In Broadcast - October 2012 - 58

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WWW.INBROADCAST.COM | ISSUE 13 - OCTOBER 2012

InMEDIA
Post-Production Formats And Suitable Workﬂows
Kieron Seth considers the support for acquisition formats and the key issues surrounding suitable workﬂows for editing in post...
There’s a trade-off between native support for camera codecs and codecs that are appropriate for use in post-production workﬂows – a clear dichotomy has emerged. Consider Adobe’s pitch: “Work with the latest tapeless formats thanks to new native support in Adobe Premiere Pro software for ARRI Alexa, RED Scarlet-X and RED EPIC, and Canon Cinema EOS C300 cameras, as well as XDCAM HD 50, AVCCAM, DPX, and AVC-Intra and DSLR footage. Native support means you won’t waste valuable production time transcoding or rewrapping and always have access to the original ﬁle’s pristine quality.” A stance supported by Grass Valley’s claims: “EDIUS continues 58 to be the world’s fastest editor when mixing formats such as MPEG2, H.264, and DVCPRO all on the same timeline... EDIUS software also provides support for virtually all industry-standard equipment and formats, including the new Canon XF format and Canon EOS movie format. Supported input formats include P2, XDCAM, GF, AVCCAM, NXCAM, QuickTime, and Windows Media. It also supports all DV and HDV cameras and decks and 3D post production.” Formats, it seems are an irrelevance in post-production. Place any clip on the timeline, edit natively and complete the project, quickly and without a fuss. Then again, neither Adobe nor EDIUS
Kieron Seth

dominate the editing world. Avid and Apple suggest a n o t h e r , radically different way of working. Avid states: “Native HD c a m e r a compression for mats a re Atomos ﬁeld recorders offer multiple format options efficient, but simply aren’t engineered to dismiss as unnecessary and timeconsuming. Avid may have a point… maintain quality during complex post-production effects processing. Uncompressed HD delivers superior Transcode For Quality image quality, but data rates and With certain DV-based codecs, ﬁle sizes can stop a workﬂow dead multiple generations of processing in post-production can indeed in its tracks. Avid DNxHD delivers markedly degrade images, by both efﬁciency and quality without compromises.” increasing on-screen artifacts. In an Next up is Apple: “Many of today’s industry dedicated to image quality, HD formats were developed under picture deterioration is simply signiﬁcant camcorder engineering unacceptable. Many HD formats, constraints and therefore limit the full such as AVC-Intra 50, HDCAM and quality that can be carried in an HD DVCPRO HD can visibly suffer multisignal. Other camera codecs preserve generational image degradation. full quality but are too complex To ove rcome this is sue, to achieve the software decoding transcoding original ﬁles to 10-bit speeds required for real-time editing. Avid DNxHD, Grass Valley HQX or ProRes encoding maintains Uncompressed HD formats deliver the highest image quality, but the the full original raster video, with high-bandwidth, RAID-storage no reduction in the horizontal requirements of uncompressed luminance and chroma samples. HD video are daunting for most The transcoded files are then users’ budgets. The Apple ProRes more resilient to intensive grading, codecs maintain the highest quality visual effects, and compositing and performance while requiring much less expensive editing and CONTINUED ON PAGE 59 storage hardware...” So a typical Avid / Apple workflow involves the initial process of transcoding or transmuxing into a proprietary intermediate codec, a process that a Grass Valley or Adobe spokesperson may
Avid DNxHD codec offers efﬁciency and quality

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In Broadcast - October 2012

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