Better PDF transcoding?

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Is there a way to get a better transcoded result from PDF files? Right now they are super pixelated, like it’s only using a preview version of the PDF to do the conversion.

I know in the WebUI that it’s possible to grab the full res version, but it would be nice to not always have to do that, plus it’s a bit more complicated to do this in Shotgun Create.

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Hi Chad,

Thanks for the note! Right now PDFs get transcoded into a 720p movie, which is likely a lower resolution than your uploaded PDF.

For the time being I’d recommend logging your request to the product team, instructions for which are here:

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Yikes! Considering what types of imagery and text that are usually in a PDF, rasterizing text to 720p is pretty dismal. I guess I’ll be putting in that request straight away!

Thanks for the info, Brandon.

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Totally agree with Chad, PDFs are usually used to present layout of the printed content or to present detailed storyboards and briefings. Compression to 720p just makes review tool unusable, all the details are lost, pictures look blurry. We have to look into alternative solutions that handle PDFs and high resolutions for the images properly. That forces us to pay twice for the review tool, as well as breaks the solid workflow of reviewing/getting feedback/applying feedback process. We’ve already checked all the shotgun articles for compression, as well as requested the #feature on the roadmap website. We hope it is possible to improve the review experience for PDF and high resolutions pictires for print content.

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Are you using BlueBeam as your auxiliary PDF review tool?

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We’re using ProofHQ by workfront for reviewing PDFs or large image files.

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Has anyone figured out a workaround for this? eg custom transcode and upload?

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We custom transcode everything.

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Were you able to transcode and upload PDFs over the 2k image size limit? We have a3 and a1 PDFs we would like to review.

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As long as you can transcode whatever you are trasnmcoding to a valid mp4 file then you can upload that to the uploaded_movie_mp4 field.

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Hi Patrick,
I have not done it myself but it’s absolutely possible.
I would do it in the following order (in code of course):

  • convert pdf into single images
  • convert image sequence in mp4
  • upload to uploaded_movie_mp4 field

I already use the same approach to review single images in much higher quality than 2k.
The resolution is only limited with the mp4 h264 codec maximum resolution which is 8K UHD (8192x4320)

So you need to have/find a python programmer who can do it for you. Let me know if you need any help :wink:

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Thanks for confirming that!

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Thats how I would do it too :slight_smile: