With Apples’ announcement of Quicktime de-comissioning what is the future for HapQ, and in particular, within TD? I hear that Max/MSP has introduced the Viddell engine which supports HapQ encoding/de-coding.
+1 if anyone has any insight
Well the codec can go into all kinds of containers. Putting it into a .mp4 container would be easy. But with ffmpeg supporting encoding it doesn’t need to change really. Unless there is new information I don’t think the .mov container is going away, just the win32 version of Quicktime Player which they stopped updating years ago.
Or are you asking about something else entirely?
He may be asking about something else entirely…
Had me worried there a minute. You’re saying that since Quicktime for Windows is going away, HapQ is less useful? Or you figured it wouldn’t work? As far as I know, TouchDesigner doesn’t even require Quicktime being installed, so nothing will change from our point of view. We will still encode to HapQ on Mac as needed.
Bruce
Our MG team render out movies in Premiere/After Effects through the QuickTime plugin but with CC’s constant updates how long will this be supported? Creating an AVI for TD encoding will not be practical.
.MOV is a convenient container for Hap Codec files. Even though it’s currently the favourite way to encapsulate videos encoded with Hap, what Malcom is saying is that you could use ffmpeg (for example) to encapsulate Hap streams into .MP4 containers.
All that quicktime provides for Hap encoding and decoding is a jar with a certain type of threaded, cap. the yummy bits inside will be just as yummy if they’re put into a different jar.
I think the question is more full-pipeline from my point of view. From what I understand you can only use HAP on Windows outside of TouchDesigner because the QuickTime plugin, and with everything updating so fast, how long before TouchDesigner is the only app that can natively read/write it easily on Windows. At that point do you need to carry around a Mac and PC to work with HAP? There’s already the slight annoyance that you can only export HAP Q and HAP Q Alpha out of TouchDesigner, and not HAP or HAP Alpha.
You can encode hap/hapq on win/mac/linux with either libav or ffmpeg open source libraries - and this means also with all the different GUI encoders based on them.
(they use no quicktime at all)
and with plugins like AEmpeg you can encode with the ffmpeg library straight from the interface of After Effects. This should give you all the ffmpeg codecs, so rendering Prores on a windows machine, or HAP.
aescripts.com/aempeg/
Oh very cool, didn’t know about AEmpeg. That might be the solution then. Got to get all the designers to install it now.
Disclaimer: I have not used AEmpeg yet to encode hap, but it works directly on the ffmpeg commandline so it should work.
ffmpeg has many many codecs, but AEmpeg ships with the settings for just a few, so you need to add HAP settings in a preference file. Your designers can share&load this preference textfile, so it only has to be done once and then everybody can install this file.
See this video starting at 6:13 youtu.be/KHHwML3OIwA?t=6m14s how to add codecs to the list. If I translate the ffmpeg commandline to this format, I come to this which you need to add to that file:
[code]HAP:
- codec:hap
- wrappers: mov
- presets:
– HAP Q: -format hap_q -chunks 16
– HAP: -format hap_alpha -chunks 16
– HAP Alpha: -format hap -chunks 16[/code]
Ya I’ve used ffmpeg from command line quite a bit, but no-one other than devs really ever wants to do that 
so being able to export native from AE is great. will have to try it out.
The latest release of the installer supports HapQ alpha… Works in Adobe and MPEG Stream Clip. Finally a solution to easily transcode ProRes with ALPHA support.