Who can playblast H.264 with more than 16 cpus?

[clemensF4NFT]

Hi,

is there anyone out there running Maya on a Windows computer with more than 16 cpus?
Do you know a way to directly playblast 1080p using the H.264 codec?
The problem being, the legacy Apple H.264 compressor component is known for having problems on computers that have more than 16 logical processors.
So does K-lite's QuickTime Alternative.
The Maya user guide says:
Because of the number and variety of codecs available, Autodesk does not provide a list of qualified codecs.
Hopefully among this number and variety there is at least one qualified H.264 codec for 16+ cpu machines.
Who knows?

Clemens

[tristan]

do this, as stupid as it may seem.

It is the only way to fix this issue.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAVABZpM90k

[clemensF4NFT]

Tristan,

thank you for your suggestion. You suggest limiting the number of processors using the advanced boot options of msconfig. Be aware that this will reduce the performance of your system. You will want to use this only as a temporary fix. If you look for a more permanent solution you might consider disabling SMT / hyper-threading. Personally, my workaround is to blast with a different codec and then convert the file to H.264 using ffmpeg. But still, there doesn't seem to be anyone who can playblast H.264 having more than 16 cpus active. Is there?

Clemens

[0065078]

Fixed this issue by going into the BIOS and disabling hyperthreading. 

[clemensF4NFT]

I'm glad to hear you were able to solve your problem by disabling hyper-threading / SMT. This means now you don't have more than 16 logical CPUs anymore. This workaround makes the old Quicktime codec work on your computer. That's fine. But my challenge here is to have more than 16 CPUs active while blasting with H.264. As I mentioned Autodesk doesn't provide a list of qualified codecs because they say there a so many available. But I'm afraid in the case of AVC / H.264  there is not even a single codec available. Is there anyone who can prove me wrong?

[tristan]

We switched to Avi uncompressed and encode the MP4 using ffmpeg through a
single script we made as a pipeline step for our animators. There are
problems like a max filesize of 3 gb before it corrupts etc. So you need to
concatonate smaller chunks or manage compression. Once you get it all down
there are little disadvantages and it playblasts faster and you can even
burn in additional shot info. I now playblast at 2k which looks awesome,
can do multiple Mayas at once (limitation of QuickTime) etc.

If you are a studio I would highly recommend going down this route. it's
not an easy one as there were several smaller problems to overcome within
ffmpeg like when there is audio or not, drop frames... Etc

All the folks at our studio are very happy now, a single button sets all
params, shotnames, renders faster, better quality, and produces the
smallest file size, so they can quickly share it over slack for review.

There was also a paying plugin if you cant write your own that basically
did the same thing, but haven't tried it.

Anyway good luck! And hopefully Autodesk will catch up by 2030 where h264
is no longer a standard. YouTube has a newer one already so it's not going
to take long.

-Tristan

[clemensF4NFT]

Tristan,

I'm glad to hear you found a workaround in your studio. Using ffmpeg sounds sensible to me and in fact, that's exactly the workaround we use here for computers with more than 16 cores, where disabling SMT / hyper-threading doesn't help, because after disabling they still have more than 16 logical CPUs. And yes, we have implemented this into our animation pipeline, too. But, please get me right, I don't ask for a nice workaround here. Instead, I'm really interested to see if someone can directly blast H.264 having more than 16 CPUs by using one of the "variety of codecs available" and without using a workaround.

Clemens