Comments on: The best codec for video in Ableton Live on a Mac.

By: sp_key

sp_key — Thu, 22 May 2008 15:46:19 +0000

@ Neuronaut

A ‘creative’ way to do lossless video is to use MPEG-2 ‘I-Frame Only’ at very high bitrate.

I do not know if Ableton can render videos in MPEG-2 but if it does then edit the parameters that allow you to access the GOP Structure and select I Frames only (no P and B frames). If your render is say around 25Mbps of I Frames only then this is nearly lossless.

By: Oliver Chesler

Oliver Chesler — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:40:35 +0000

So far everything I tested or read about leads me to photo jpeg as the best choice.

By: lagowski

lagowski — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:34:55 +0000

You could use DV as ‘none’ would create a HUGE file!
BTW: H.264 is very CPU intensive because there is a large amount going on when the video is encoded and decoded; I,P and B frames, slices, motion vectors, error correction, entropy encoding, variable macroblocks etc etc.

By: Neuronaut

Neuronaut — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 01:09:31 +0000

What about during composition? Can anyone suggest a good codec for lossless video? I tried None as a codec and it failed to export from live.

By: Kent Sandvik

Kent Sandvik — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 00:13:37 +0000

If you play back a lot of animation movies, the animation codec works well and is light on the CPU. I was surprised H.264 was expensive, would think that codec is optimized to the N:th degree. Note that a lot of how the playback works is reflected when you encode the movie itself. You could make it play really slow and take a lot of CPU cycles if you make the quality parameters very high. –Kent