mid video write out can corrupt a lengthy render. With image sequences you only lose the current frame.
People aren’t going to stop using image sequences even if they stayed in the same app.
And I’m not sure why this applies: “this goes beyond” what Apple has, because they do have hardware support for decoding several compressed codecs (also I’ll note that ProRes is also compressed). Other than streaming, when are you going to need that kind of encode performance? Or what other codecs are you expecting will suddenly pop up by not requiring ASICs?
Also how does this remove degradation when going between apps? Are you envisioning this enables Blender to stream to an NLE without first writing a file to disk?
I thought an industry standard was to use proxy files. Open source editor Shotcut use them for example. Create a low resolution + intra-frame only version of the file for very fast scrubbing, make your edits on that, and when done the edit list is applied to the full resolution rushes to produce the output.
Yep! Almost finished implementing support in https://ossia.io which is going to become the first open-source cross-platform real-time visuals software to support live scrubbing for VJ use cases, in 4K+ prores files on not that big of a GPU (tested on my laptop 3060) :)