What’s the highest/most appropriate resolution?

[Michael Hancock]

What is your source material?

The best quality would be 1:1 10-bit, which is uncompressed 10-bit. If you’re going with a DNxHD codec you’d go with 220x, also 10-bit.

Ultimately, it sounds like your resolution will be determined by the throughput of your EditShare system. Your producer can want the highest quality all day, but if you can’t play it back it’s no good to you. And if your source footage is HDV or DVCPro or some other compressed HD format, going uncompressed is a waste of drive space.

Michael

[Caton Clark]

If they shot in DVCPRO is it worth it at all to up-res to 220 or will 145 be the best?

I’m not really sure why they didn’t go with DVCPRO when they loaded, but they went with 145, so here i am.

[Rory Brennan]

Caton,

You might have a hard time convincing your producer of this but they are unlikely to see any difference between 145 and 220. Mostly ego says otherwise. Furthermore, your system is unlikely to handle anything higher than 220x.

Finally and I believe most importantly, DVCPro HD is a rough equivalent to DNX100 8bit (if it existed), thus 145 is the best quality your going to get. Anything higher will not improve the footage.

RB

Rory Brennan
Editor
New York City

[Caton Clark]

Thanks for your input, Rory. That’s really helpful.

I also found out that they ultimately want to output back onto DVCPRO HD tapes to finish, so I’m planning to use all the info I’ve been given on here plus the fact that they are going back to the original format they started with to overwhelm them into agreeing with me.

I hope it works . . .

[Michael Hancock]

With what Rory said, DVCProHD won’t get better at220. If they really, really, really want 220 or 220x you can just select your 145 clips and transcode them to the higher resolution. It would essentially be the same as transcoding the DVCProHD clips to 220. You can’t add quality that isn’t there.

Good luck with it. If they’re dumping back to DVCProHD, they’ve already wasted space by converting it to DNxHD145. Hope you don’t have to waste more going to 220.

Michael

[Benjamin Mckay]

im just gonna chime in here with a question. I have some dvcpro hd 1080i footage. in the format tab i can choose between standard(1920×1080) and dvc pro hd (1440×1080) rasters. I was told to transcode the material to DNxHD 145 because it was less of a resource hog. BTW i am not outputting back to DVC PRO HD, im going to quicktime ref files. the only way i have the option to transcode the material is by selecting the standard raster format. is all of this useless and redundant, or am i proceeding in the most efficient workflow method? any help would be awesome, thanks