Epidiascope

The Canon 5D Mark II shoots beautiful video, but it is unfortunately encapsulated in the .mov container, which the Playstation 3 will not play natively. After much trial and error, I’ve found that H.264 encoded video and Dolby AC3 audio muxed into a .m2ts file works well.

If you simply want to watch your unedited video on the PS3, follow the following steps:

• Install YAMB and select “Editing” and “Click to extract streams…”
• Select your input .MOV and select “Extract to Raw Format” and then click “Extract”
• Use BeSweet to convert the audio file (it’s a PCM wave) to AC3
• Install tsMuxeR, and add the extracted video file and converted audio file to the input file list
• Select “M2TS muxing” and specify your output filename
• Click “Start muxing”, and when it’s finished, copy the file to the PS3 and play it

The above steps work well, but don’t allow for much editing to take place. I use Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 to edit video, but none of the native H.264 output formats that include both audio and video seem to play back correctly on the PS3.

This is the workflow I use for editing and rendering these videos:

• Create a new project using the correct settings. Here’s my Adobe Premiere New Sequence Preset preset for the Canon 5D Mark II (It goes in the “Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Adobe\Premiere Pro\4.0\Settings\Custom” folder on Windows XP)
• Import your .MOV files and edit them as usual
• Export your project using my Canon 5D Mark II Video Export Preset for PS3 or use these settings:
  • Format: H.264
  • Export Video and Audio checked
  • Multiplexer set to None
  • Video set to NTSC, 1920×1080 resolution, 30fps, None(Progressive) Field Order, Widescreen pixel aspect ratio, High profile. 20-30 Mbps Bitrate
  • Audio Format set to Dolby Digital
• Open tsMuxeR and import your separate rendered video and audio files
• Select “M2TS muxing” and specify your output filename
• Click “Start muxing”, and when it’s finished, copy the file to the PS3 and play it

This produces full-resolution video output that does not drop frames, stutter, or display excessive transcoding artifacts.

This is what has worked for me. If you’ve got suggestions, or have problems with these methods, let me know and I’ll see if I can help you.