AV1 in WebM

AV1 is the current cool kid in the world of video codecs. It boasts coding efficiency that is as high or higher than the previous king, HEVC (H.265), all while being free of patent and licensing issues. AV1 is brought to you by the Alliance for Open Media, a consortium started by the same people who brought you WebM and its royalty-free video codecs.

But unlike VP8 and VP9, AV1 is already seeing widespread adoption. Multiple hardware and software codecs already exist, and chances are the web browser you are using to read this can play AV1 video right now.

However, despite its pedigree, AV1 is not yet officially supported in WebM, even though the WebM parser is ready for it and so are browsers. So even if the WebM Project isn't quite ready, I've added the AV1 codec to the WebM plug-in for Adobe Premiere, available for download at fnord.com. It includes these encoders for you to choose from:

• aom
• SVT-AV1
• Intel VPL
• NVENC

Enjoy!

CDL for After Effects

Here's a little AE plug-in for applying CDLs. AE currently provides a plug-in for reading a CDL file, but the settings remain hidden and picking the .cc file is not scriptable. This plug-in comes with a script that will read a CDL file, and another to write a CDL based on your settings. Free and open source. Enjoy!

Download
version: 1.0
date: 15 April 2024
Mac | Win

ProEXR 2.6

If you've been keeping your After Effects up to date you're already running ProEXR 2.6, which adds some performance optimizations to the AE plug-ins. Standard scanline multi-channel EXR files receive a modest speed improvement, while tiled EXRs will read about 3x faster in this version. And if you have a multi-part EXR file, the individual parts are now read on-demand for faster previews and more efficient rendering.

These optimizations were made possible by Harsh Patil from Apple's Pro Workflow Team, who analyzed the OpenEXR plug-in's performance when loading some real-world EXR sequences from various renderers. I warned him that Windows users were going to benefit from his optimizations as much as Mac, and he said Apple was fine with that! Thanks, Harsh!

BRAWconverter

BRAWconverter is a command line program for converting Blackmagic RAW files into image sequences. It uses Blackmagic's public SDK to convert the BRAW file to RGB, complete with various color transformations, etc. It can output OpenEXR, DPX, PNG, TIFF, and JPEG.

BRAWconverter is free and open source. Enjoy!

Version: 1.0
Date: 11 September 2020
Download Mac

ProEXR 2.5

Today marks the release of Adobe After Effects 2020, which includes ProEXR 2.5. In fact, improved multi-channel performance is one of the highlighted features in this version of AE. Users who had previously installed version 2.0 have already been enjoying the extra speed, but now it's shipping with AE itself.

ProEXR 2.5 gets rid of the separate ProEXR AE plug-in, which has been merged into the main OpenEXR plug-in. That means AE now ships with the features in ProEXR AE, such as the ability to set up your layered comps for you, as well as export layered EXR files. To have AE set up comps for you, import your EXRs using AE's regular Import File dialog, and then tell it to Import As Composition, which is very easy to miss. Fans of the old File menu item can bring it back by editing their AE preferences file.

Import As Composition

Also coming along for the ride is the Cryptomatte plug-in that first appeared in ProEXR 2.0. In addition, ProEXR 2.5 uses newly added AE APIs to support the reading and writing of timecode with EXR files. And finally, the EXtractoR and IDentifier interfaces have been re-done, getting rid of their modal dialogs in favor of menus right in the Effect Controls Window.

The easiest way to get ProEXR 2.5 is to just start using the new version of AE. For people sticking with older versions, you can still download the plug-ins from the ProEXR site.

Enjoy!

The joys of an antique keyboard

Apple Extended Keyboard (AEK) photo by bujcich

The best tech I’ve bought this year is a keyboard made in 1987.

ProEXR 2.0

Version 2.0 of ProEXR is now available. The major new addition is support for Cryptomatte in After Effects.

Cryptomatte is a clever improvement over OpenEXR’s ID channels, which have been supported by ProEXR since the beginning, but in practice are rarely used. The problem with an ID channel is that each pixel can only specify a single ID, so small things like antialiasing, motion blur, and depth of field won’t work properly. Using some tricks involving 32-bit float EXR channels and cryptographic hashes, Cryptomatte gives you the ID channels you always wanted, fully functional. Just turn on Cryptomatte in a supported 3D renderer, set up the comps in After Effects using ProEXR AE, select the Cryptomatte effect, and click in your comp to generate perfect mattes for any object(s) you choose.

Since Cryptomatte uses a series of EXR channels to work its magic, developing this plug-in exposed some inefficiencies in the OpenEXR file module, which has now been updated to always cache channels and headers. In extreme cases involving EXR sequences with many channels, the speedup can be as high as 20x. I encourage all multi-channel EXR enthusiasts to replace the plug-in that ships with AE.

Enjoy!


Update: More information about this release and Cryptomatte in a ProVideo Coalition article by Chris Zwar!

RenderGarden

Got a new product sold though Mekajiki: RenderGarden. I suppose the tagline sums it up best: it's not a farm, just a little garden. As opposed to full farm management software like Pixar's Tractor, RenderGarden is just a couple of scripts. But it's cheap and easy, letting you get a little After Effects render farm garden going in minutes.

A big benefit of using RenderGarden vs. the AE render queue is that you can run multiple render processes simultaneously, even on a single computer. If After Effects were fully multi-threaded this would not be much help, but in AE's current state RenderGarden can often double or triple rendering speeds, meanwhile leaving After Effects available for you to continue working.

Programs like Tractor have a centralized database of their various render tasks. A hack used by RenderGarden is that the filesystem itself is the database, with the priority of the various jobs controlled by their place in your drive's hierarchy, their status determined by naming conventions. This system isn't as bullet-proof as Tractor, but it's simple, cheap, and works for small-scale users and teams looking for a little render farm functionality.

OpenColorIO for Photoshop

Many moons ago I released an OpenColorIO plug-in for After Effects. Now there's a Photoshop plug-in as well. It has most of the same features and a similar interface.

One useful feature for Photoshop workflows is the ability to export ICC Profiles and LUTs right from the plug-in. You can test out a color conversion directly on your pixels by running it normally. Then undo and export an ICC Profile that can be assigned to your document (make sure you save it in the proper directory). Or export a LUT to be assigned to a Color Lookup adjustment layer in Photoshop.

As usual, it's free and open source.

Enjoy!

Update: The October 2024 Photoshop update (26.0) added OCIO support natively. Use that instead!

ProEXR is Free

About 10 years ago I released ProEXR, a set of After Effects and Photoshop plug-ins for using multi-channel OpenEXR files. From the beginning, the core AE plug-ins were free and the source code was available. A year later the AE plug-ins started shipping with After Effects CS4, and they still do to this day. Eventually ProEXR AE was added, ProEXR EZ was made free, then Premiere plug-ins were added and later included with the program, free. I guess the only thing left to do is make the whole darn thing free. And so it is. (It's open source too.)

From the bottom of my heart, I would like to thank everyone who bought ProEXR over the years. Your support has really meant a lot, and allowed me to keep refining ProEXR into a stable product used by artists and installed in studios all over the world. All those who will use ProEXR in the future owe you a debt.

To be candid, part of the decision to make ProEXR free was driven by the emergence of another free Photoshop plug-in with a strikingly similar feature set. It looks nice, check it out.

Thanks again, everyone. Enjoy!

Boardfish

I've teamed up with some old friends to make a new Mac application, Boardfish, a tool for creating storyboards. Make panels in the graphics app of your choosing and drag them in. Boardfish will let you arrange them, add captions, and export to a PDF.

Boardfish is the brainchild of Matt Silverman, who runs the production studio Swordfish. (I've known Matt since forever, starting with ElectricImage user groups at the turn of the century.) At Swordfish, Matt & co. have often made storyboards using general purpose tools like InDesign, but making changes to the layouts was a pain. Matt thought it would be worth it to make an app dedicated to storyboards, so he brought me in to do the programming, Mauchi Baiocchi for creative input, and Brandon Smith for everything else (including the docs and website). Together, we are Mekajiki Inc.

When it comes down to it, Boardfish is basically a page layout app—a procedural one. Virtually everything about the layout of the boards is exposed: the number of panels on a page, the typeface and font size of each text element, the width and color of every line. Boardfish lets you make global changes instantly.

There's a free trial. Give it a whirl!

ProEXR AE update

Several years ago ProEXR added the ability to render the layers of an After Effects comp into an EXR sequence, each layer given its own set of RGBA channels that could be pulled out independently in AE, Nuke, or another savvy program. This feature was accessed through the standard After Effects render interface, made possible by various loopholes in the After Effects API.

Well, all good things must come to an end and those loopholes were closed in After Effects CC 2015 as part of the program's re-architecture-ing. As a result this feature is now found where you might have expected it from the beginning, under Composition ➤ Save Frame As ➤ ProEXR. Unlike its neighboring Photoshop Layers feature, the ProEXR layer export will let you render out a sequence.

Users of previous AE versions can still use the render queue as they always have, and that's the only way to render on a farm. Or since AE CC 2014 can read CC 2015's project files, you could always open your project in the older version and regain the render queue functionality.

OpenEXR for Premiere is Free

Adobe has released an update to Adobe Premiere CC 2015 that includes something relevant to this blog: an OpenEXR plug-in. This is actually the same plug-in that has been a part of ProEXR for the past three years, and it is now free to all. (It runs in Media Encoder too.) Updating your CC 2015 is the easiest way to get it, but for those of you still using older versions of Premiere you'll find a free copy in the standard ProEXR download, replacing the old non-free one. The price of the remaining ProEXR plug-ins has dropped to $50.

Like the After Effects plug-ins before it, I've made the Premiere plug-in open source on GitHub.


As a refresher, the following plug-ins are free in ProEXR:

• ProEXR EZ for Photoshop
• OpenEXR, EXtractoR, IDentifier plug-ins for After Effects
• OpenEXR for Premiere
• ProEXR Comp Creator for After Effects (part of ProEXR AE)

The following ProEXR features require a license:

• ProEXR for Photoshop (read/write layered EXR files)
• ProEXR AE (write layered EXR files out of After Effects)
• VRimg support (part of ProEXR for Photoshop and ProEXR AE)

WebM for Premiere Pro

After well over a year in public beta, today we're calling the free WebM plug-in for Premiere Pro officially released. In that time the plug-in has evolved greatly based on feedback from users and from Google itself. And it will continue to evolve, especially as Google continues to develop their libvpx encoder.

One thing that has been interesting to watch is how the VP9 codec has come along. When I posted the first beta, VP9 was experimental, had hardly any application support, and was incredibly slow to encode. Today you can play VP9 in Firefox, Chrome, VLC, and other standards-compliant software. And VP9 encoding…well, let's just say it's a lot faster than it used to be, thanks to multithreading and countless other optimizations.

MOX

Usually I use this blog to announce a piece of software I've written, but now I'm announcing something I'm hoping to write. It's MOX, an open source movie format for video and film production. You can read all about it on the Indiegogo page.

The reason to use crowd funding is twofold. First, this free software project is too big for me to just put it together in my spare time. Second, we are proposing to create a new standard so we need to know there's support for it before we get started, to know that it's really worth doing.

Continue reading for the details of how this all began.

DWA compression in OpenEXR 2.2

OpenEXR 2.2 was just released, and it features a new lossy codec created by Karl Rasche of DreamWorks Animation. Simply called DWA, it applies techniques common in lossy image compression like the discrete cosine transform and Huffman coding, but it uses them to great effect. If you can accept a little loss in your HDR images, DWA can shrink them to a fraction of their lossless size.

SuperPNG 2.5

I just posted a new version of SuperPNG for your downloading pleasure. The big new feature is the Quantize checkbox, which will convert your 32-bit RGBA image into an 8-bit indexed color image with transparency. And I'm not talking about GIF-style 1-bit transparency here, but full 8-bit transparency values in the PNG color palette.

That 75% reduction in bits can really crush PNGs even more than was previously possible. Lower the quality slider to use fewer colors, which means even fewer bits and an even smaller file. This feature is powered by Kornel Lesiński's pngquant library, and Kornel has agreed to join me as SuperPNG's co-author.

Another new feature in this version is the Clean Transparent checkbox. It turns out that your transparent pixels may have unseen colors in them that are making PNGs harder to compress, but this feature will wipe them out for you. See the manual for more details.

SuperPNG has always been free, but now it's open source as well. Check out the GitHub repository and see exactly what we're doing.

Enjoy!

ProEXR 1.9

Today Adobe released a major update to After Effects and the rest of the Creative Cloud suite. This new AE ships with version 1.9 of the ProEXR plug-ins, which have been available here in beta form. Well, if the plug-ins are good enough for Adobe to ship them, I guess they're good enough for me. Consider version 1.9 released.

The biggest change in 1.9 is that the After Effects plug-in now handles displayWindow natively. Most users will not be affected by this, but the beta notice has more information for those interested.

The other subtle change is that all the ProEXR plug-ins are now built using OpenEXR 2.1, which supports multi-part files and deep image buffers. ProEXR can now read files that use these features, although the files you write will still be single-part flat images that are compatible with EXR readers that haven't yet upgraded.

Even if you're using an older version of After Effects, you can still download the latest ProEXR plug-ins and install them with your copy. Likewise, the Photoshop and Premiere plug-ins will work just fine in older versions of those programs.

As usual, this update is free and recommended for all ProEXR users. Enjoy!

ProEXR 1.9 beta

There have been some significant changes in the world of OpenEXR this year, so it's time to incorporate some of them into ProEXR. The changes are big enough that I felt it best to release 1.9 in beta form and leave ample time for testing and feedback. Download links and more details after the jump.

WebM and Theora plug-ins for Premiere (beta)

When people think about video in HTML5, they usually think H.264. But many browsers also support Theora (.ogv) and WebM, two video formats that have the advantage of being truly open, with no patent licensing fees required for the privilege of using them.

Theora and WebM actually share a common heritage in the VPX codecs created by On2 Technologies. On2 gave their VP3 codec to the Xiph.Org Foundation in 2001, while Google got VP8 when it acquired On2 in 2010. Now both codecs, once proprietary, are open source and freely available, attempting to unseat H.264 as the preferred web video format.

The only problem is that my favorite video editor, Adobe Premiere Pro, has no way of reading or writing these formats…until now. I've taken the open source encoders and built Premiere plug-ins around them (they also work in Adobe Media Encoder). The plug-ins themselves are open source as well, currently in a beta release. Find download links in the ReadMe on their respective GitHub pages:

WebM | Theora

The Theora repository also has a plug-in for using Ogg/Vorbis, Opus, and FLAC audio files in Premiere. Vorbis is a similarly free alternative to MP3 (Both Theora and WebM use it for audio compression), Opus is a new high-quality codec, and FLAC is the Free Lossless Audio Codec.

WebM is actively being developed by Google. There is talk of supporting alpha channels and lossless compression in the future. If they follow through, WebM could become a reasonable movie format for use in production.

Please download, experiment, and send feedback. And enjoy!

Update: the WebM plug-in is now released!