Apple Prores Proxy MXF vs DNXHD 36

[Michael Phillips]

Just to be clear… you are asking what the offline dailies proxy file format should be, not what is being captured in camera, correct?

Camera will most likely be ProRes 444. Maybe ARRIRAW (if so, plan for a 5x increase in storage, backup and transfer times) or possibly DNxHD MXF if that camera has the additional $5K option. Even so, if choosing between ProRes and DNxHD for camera master I would go ProRes as you will get an additional 20 minutes per card.

When it comes to offline dailies, I would recommend that whatever you are shooting camera master wise be transcoded to an MXF wrapped DNxHD as there is no real advantage toProres in the offline process and DNxHD is optimized for Media Composer where ProRes can me Avid managed, the codec itself is most likely not as optimized as DNxHD inside Media Composer.

Michael

[Ariadna]

Thanks, Michael. I really appreciate your time answering.

I’ve found this on another forum:
On the lower flavours Prores (and ProResLT, and ProRes Proxy) are 10bit but introduce more artifacting. ProRes Proxy is especially bad. DNxHD, on the other hand, goes down to 8bit on its lower flavours with better results at lower data rates…

DnxHD is free to decode (play back) and encode (create) on all platforms. ProRes decode is free for all platforms but encoding is limited to OSX. There are obviously hacks to get around this though.

Mac Pro (Mid 2010)
2 x 2.4 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
24Gb 1066 MHz DDR3 EECC
ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024 MB
Mercury Yosemite

[Michael Phillips]

10 bit is not really a concern when working at offline proxy. For offline in Media Composer, you are always safe with DNxHD 36.

Michael