Alternative to Uncompressed 10-bit

[Abd Samad Hassan]

Hi guys,

Before we got our Scratch, we'd make SD master of our feature films on Mac with uncompressed 10-bit. But since that's not an option on PC, would like to ask this:

What codec do you guys output from Scratch to make SD master of your work?

Thanks,
Sam

[Alexander Ibrahim]

Not using Scratch. Most of my clients don't care what I use.

I've been asked for ProRes, DVCPRO 50 & DV50. Usually they want the DV formats in addition to uncompressed 10 bit. Some clients are accepting the ProRes HQ as the SD master.

I have had a few clients ask about ProRes 4444 output for SD & HD masters, but no one has specified it as yet.

I have also been asked for D-5, Betacam SP and Digital Betacam- all tape formats so a deck rental was needed. Its been a few years for any of these. Usually that's for broadcast.

On a single occasion I was asked for Avid Meridien and/or DNxHD.

[Barend Onneweer]

You can export to uncompressed 10-bit on Windows using an AJA or Blackmagic codec. Those are free downloads on the resp. websites.

Barend

[Frank Cueto]

Just a heads up, those 10-bit codecs are not quite lossless.

Just an FYI.

[Hans von Sonntag]

You will find that all of those QT codecs shift in gamma and sometimes in the matrix as well. At least that is what they do here. QT on Mac is bad and QT on Windows is even worse. You need a LUT for compensation.

AVI on Windows works well and hardly shifts gamma. If that could be an alternative for your clients this is a viable option.

On the Mac ProRes 4444 seems to be the only QT codec that renders without any shifts from SpeedGrade. I belief that this is due to its RGB nature on the contrary to the other ProRes codecs which are YUV 422 based. So, ProRes 4444 delivers AFTER rendering what you saw in the grading process.

We use ProRes 4444 in conjunction with Smoke on Mac as a well working camera footage codec as long as no GS work is involved. Unfortunately Smoke on Mac is currently not able to export ProRes 444 so we have to use QT uncompressed 10 Bit 422. Here, we encounter a strong gamma shift which we compensate quite satisfactory with a 1.2 gamma correction when out putting. We also found that compensation is not necessary when creating a H264 copy because the H264 encoding introduces a gamma "correction" that is very close to the original footage. Welcome to QT!

I'm sure that Scratch has these capabilities as well. I would test some codecs and gamma compensation LUTs. Some codecs shift also in the matrix and others only in the gamma. Gamma compensation is pretty easy to achieve, IMHO, while creating a LUT for matrix compensation is beyond my knowledge.

Hans

[Barend Onneweer]

Of course the YUV codec introduce chroma subsampling and gamma shifting.

I've had good results with the Blackmagic 10-bit RGB codec though.

Barend