If an DNxHD quicktime file (reference or self contained) contains only a single video track, it will turn into a dark-red freeze-frame when run through Apple Compressor. If it doesn’t, then bully for you! You can stop reading.
But if you’re afflicted with this issue, there’s an easy workaround. If you add any video track, even a text track, to the quicktime file using QT7 Pro, it will pass through Compressor like a dream (with a slight gamma shift). Iâ€
ve made a quicktime text track of a tiny period character in the upper-left corner that I paste into Quicktime files for this purpose.
To use:
- Download this zip file (local link, dropbox link) and uncompress it.
- Open the quicktime “dot-text-track-invisible.mov” in QuickTime 7 Pro (assuming you can still run QuickTime 7 Pro — at some point a macOS update is going to break that ancient piece of very usable software, and I don’t think QuickTime X lets you add tracks to a QuickTime file).
- copy to clipboard
- open your dnxhd quicktime in QuickTime 7 Pro
- From the menubar, choose “Edit > Add to Selection & Scale”
- Save the dnxhd quicktime, which now has a new but invisible text track composited atop its video track
The resulting quicktime file should now be fully usable in Compressor. Having more than a single track in the file somehow knocks the compression job into a different code path or portion of the compositing engine that avoids the problem, or maybe it just flips a magic bit somewhere, I know nothing beyond speculation –but it works.
In case you’re reading this and thinking,”Why would I use Apple Compressor for this when I have Adobe Media Encoder which is not afflicted by this DnxHD issue?”, the answer to that could be any of the following:
- A properly-configured Apple Compressor on a multiple-core machine (or network of machines) still beats Adobe Media Encoder on the same machine at making H264 in both speed and quality, at least last time I tested it.
- You may already have created some nice presets for making files with certain watermarks in Apple Compressor and want to use them.
- One click to compress and author/burn a simple DVD or Blu-ray disc or image. Nice.
- You don’t have the Adobe Creative Suite on hand and are intimidated by ffmpeg
As an aside — ffmpeg can do watermarking, scaling, timecode burns, and a billion other things (as well as encode to Prores on Windows machines), and I highly recommend it. But it’s got a steep learning curve once you get into complicated tasks.
