The general process now a days for video editing and deployment

[l33tmeatwad]

x264/MP4 does technically work in resolve, but it was painfully slow to edit at 1080p when I tried it, but then again I have a very weak computer.

Just looked it up and the free version does not support hardware decoding on Linux or Windows but does for macOS for some reason...good information to have so those users can be told to only use lossless.

[l33tmeatwad]

It's been a while, but I did add support for DNxHD encoding in AMVtool.

[Silvercoat]

After reading the AMV101 guide and working with a few things, I still had some questions around this.
What I have been doing is BLURAY ---> MakeMKV --> .mkv > AMVTool ---> .mp4 ---> Premier ---> Export finished as .mp4 (using whichever highest quality H.264 setting)

Have not had any issues with this, videos seem to play / view just fine, and it does not seem to take forever as I have plenty of PC horsepower.

Am I missing something here? Am I doing something that is making my life harder?

Would it be better to BLURAY ---> MakeMKV ---> .mkv ---> AMVTool ---> .mp4 (or is .avi the better choice?***) ---> Premier ---> Export in same codec as AMVTool input prior to editing ---> Recontainer with AMVTool?

Always hard to distinguish between whats working and whats best sometimes.

Next hurdle is getting my new drive to rip faster....

*** "NOTE: It is highly recommended that you convert the source to lossless AVI files to work with as it will improve the efficiency of the footage in the editing software!" is what triggered this question from the AMV 101 site.

[l33tmeatwad]

So the h264 encoders in premiere are okay, but not as good as x264. Additionally, there is small delay for the AAC audio on playback with premiere encoded MP4s, however FFmpeg (which AMVtool uses) compensates for delay with AAC audio it encodes so the A/V sync is more accurate for playback if you export to lossless AVI with uncompressed audio then encode with AMVtool. Simply recontainering will unfortunately not fix the delay.

Another benefit is, if you need to tweak the encode settings to get it to a certain size your not needing to re-export, which is slower than just encoding a lossless file.

As for MP4 vs AVI for editing, AVI is better for smooth editing, however the files are much larger and converting takes longer than recontainering. Premiere hardware decoding makes using MP4s possible to edit with, but seeking is often slow and sometimes there are files that don't decode correctly.