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Final Master Output File delimna
Hello all!
I am a director who just finished up his first independent feature doc. I have zero experience/knowledge with Resolve so I hired a colorist to do the final grade.
We have a bit of a time crunch and are just about ready to finalize the master file.
The colorist wants to export one master file to give back to me, not individual clips. If they take this approach, they want to use avid DnxHD 10 bit.
I’m just a little concerned that there will be some quality loss. Is it possible to export uncompressed and would that be a better option? Something about how the project was set up in resolve is not conducive to your typical export back to Premiere, so they will be giving me just one master file.
Ultimately for final delivery, we hope to send to film festivals, digital download for our backers, and dvds for our backers.
Please let me know if you need any more information, as mentioned, I am not too familiar with Resolve at all.
Cliff notes: Looking for best quality if a feature has to be exported as one large file.
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9 Replies
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What codec was the camera original? Was it edited natively, or was it transcoded before editing?
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss ProductionsDavid is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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Hi David!
It was a mixture of formats, but the vast majority of the film was ProRez HQ shot on C100 log and Black Magic Pocket Camera. The film was edited in premiere natively.
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The issue is most likely that your colorist is working on a PC and thus unable to output ProRes. So, there are only a few choices for them, and the version Avid DNX that most closely matches ProRes HQ is a very reasonable choice. I think the one they should use is DNX 185x, where the x indicates 10-bit. Just be sure to quality check the final master, as there have been some reports of black frames when moving between ProRes and DNX, though those reports may or may not be issues involving “pilot error.”
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss ProductionsDavid is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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Thanks for the response David.
The colorist is using a Mac, I know that. Do you suggest exporting the entire movie as ProPrez then? (Instead of DNxHD)?
I was wondering if there was an uncompressed option that might work better (perhaps as an AVI.)
I’m just concerned about quality loss as we still need to take the master grade and compress it again for our final deliverables.
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I would stick with a ProRes master, and if you really want to squeeze every drop of goodness out of your video you could request that they output at ProRes 4444. However, the file will be 2X as large as HQ, and you will probably not be able to see any difference whatsoever in terms of quality.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss ProductionsDavid is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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Thank you very much David.
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Prores is always lossy compressed format. If he wants best quality output master, it should be exported in uncompressed format.
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Although of course its true technically that prores4444 or proresXQ are compressed formats, the real world perceptual difference between a Prores4444 or Prores XQ and uncompressed DPX is frequently zero.
Of course if you plan to manipulate the image further then going uncompressed could provide some benefit, but if this is an output which is not intended to be further manipulated then Prores4444 or XQ is typically not going to be perceptually different from uncompressed DPX.
best-
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[Nat Jencks] “Although of course its true technically that prores4444 or proresXQ are compressed formats, the real world perceptual difference between a Prores4444 or Prores XQ and uncompressed DPX is frequently zero.
“Precisely! Not to mention, I sincerely doubt the original poster has the hardware necessary to playback DPX files seamlessly.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss ProductionsDavid is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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