DNxHD Intermediate..... any users here?

Streamworks Audio wrote on 9/4/2009, 1:57 AM
I have been playing around with Intermediate codes and such for my AVCHD material over the last few days. I am very happy after testing Neo Scene... however I want to get a better idea of what else is out there before I purchase Neo Scene.

One codec that caught my eye was the Avid DNxHD - I downloaded the Quicktime codes and they were dog slow form Vegas... but tonight I created a batch script to batch create avs scripts for each m2ts file in a folder... I then took that one step further and created a batch script to create DNxHD mov files with FFMPEG. The speed was far better! And the sizes were about the same as Cineform. I was able to open them in Vegas and edit with no problems.

No because I only did a handful of test clips - I wanted to see if anybody else here was using this codec for their intermediate needs.

Also - I know there are mixed reviews on this... but what do you guys think about MJPEG for intermediate? I know the Cineform will out perform it... but by what margin? As I notice that Black Magic's hardware captures with MJPEG - can't be that bad can it?

Cheers,
Chris

Comments

dreamlx wrote on 9/4/2009, 3:28 AM
Hi,

I was testing the use of dnhxd in vegas some weeks ago, Everything went well (except lower performance than cineform) as long as I had less then 10 clips in the project. One more clip and vegas crashed. I am not sure if the crash was vegas, quicktime or dnxhd related. The files have also been created by ffmpeg like in your case.
rs170a wrote on 9/4/2009, 3:33 AM
Chris, I know that user PerroneFord uses this codec extensively so hopefully he'll chime in here.

Mike
ushere wrote on 9/4/2009, 4:19 AM
tried it, but found it much slower on tl than mxf.

leslie
Cheno wrote on 9/4/2009, 7:03 AM
DNxHD is nice because it goes back to FCP very solidly. Cineform seems more optimized for Vegas if you're looking for an intermediate codec that will remain strictly on the pc.

Personally, I like how Vegas handles DNxHD but to render it back out takes way too long.

I work both in FCP and Vegas so I'll bring my AVCHD and HDV in as ProRes in FCP and then work with it on both machines. No PC ProRes encoder though.

cheno
Streamworks Audio wrote on 9/4/2009, 10:33 AM
Cheno,

ProRes is on FCP only right? One cannot access that encoder from the iApps like iMovie? I am sure that I read that it is only for FCP. I think I found a Windows decoder for it though... so one could open the files in Vegas.

Cheers,
Chris
Laurence wrote on 9/4/2009, 11:27 AM
The problem with DNxHD as far as Vegas goes is that it has to exist in a Quicktime .mov container. Because of this there is extra overhead when using it with Vegas. The codec itself is great, but having access to it only as a Quicktime file is a problem.
Streamworks Audio wrote on 9/4/2009, 11:41 AM
My experience with Quicktime thus far in Vegas is that writing to a file is slow... reading from it is not so bad. I am sure it is not 'optimal' but decent enough for getting files to the time line.

Chris