It's like Joachim said, I have to use it for editing in Premiere CS4 and then
I do some color correcting in After Effects.
Then afterwards I have to render it out on a DVD for a customer.

Ok, then the Avid DNxHD is excellent for what you want to do. Some of the AJA codecs would work to, but I just stick with the Avid codecs because they do such a good job.

I've heard the same thing about mov and Vegas. All I can say so far is that DNxHD in the QT envelope is better than the native 7d files. So far so good, I'll see what happens when I start loading up the timeline with filters and other stuff. I've always had good luck with native HDV in Vegas 9. When I used Vegas 5-6, I always transcoded to Cineform. But it's my understanding that Vegas has had it together with HDV since version 8.

I believe Perrone Ford has a lot of experience with DNxHD in Vegas, perhaps he can jump in on this.

DnxHD is going to be faster on the timeline than the mpeg4 variants like we see in the 5D/7D. The .mov performance hit is still there, but modern machines like the i7 are nearly fast enough to cope with the issue. My dual quadcore still can't play 1080p real time in the Vegas timeline inside the .mov container. HDV moves like SD, as does my XDCamEX footage.

If cutting HD on the timeline is important to you, and you do not want to work with proxy files, then Cineform still makes the most sense for Vegas users. Other NLEs don't seem to have much of a problem with .mov files, so I have no hesitation recommending DNxHD.

So for Vegas users, I typically recommend one of the following:

1. Use an i7 processor and live with the small performance hit
2. Use Cineform
3. Use Proxy files and do traditional online/offline editing
4. Use DNxHD and live with the performance issues. Especially if sharing with Mac users.

I would love to hear what Perrone has to say on this as well as what you learn in the coming days while using DNxHD on the Vegas timeline.

I once converted some of my HDV footage to DNxHD and there was a definate performance hit over just using HDV on the timeline. I wasn't sure if it was the coded, the resolution of the file, or the fact the file was an .mov but my sense was that it was Vegas not playing nicely with .mov files that was doing me in.

I'm a fan of Cineform's products and find encoding from their application into their codec is straightforward and the editing abilities on the Vegas timeline are roughly, if not slightly behind, the same as working with raw HDV footage.

Jon

That frankly answers the question perfectly Perrone. As usual, thank you for your input here..

Jon

Perrone,

Kind of off-topic, but do you know if mpeg streamclip can batch-transcode long-gop nanoflash files and render out to DNxHD?

I'm in the middle of something, but give me a few minutes and I'll let you know.

Thanks, I just installed streamclip (I also have a trial version of calibrated software's xd decode for quicktime) and I was able to get a sample 100mbps long-GOP .mov file from CD's website to play (although with grey bars due to the trial version of xd decode). No luck on the .mxf sample. Could be a free, high-quality, cross-platform solution for dealing with nano files. I am still NLE-shopping so I can't test fully, but if this works it would be good news for me.

Could you also clarify whether .mov DNxHD files should be fully functional in Premeire, After Effects, and Final Cut Studio? I understand some of your previous posts to say that is the case, but I'm not sure if I'm reading you right.

Thanks for your input.

Ah, you know what. You'd be further along than me. I don't have access to Calibrated software's decoder, so I couldn't say whether it would work or not. It would be interesting to pull the file into Vegas and see what it does.

I just installed the DNxHD codec and converted a few frame-long clip, I could try to send you the output file if you can give me an email address. The only thing I can't figure is that the file size increased by 4.3 times (with the output quality slider at 100%), I would have figured that 100mbps source to 220mbps DNxHD should have given a smaller file.

Mike, as much as I hate saying this, but that was a very "Mac" thing to do! :) Leave the quality slider alone, and click on the "Options" button. This will bring up the real settings for the codec.

Set your color levels to 709 (since I am assuming you are not feeding the codec RGB level images), and then select the desired bitrate from the listing. You can choose the one that most closely resembles your footage.

That should give you the expected results. By choosing the 100% quality, you likely created a 10bit file.

Thanks, I was able to get the appropriate file size that way. There's a little glitch in streamclip on my computer where you can only see the top edge of the quality selector in the options window, but I got it to work. I'll make a post in the convergent design forum and see if anyone there wants to test the workflow all the way through, that's where I found out about the quicktime XDCam decoder.

Excellent. I thought you were on a Mac, and it was my understand that glitch doesn't show on the Mac. I apologize for not pointing that out. Honestly, it's been there forever, and I can't believe Avid hasn't solved it.

Ha, I was looking for a close substitute for Prores so I could avoid having to buy and learn how to use a Mac or pay $$$ for Cineform. I want to do some time-remapped slow motion with nano footage and already have a reasonably fast quad-core PC, so I figured my existing PC plus PP/AE/twixtor was a way better value than buying a new Mac plus FCP/Motion, but I wasn't sure of what was a suitable intermediate codec for that setup.