Recently I was doing an activity that I have previously found myself doing on multiple occasions: Looking through all of the different codecs that are options to render out my newly perfected 1080p23.976 scene into. I could choose the apple Animation codec, which is rumoured to be nearly lossless, at the expense of harddrive space and at the cost of being unable to play it back in real-time, but to the benefit of having a lossless image. A similar predicament with the 8-bit 4:2:2 Lossless codec. On the other end of the spectrum, there is the temptation of encoding to something like mjpeg, and having a small file, easy playback, but horrendous image degredation.
Apple and Red Cinema have been hyping the new Apple ProRes 4:2:2 codec for a while. “Perhaps I should use that!’ I thought. “If this codec can compress 4k video from the Red camera down to 200mbits/sec, then surely it could help me with my mere 1080p workflow problems!” And so then I decided to do some research about just what technology the ProRes 422 codec used and how it compared to others of similar variety.
During that process, I came across this comparison of the ProRes 422 codec and the Avid DNxHD codec, which is apparently one with a similar intended specialty of “Why yes! I can compress your HD footage so you can actually work with it, while preserving detail!” Apparently, the ProRes 422 codec is a bit more lossy at similar bitrates than Avid’s codec. After a little bit of searching, I discovered that not only are Avid’s codecs freely available, they are cross-platform between Windows and OSX. This issue was lending me trepidation earlier on as well, myself considering what would happen if I had a bunch of scenes rendered out in Apple ProRes 422, and then needed to reboot into Windows to do some specialized work on something, only to be unable to read my files!
Anyway, barring complete disaster, I will be using the Avid codecs for some of my needs.
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