Hey Gunther & community,

I use LRTimelapse for quiet a while, but somehow encoding H265 broke on my OSX some day between February and Mai. Till Feb I was happily converting to h265 to store my timelapses in highest quality for later use in projects.

I suddenly get very weird output when rendering h265 videos, even when using to the very same settings or trying completely random combinations. The output is always broken in the same way.


The new h265 videos are broken by:

* Show a proper thumbnail in finder/preview (https://imgur.com/a/XPRnHWW - The green bars move depending on the fps)
* Do not run in Quicktime
* VLC gets some frames, then stars lagging and showing a lot of visual fragments
* Final Cut Pro has the same issues as finder/quicktime

All of these are working fine in older h265 videos.


They work fine with:
* Adobe Premiere Pro 2020 can open it
* Youtube manages to eat the files: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFQHy_28AEE && https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjrEKwua9fU


Here is a diff of the ffprobe outputs of a working and broken file. Both shot with the same Canon Alpha 6000, processed the same way I am used to.

https://www.diffchecker.com/UQf4OE8E

I tried multiple versions of ffmpeg, upgrading it via brew, using a custom compiles on and downloaded binaries from the website. Always the same issue with Apple Software & VLC.


Any advice on what I could try would be very helpful. Is there a way to get the ffmpeg command LRTimelapse will execute? So I could fiddle around with the config. I have working h265 conversion via ffmpeg running properly in my open source projects on the very same machine (Unrelated to timelapse ^^)


Till this is fixed, I am stuck with a huge amount of data from 2 trips as I can't process the timelapses and store them in an acceptable Quality/Size ratio. (Prores is simple to huge and mjpeg crashed final cut ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

Thanks a bunch,

Benedikt

Hi Benedikt,H.265 is not really an "archiving" format - it's more a highly compressed consumer format which is also heavy to decompress and therefore not really well suited for further editing. For archiving purposes I'd always recommend ProRes.

Also Quicktime is a pain and not suited to playback highres stuff that goes to the limit of specs as the output from LRT does. I wonder however that VLC also doesn't play them back. But I can't say anything without knowing which settings you did use - often for example other aspect ratios than 16:9 or rendering in original quality might break playback on some players although the files are fine, as you can see in decent video edition programs like Davinci Resolve and Premiere Pro. Try figuring out if you find a pattern, when the compatibility with the finder preview breaks.

Of course, we can do some tests together to see, if we can find a way to increase compatibility, best would be if you contacted me via email for this: support at lrtimelapse dot com

Hey Gunter,


thanks for the quick reply.

The settings don't really matter, they always broken for Apple software. I even tried another camera and smaller resolutions and different aspect ratios.

As you can see in the diff, the following seems to be different:

OLD: Video: hevc (Main 10)
NEW: Video: hevc (Rext)

OLD: yuv420p10le(tv, bt2020nc/bt2020/bt2020-10, progressive)
NEW: yuv444p10le(pc, bt2020nc/bt2020/bt2020-10, progressive),


As you can see in the filenames I selected 444 as color sampling, but, maybe, was it not applied back then?


Thanks for clarifiying about the archiving format, I'll have a closer look on prores again, the speed to write and read the format is a big plus for sure

Thanks,
Benedikt