Hey there, it seems that we’re having problems with (converted) Blu-Ray files (.mov, H264 compression) in Elan. The whole workflow is very slow and basically unreasonable. Does Elan have a general problem with full HD video material? If so, is this problem solved in the new alpha version or is there another possibility to avoid it?
I think I can only answer the last question: with respect to general playback performance, nothing changed in the new alpha version of ELAN.
I wouldn’t say there is a general problem with full HD video, but performance can depend on many things (computer hardware, the encoding of the media files etc.)
Am I right that this is on Mac OS? What settings have been used for the conversion?
-Han
It does indeed depend on a variety of things, the computer you are using (windows / osx), the conversion settings used to create the mov file, and what your desired workflow in ELAN is. If you want to work with doing a lot of frame-by-frame navigation and you are working on a windows 7 computer, h264 might be a bad choice. You may want to encode to an mpeg2 file in that case.
But, please provide us with some additional info, so we can help you out.
We’re working with MacBooks (mainly MacBook Pros) running on OS X 10.11.06. There’s some frame-by-frame navigation, but it’s not a huge part of our workflow. As for the conversion: we’re converting .mkv files via ffmpeg into .mov files. Please let me know what other information might be helpful.
Thanks for the response. There should be no problem working with the files on these machines, perhaps there is an issue with the conversion. We have published a Media conversion guide which can be found here: https://tla.mpi.nl/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Video_encoding_guidelines_ELAN.pdf
You will find settings for ffmpeg in there to create h264 mp4 files, both normal, as well as I-frame only files. (.mov and .mp4 containers should both work in this case, although we tend to only use .mp4 containers).
Hopefully you are able to gain better results with the help of this guide.
Thank you so much for your reply. We’ll try again using the settings from the conversion guide.