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Hey, SoS. Mac user here. I can only imagine what kind of digital gremlins are causing the muxed file to misbehave, but for the best image quality, you might not want to edit a delivery codec like mp4, even if set at a high bit rate. You'll lose quality with each encoding generation.
on the PC side, lagarith avi seems to be the preferred lossless codec for editing. In the Mac realm, prores is the way to go; it's nearly lossless, and I've read that recoding a prores file at least 10 times is necessary before visible image degradation occurs.
i used pavtube's bytecopy to create a prores file directly off the blu-ray. The 2-hour, 6-min movie became a roughly 100-GB file with great image quality. Even prores LT, which should be ok for FCP editing, would provide an approximately 70-GB file for a movie of the same length. If your editing file's in the 16-19 GB range (and superman returns is around 2.5 hours, iirc) then you're definitely dealing with loss of quality, which will be pixeliciously noticeable by the time you crank out your final encode.
i was skeptical re: pavtube because they have a confusing and jumbled product line and dodgy Engrish on their site. But on the recommendation of other editors here, I gave it a try, and lo & fucking behold, the software works like a charm. More so than their website, the pavtube support staff was superhelpful in helping me to pinpoint the program that I needed (which ended up being bytecopy). You can download their software for free and give it a test run, which should crank out a prores file with a watermark.
Plus, pavtube is having a tenksgibbing sale. And you can also ask the support staff for discounts. I was going to try several free programs to create a prores file in multiple steps (without even knowing whether that solution would work), but it's much nicer having one program do all the heavy lifting. The 1080p prores file was ready in less than two hours.
hope this helps. cheers, dude.
on the PC side, lagarith avi seems to be the preferred lossless codec for editing. In the Mac realm, prores is the way to go; it's nearly lossless, and I've read that recoding a prores file at least 10 times is necessary before visible image degradation occurs.
i used pavtube's bytecopy to create a prores file directly off the blu-ray. The 2-hour, 6-min movie became a roughly 100-GB file with great image quality. Even prores LT, which should be ok for FCP editing, would provide an approximately 70-GB file for a movie of the same length. If your editing file's in the 16-19 GB range (and superman returns is around 2.5 hours, iirc) then you're definitely dealing with loss of quality, which will be pixeliciously noticeable by the time you crank out your final encode.
i was skeptical re: pavtube because they have a confusing and jumbled product line and dodgy Engrish on their site. But on the recommendation of other editors here, I gave it a try, and lo & fucking behold, the software works like a charm. More so than their website, the pavtube support staff was superhelpful in helping me to pinpoint the program that I needed (which ended up being bytecopy). You can download their software for free and give it a test run, which should crank out a prores file with a watermark.
Plus, pavtube is having a tenksgibbing sale. And you can also ask the support staff for discounts. I was going to try several free programs to create a prores file in multiple steps (without even knowing whether that solution would work), but it's much nicer having one program do all the heavy lifting. The 1080p prores file was ready in less than two hours.
hope this helps. cheers, dude.