Nix McRetro
I tend to upload all my videos at 1080p these days. I used to be a 720p person, but 4K was starting to appear everywhere and apparently resolution inflation is unavoidable. My internet connection is bad enough that uploading 4K regularly would be an exercise in suffering, so 1080p it is.
YouTube’s upload recommendations are useful here. For standard frame rates (24, 25 or 30 fps), they recommend roughly 8 Mbps for 1080p, 16 Mbps for 1440p and 35 to 45 Mbps for 4K. That’s a lot of bits!
For video captures themselves, I had been trying ScreenFlow or the open-source alternative OBS, then doing the final encode in Final Cut Pro X. OBS did a sensible job and was free, but recently I had been giving ScreenFlow a go and it was quite powerful.
One 2560 x 1440 ScreenFlow recording produced around 17 GB of source material.
Exporting a roughly 30-minute 1080p version gave me:
- ProRes 4444: roughly 115 GB and around twice real-time to encode
- ProRes 422 HQ: roughly 50 GB and just under real-time to encode
- H.264: slow enough on this machine that I eventually cancelled it
I originally took the larger ProRes file to mean I wasn’t sacrificing the source, but file size alone doesn’t establish that. ProRes 422 HQ is still a compressed codec, but Apple designed it for very high visual fidelity and multigeneration editing. ProRes 4444 can preserve 4:4:4 colour and alpha-channel information, which is useful for compositing but unnecessary for plenty of ordinary video workflows.
For this particular screen-capture workflow, 422 HQ was already enormous. ProRes 4444 was super-incredible-overkill-2000. My little dual-core i7 was doing its best; I believed it was a fourth-generation model.