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crazygringo

It's my understanding that TV series are delivered to Netflix and other streamers in ProRes these days.

Then they convert to h.264/265/etc. as desired to produce the consumer streams.

I'm curious... does anyone know, do they use ffmpeg for that? Or a commercial tool?

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They do use ffmpeg (maybe not for everything). They've published quite a bit about their encoding:

https://netflixtechblog.com/high-quality-video-encoding-at-s...

https://research.netflix.com/research-area/video-encoding-an...

They might have several possible formats but for example netflix branded content specs are in the net [1]. It’s IMF package with jpeg2000 content. Prores files are sent as helper files. Sometimes ffmpeg can be used but often grading / mastering tool is used for export (resolve, baselight etc). In my experience FFMPEG is very easy to keep consistent once you get the parameters right (which is always pretty painful), but pretty slow compared to most other tools.

[1] https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/726...

"helper" files. is that the accepted term now instead of the master?

I mean files that are called officially Servicing turnovers https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/360...

what MBA came up with that term?

One who doesn't like Master/Slave terms probably.

FFMPEG and Elemental are the two which I've seen at scale.

Source is not always the same, but does often go through a Mac. Not an Apple employee, but I've heard the reason they make the 5k display is to account for 4k fullscreen + toolbar.

Ffmpeg is used frequently, but not for masters. The finishing part is done under softwares like Baselight/Resolve/Nucoda, and that's when the color is baked. If a ProRes is required, usually it comes out from them. src: I work in a pipeline of a large VFX studio.

I kind of thought the big orgs were mostly using hardware encoders now.

AMD Xilinx's Alveo lineup is basically just for this and I think the energy efficiency is way higher, incredibly parallelizable workloads. ASICs would be even better.

YouTube transcodes from their reference copy on ASICs, "Argos" (maybe onto a new thing by now). There's a paper on this too. https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/new-era-video-infrastruc...

I don't think efficiency and speed matter for Netflix like it does for YouTube since there's only a fraction of the content. Software encoding will always be better and more flexible.

The AMD Alveo ASIC isn't actually available to buy yet. Their older Alveo FPGA (formerly NGCodec) is available but is not competitive by any metric apart from marketing noise.

everyone uses ffmpeg whether they admit to it or not. the internal prores codec(s), i believe there is more than one, is not Apple certified, so there are some potential pitfalls if you're not aware of that. so depending on your intended purpose of the file, it might be good enough. if you are planning on sending the output to Apple iTunes, then nope.

I've delivered to Apple with ffmpeg flavor prores files (as well as Netflix). Both pass QC just fine.

Interesting, would you be able say what it was? An indie movie?

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