MP4 vs MOV and H.264 vs H.265

NAZty · May 19, 2020

My current settings are MP4 and H.265.

To my knowledge H.265 does a better job at compressing vs H.264 - is that correct or is there more to it?

I’ve copied some files onto my iPad and while I can play/view them, when trying to import them into iMovie it says it can’t. Is that because of the MP4 setting? If I switch to MOV will I lose compatibility when using say Adobe Premier on a Windows PC?

Apologies for the noob questions but just getting into editing and trying to figure out the best/most universal way forward.

Raptorman · May 19, 2020

NAZty said:
My current settings are MP4 and H.265.

To my knowledge H.265 does a better job at compressing vs H.264 - is that correct or is there more to it?

I’ve copied some files onto my iPad and while I can play/view them, when trying to import them into iMovie it says it can’t. Is that because of the MP4 setting? If I switch to MOV will I lose compatibility when using say Adobe Premier on a Windows PC?

Apologies for the noob questions but just getting into editing and trying to figure out the best/most universal way forward.

With my P4P I almost always used MP4 and H.265 and for a long time Premiere Pro handled that just fine, but at some point PP just stopped working with H.265 files and I'd get 20 minutes into an editing session when it would puke and not recover. I backed out of the then current version of PP and reverted to the previous years version and was OK and with each new update I'd try the new version but it always failed. After about a year of this I finally gave up on PP and no longer use it. Adobe's focus is creating new features that appeal to the marketing types but they do a terrible job of fixing bugs or increasing the number of tools that use 64bit -- for Adobe its all about the feature set they can advertise and reliability takes a back seat.

I now use DaVinci Resolve and although I prefer PP as a cutter the other tools in Resolve leave PP in the dust.

Brian

Hauptmann · May 19, 2020

H.265 is a resource hog. Better have max computing power for post.

Raptorman · May 19, 2020

Hauptmann said:
H.265 is a resource hog. Better have max computing power for post.

Until recently none of the CPU's or GPU's were natively able to handle H.265 and even higher end PC's like the one I built a few years ago will struggle to do real-time scrubbing etc. Newer CPU's and GPU's make working with H.265 easier, but if the software handles it poorly as PP does then your in trouble no matter how much processing power you have.

Brian

Meta4 · May 19, 2020

Mov or Mp4 makes no difference to image quality.

NAZty said:
I’ve copied some files onto my iPad and while I can play/view them, when trying to import them into iMovie it says it can’t. Is that because of the MP4 setting?
If I switch to MOV will I lose compatibility when using say Adobe Premier on a Windows PC?

The issue is that iMovie only accepts a limited variety of file formats.
Most software will handle a wider variety of file formats.

GadgetGuy · May 20, 2020

NAZty said:
My current settings are MP4 and H.265.

To my knowledge H.265 does a better job at compressing vs H.264 - is that correct or is there more to it?

I’ve copied some files onto my iPad and while I can play/view them, when trying to import them into iMovie it says it can’t. Is that because of the MP4 setting? If I switch to MOV will I lose compatibility when using say Adobe Premier on a Windows PC?

Apologies for the noob questions but just getting into editing and trying to figure out the best/most universal way forward.

4K@60fps is only available in H.265.
The MP4/MOV choice is available in all video modes and makes no difference.

Raptorman · May 20, 2020

GadgetGuy said:
4K@60fps is only available in H.265.
The MP4/MOV choice is available in all video modes and makes no difference.

Yeah, you can convert an MOV to an MP4 by renaming -- no processing required.

Brian

GadgetGuy · May 20, 2020

Raptorman said:
Yeah, you can convert an MOV to an MP4 by renaming -- no processing required.

Brian

Not exactly. It doesn't change the actual video format of the file itself, but it can then sometimes be edited/played in editors/players that don't officially support .MOV files.

NAZty · May 20, 2020

Thanks for all the replies.

So if I go with MOV I’ll have less compatibility issues as only really iMovie is limited to that whereas most other software won’t have an issue with either?

I know iMovie is very basic but as I’m just starting out I like it’s ease of use and the fact I can do it on an iPad.

Raptorman · May 20, 2020

GadgetGuy said:
Not exactly. It doesn't change the actual video format of the file itself, but it can then sometimes be edited/played in editors/players that don't officially support .MOV files.

Not sure how you say 'Not exactly' -- changing the name doesn't change the video so if changing the name permits it to be played it isn't because the video is being processed in any way by changing the name. The simple fact is many programs expect a given list of file name extensions and if the video file doesn't match it pukes.

Brian

GadgetGuy · May 20, 2020

Raptorman said:
Not sure how you say 'Not exactly' -- changing the name doesn't change the video so if changing the name permits it to be played it isn't because the video is being processed in any way by changing the name. The simple fact is many programs expect a given list of file name extensions and if the video file doesn't match it pukes.

Brian

Isn't that what I said? Aren't we both saying the same thing, in a slightly different way? Your explanation is just more complete on the why.

dsd317 · May 20, 2020

So is there a way to select H.264 or H.265 on the MA2? Or is that based on 4k30fps or 4k60fps, respectively?

z28lt1 · May 20, 2020

dsd317 said:
So is there a way to select H.264 or H.265 on the MA2? Or is that based on 4k30fps or 4k60fps, respectively?

If I recall from playing with it, In 4K60 you have to use H.265 In the other resolutions and frame rates, you can select between them.

gb160 · May 20, 2020

Raptorman said:
Yeah, you can convert an MOV to an MP4 by renaming -- no processing required.

Brian

It's not that simple, that's just changing the extension...it will still be a MOV wrapper, just with the wrong extension if you do that.

DaveS · May 20, 2020

We use the latest version of Premiere Pro in our office. I edit on a 2017 iMac, OS 10.13.6, 64GB RAM, Radeon Pro 580 8192 MB, 4.2 GHz Intel Core i7 and I have no problems with the H.265 video I've been shooting on our new Mavic 2 Pro. In fact, it looks great and only needs to be rendered to play smoothly if I add an effect to it. Even with color grading alone, it plays fine. I've been editing video for over 30 years. I started with AVID at the beginning. Now, I can say that if you want a video to be a different format, you have to put into a conversion program like Adobe Media Encoder and render it out with a new compression on it. Just changing the extension won't change the video. However, we have found on Macs that if you change an extension from mp4 to mov, it generally plays better. smoother, no glitching.

MavicAir2Marc · May 20, 2020

NAZty said:
Thanks for all the replies.

So if I go with MOV I’ll have less compatibility issues as only really iMovie is limited to that whereas most other software won’t have an issue with either?

I know iMovie is very basic but as I’m just starting out I like it’s ease of use and the fact I can do it on an iPad.

Which IOS are you using on your iPad? I know that to preview H.265 format in the finder or Quicktime, you have to be running High Sierra or higher. Unfortunately my old 2011 iMac Pro will not update to High Sierra so at some point I'll be putting everything on my MacBookPro that runs Catalina. No problem viewing those files from the finder on that. I use Premiere and so far haven't had any issues with crashes or anything like that. As a matter of fact, playback is better than my 4K.MOV files from my X-Star. Most of the time I get no dropped frames if I leave it at 1/4 resolution. I had to resort to proxies on the X-Star footage and that is still running on my 2011 iMac Pro.

Raptorman · May 21, 2020

DaveS said:
We use the latest version of Premiere Pro in our office. I edit on a 2017 iMac, OS 10.13.6, 64GB RAM, Radeon Pro 580 8192 MB, 4.2 GHz Intel Core i7 and I have no problems with the H.265 video I've been shooting on our new Mavic 2 Pro. In fact, it looks great and only needs to be rendered to play smoothly if I add an effect to it. Even with color grading alone, it plays fine. I've been editing video for over 30 years. I started with AVID at the beginning. Now, I can say that if you want a video to be a different format, you have to put into a conversion program like Adobe Media Encoder and render it out with a new compression on it. Just changing the extension won't change the video. However, we have found on Macs that if you change an extension from mp4 to mov, it generally plays better. smoother, no glitching.

I hope that's accurate, but for me I had update after update extending for more than a year and none of them worked with the H.265 video shot on my P4P. Of course, I was not using a Mac and I did abandon Adobe about a year ago so who knows what's transpired since or if the H.265 video files from the Air 2 are in some ways different than the H.265 coming out of the P4P. The PC I have is a bit older than yours but used what was then a fairly high spec PC (Asus X99 Pro/USB 3.1, Intel i7-5820K slightly OC'd, Corsair H100i liquid CPU cooler, Samsung 950 Pro PCIe M.2 SSD 512GB, EVGA GTX 980 Ti GPU, and a couple 6TB WD Black HD's all running on a clean install of Windows 10).

So, is the newest version of PP compatible with my legacy P4P H.265 video files -- I may never know! Just so I'm clear ... I liked PP as a cutter and find it superior to Resolve as a cutter, but everything else favors Resolve with the big thing being that I'm no longer a slave to Adobe. I really hate Adobe as a company!

Brian

MavicAir2Marc · May 21, 2020

Raptorman said:
I hope that's accurate, but for me I had update after update extending for more than a year and none of them worked with the H.265 video shot on my P4P. Of course, I was not using a Mac and I did abandon Adobe about a year ago so who knows what's transpired since or if the H.265 video files from the Air 2 are in some ways different than the H.265 coming out of the P4P. The PC I have is a bit older than yours but used what was then a fairly high spec PC (Asus X99 Pro/USB 3.1, Intel i7-5820K slightly OC'd, Corsair H100i liquid CPU cooler, Samsung 950 Pro PCIe M.2 SSD 512GB, EVGA GTX 980 Ti GPU, and a couple 6TB WD Black HD's all running on a clean install of Windows 10).

So, is the newest version of PP compatible with my legacy P4P H.265 video files -- I may never know! Just so I'm clear ... I liked PP as a cutter and find it superior to Resolve as a cutter, but everything else favors Resolve with the big thing being that I'm no longer a slave to Adobe. I really hate Adobe as a company!

Brian

I've been using Adobe products since before Photoshop had layers (anybody remember floating selections?). I use all Adobe products for my day job. You're right though, lately they have been pretty bad at customer service and fixing issues on their upgrades. I hate that they changed a bunch of the old key commands in Photoshop, I mean basic ones like the way command Z works and stuff. They are catering to new users that don't have previous experience with Adobe while leaving long-time users for real work hung out to dry. Unfortunately in my industry, it is the gold standard and none of the other software companies seem to want to compete with the suite of products they offer. There are other companies that have image editors or video editors but no one has the breadth of cross compatible software apps that they do, plus, like Microsoft Office, a lot of proprietary software is made to be compatible within those systems.

Raptorman · May 21, 2020

MavicAir2Marc said:
I've been using Adobe products since before Photoshop had layers (anybody remember floating selections?). I use all Adobe products for my day job. You're right though, lately they have been pretty bad at customer service and fixing issues on their upgrades. I hate that they changed a bunch of the old key commands in Photoshop, I mean basic ones like the way command Z works and stuff. They are catering to new users that don't have previous experience with Adobe while leaving long-time users for real work hung out to dry. Unfortunately in my industry, it is the gold standard and none of the other software companies seem to want to compete with the suite of products they offer. There are other companies that have image editors or video editors but no one has the breadth of cross compatible software apps that they do, plus, like Microsoft Office, a lot of proprietary software is made to be compatible within those systems.

Completely agree ... been using Adobe products for about 20 years with PS at first and then expanding to the suite with PP about 4 years ago to edit the video I began making. I've never been a fan of the subscription model and Adobe in particular is a greedy company, but where are you going to go to get the full range of tools that Adobe has. There are some little guys that punch way above there weight like the team that makes Blender and if that approach could be applied more broadly and with a unifying UI it would give Adobe fits.

Brian