DPX vs Prores4444 for Sony A7 DSLR 4K Footage

[Jason Morehouse]

Hi,

I’m currently working on VFX-heavy short and the VFX artist has been sending his work in prores4444 files. I’m used to working on DPX or TIFF and was wondering if prores will limit color grading capabilities in my film. As expected of shooting on DSLR, there’s a lot of grain and lighting problems in my film. Will there be a big difference working off of prores4444 files instead DPX? I remember prores is 12bit while DPX is capable of 16. I’m wondering if I need to ask the VFX artist to re-export to an uncompressed format for better color grading. Is there very a noticeable difference? The final export will be a DCP for film festivals.

Thanks in advance for your answers.

[Tero Ahlfors]

Your camera probably shoots highly compressed 8-bit footage in 4:2:0 chroma subsampling. I would say both of those formats are kinda overkill but I would probably use the prores4444 especially if you’re actually working in 4K. Those uncompressed 4K DPX’s will be pretty heavy and need really fast drives to playback.

[Jason Morehouse]

Oh, so since the Sony A7 mp4 container is 8bit anyway, dpx will be an unnecessary bump up… Is that what you mean? Any room for improvement with my colorist would be great but re-exporting with dpx would definitely be a pain in the ass. Is there no noticeable advantages besides faster playback with dpx on Davinci? Thanks.

[Tero Ahlfors]

[Jason Morehouse] “dpx will be an unnecessary bump up… Is that what you mean?”

Yes.

[Jason Morehouse] “faster playback with dpx on Davinci?”

I kinda doubt that especially if you’re working with 4K sequences and you don’t have a 2GB/s RAID.