The undisputed champion of Notch LC Encoding is...Assimilate!

Any Virtual Production stage that uses video playback knows that Notch LC is one of the best video codecs for playback. It's GPU-accelerated and can playback faster than any other codec.

But how do you encode your files to Notch LC? Well, you can either use Adobe Media Encoder or ASSIMILATE .

The TLDR of this article is, that there is only one professional choice, Assimilate.

It's 5x-20x faster, can handle much higher resolution, and has OCIO support built in.

Testing, Testing

I've always known that Assimilate would be way faster at encoding Notch than Media Encoder, in fact, I would go as far as betting it beats every software in every situation when it comes to encoding!

There's just some sort of magic built into the software that allows it to be as efficient as possible.

But how much faster is it?

Assimilate is about 5-20 times faster than Media Encoder when encoding to Notch LC!

My first test was a 12288 x 6144 ProRes 422 file. Here are the results:

Media encoder = 25 minutes, 3 seconds

Assimilate = 5 minutes, 1 second

My next test was 8 Arri Raw files, transcoded to 8 separate files. Media Encoder kept failing and eventually, through a bit of trial and error, I realized Media Encoder couldn't use the GPU-Acceleration with the Arri Raw files for some reason.

Media Encoder = 6 minutes, 15 seconds (7 minutes, 15 seconds with LUT burned in)

Assimilate = 38 Seconds, with OCIO config applied!

Open Color IO

Ok so my tests were already conclusive in my mind, but I wanted to go a little further since I already went through the hassle of installing Media Encoder.

So I tried to see how to do a simple color transform using Open Color IO, I had assumed it would have been an easy journey...and I was wrong.

There's no built-in support for Open Color IO, and there's not even a plug-in for it.

At best you'd have to go through After Effects to use Open Color IO. Seriously no real color management tools for Premiere Pro?

So I burned a LUT in that went from Arri LogC to Rec2020PQ. Not ideal and it added to the render time.

Assimilate has support for all the camera raw formats and has OCIO built in.

24k Resolution anyone?

I know it sounds crazy, but some stages need 24k resolution video plates, and with Sim-Plates, we can actually render and deliver at that resolution. It's only possible thanks to OTOY 's Octane Render Engine, Silverdraft computers for local rendering, and the Render Network Foundation for scalable cloud rendering!

But how do we take those exr sequences, composite them together, and render out at a staggering 24,576k x 12244 resolution? Through Assimilate of course!

I did try to see if I could work at that resolution with Media Encoder and 16,384x8192 was the hard limit. I realize for most studios, this is absolutely reasonable, so I don't expect this to be a deal breaker for most studios.

To learn more and to get your license to encode Notch LC, make sure to email [email protected]