I need to do some 4K high quality masters and was wondering If I should PROrRes (which I use a lot in Mercalli) or Sony XAVC. This would be to store masters. Don't really care about size or the time it takes to render want to capture the best dynamic range and overall quality of the stock (100mb 4K 8 bit) and Vegas VST's.
Thanks
If size is not a concern, then an uncompressed format will always be the best for archiving. ProRes and XAVC are all compressed formats, granted very good ones, but compressed.
Lots of discussion under the moniker "intermediates". I have used cineform in the past, but the current best recommendation seems to be MagicYUV. One "gotcha" might be how long are you going to archive them for, and will a proprietary format be in use X years from now.
...One "gotcha" might be how long are you going to archive them for, and will a proprietary format be in use X years from now.
That's been my feeling lately with what appears to be the ugly slow death of Cineform - I've been using XVAC-I for my master/editing format in Vegas 13 and it's working quite well. I'm converting in SONY Catalyst Prepare 2015.1.2. PPro CS6 chokes on the file format displaying a Green video screen only. Ideally DNxHD/DNxHR in an MXF wrapper would be the best compromise but not even VP15 recognizes the file format.
As mentioned above, stick to industry standard formats like ProRes if you plan on archiving for the long term, or you may have trouble finding anything that can play it in X years.
Both ProRes and XAVC I are industry Standards - Keep the original files and it is fine. Also because both files are decoded as 10bit in Vegas. I have also converted to Cinform in earlier days before Vegas became capable to read ProRes - BUT the conversion is very sloooww and if the codec is available also in future is another question.
Thanks all who answered. Been use ProRes and will just keep doing so.
I've been using XAVC-Intra and very happy with results. It's also a smart codec so no recompress on straight rerenders.
So all what kind of rendering speeds are you getting on high MB ProRes renders (please tell us what your hardware is)?
I work with CGi and so my use cases are a little different, but in order to keep my footage COMPLETELY lossless until the final step, I use the free, open-source AVI-based codec "utvideo": http://umezawa.dyndns.info/archive/utvideo/
(in fact, I also use this to export out of Vegas, and encode with an external app; I don't trust Vegas' encoders...)
2mn35 worth of 4K (3840x1620) comes out at "only" 20 gigabytes (that is the equivalent of roughly 1060mbps bitrate)
1mn30 worth of 2560x1080 is 7 gigabytes (626mbps). And then, I've got two 60 second videos, one of which ended up being 5.2 gigs, the other 4.9 gigs. The compressibility of footage is 100% dependent on what it is, so this may not benefit real-life footage too much, but perhaps some of you will find it useful; complete losslessness while still getting compressed file sizes is great.
Yes, we tested UT codec back in 2011, and found it slightly faster than Huffy and Lagarith, but a little slower than MagicYUV which was released later. Other than that, the vfw intermediates are about the same.
Never heard of MagicYUV before—it looks like a great upgrade! Thank you :)