DNxHD - When is it coming?

[Jack Zhang]

The time is now for the recorder companies to transition away from ProRes and .MOV. With MOV being a security risk on Windows, it's no longer as cross-platform as it was before. The dated 32bit hooks for Quicktime just won't cut it anymore.

[Chris Medico]

Originally Posted by Jack Zhang

The time is now for the recorder companies to transition away from ProRes and .MOV. With MOV being a security risk on Windows, it's no longer as cross-platform as it was before. The dated 32bit hooks for Quicktime just won't cut it anymore.

What he said plus the gama shift errors that Apple refused to address will die with quicktime. About damn time too..

[Christopher Young]

Interesting that there is a deafening silence from Convergent Design. Dan Keaton is usually quick to respond.

Dan if you are following these posts what is CD's point of view on this lack of support for .MOV on Windows going forward? Virtually everyone I know shooting with ProRes on CD and Atomos products are on Windows. Some on Apple but not as many as back in the days of FCP. Still offer ProRes but add Cineform or Sony XAVC MXF as option so we are not dependent on an OS system manufacturer who's main stock in trade these days is iProducts. You did very well back in the days you worked with Sony on the MPEG2 MXF codec with the NanoFlash. You can do it again I'm sure.

I for one won't be buying any more ProRes recording products.

Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney

[Gary Huff]

At NAB this year I told every monitor/recorder manufacturer I talked to (I.e. Atomos, Convergent, Videodevices) that they needed to implement DNxHR in MXF ASAP, and that it would cause all the Windows users to switch to them. Some of the people I talked to poo-pooed the notion that there was any significant amount of Windows users to make much of a dent in their bottom line, so I was talking to Adobe about Win vs Mac Creative Cloud installs, and they felt like it was nearly 50/50.

I am on Mac, but I sympathize with the issues because I was on Windows for quite a long time.

[Jack Zhang]

Originally Posted by Christopher Young

Still offer ProRes but add Cineform or Sony XAVC MXF as option so we are not dependent on an OS system manufacturer who's main stock in trade these days is iProducts. You did very well back in the days you worked with Sony on the MPEG2 MXF codec with the NanoFlash. You can do it again I'm sure.

Thing is, wavelet codecs (which is what ProRes and DNxHD/DNxHR are) run really efficiently on FPGAs, which is what CD uses a ton of. Sony's H.264 based codecs require dedicated encoder chips, which require more R&D.

Wavelet is the way forward, but not with ProRes. DNxHR is the way forward. Cineform is also owned by GoPro, so once again, they don't have any interest in further advancing that codec, same with Apple.

[Dan Keaton]

Originally Posted by Christopher Young

Interesting that there is a deafening silence from Convergent Design. Dan Keaton is usually quick to respond.

Dan if you are following these posts what is CD's point of view on this lack of support for .MOV on Windows going forward? Virtually everyone I know shooting with ProRes on CD and Atomos products are on Windows. Some on Apple but not as many as back in the days of FCP. Still offer ProRes but add Cineform or Sony XAVC MXF as option so we are not dependent on an OS system manufacturer who's main stock in trade these days is iProducts. You did very well back in the days you worked with Sony on the MPEG2 MXF codec with the NanoFlash. You can do it again I'm sure.

I for one won't be buying any more ProRes recording products.

Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney

Dear Chris,

For the past few days, I have been driving from Los Angeles to South Carolina.

We are taking the problem with Apple dropping support for QuickTime Player for Windows very seriously.

We have been developing Avid DNxHD for quite some time. We can record and playback Avid DNxHD in Odyssey's in our lab.

This code is being integrated with our regular firmware.

There are two possible "wrappers" for Avid DNxHD; a Quicktime Wrapper and a MXF wrapper.

We will provide more information on the "Wrapper" or "Wrappers" in the future.


We intended to release our support for Avid DNxHD as soon as possible.

Respectfully,

[Chris Medico]

Dan,

Will you offer DNxHR as well? That will be required to record in 4k. DNxHD doesn't support 4k.

[Christopher Young]

Originally Posted by Dan Keaton

.

There are two possible "wrappers" for Avid DNxHD; a Quicktime Wrapper and a MXF wrapper.

We will provide more information on the "Wrapper" or "Wrappers" in the future.

We intended to release our support for Avid DNxHD as soon as possible.

Thanks for the heads up Dan and no thanks Apple. Man that's a long drive! That's like Sydney to Broome over here. For us that's about 4,500 Klms. Must be about the same for you. Be safe, get plenty of rest on those long stretches.

The old NanoFlash MPEG-2 MXF wrapper is still alive and well today so fingers crossed you go for MXF again. Especially with the Material Exchange Format being adopted by so many in the industry, especially the broadcast industry. For those interested:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_Exchange_Format

The sooner we get away from proprietary wrappers owned by the likes of Apple, Google, Microsoft etc. the better off all of us will be. Chris M. makes a good point on DNxHR as obviously demand for 4K/QFHD is becoming paramount these days. Look forward to more news down the road.

Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney

[Jack Zhang]

Actually, Google's WebM is a fork of Matroska. That's all open source.

However, Matroska as a container for professional use is likely never going to be adopted cause it's clearly been linked to piracy.

We need to avoid AVI and MOV moving forward. MXF is the only cross platform format going forward.

OP1a is going to put a lot of I/O and computational stress on the FPGAs, since the output has to be muxed into a single file. OP-Atom writes separate files for each stream, so it doesn't need muxing. My testing on a 5400RPM drive shows Atom being superior to OP1a in terms of less I/O stress in Premiere CC.

[Christopher Young]

Agree with everything you say Jack.

My take on the OP1a and OP-Atom differences Jack.

Give me OP1a any day as I prefer to work with the muxed streams. I haven't edited Panasonic P2 MXF footage for a while now, which are OP-Atom based MXF, and I have a few nasty memories from those previous times.

All is fine until you get a set of files sent to you where the "Lastclip" TXT file is corrupt in some of the file groups and you can't read the files which are all in individual folders for video and audio streams. Having all those folders is unnecessarily complicated in my opinion. If one becomes corrupted it becomes a disaster of monumental proportions to sort out and reassemble and I've seen that problems too many times. I've never had that issue when all the streams have been muxed together as in OP1a Sony XDCam MXF files. Will happily trade off more CPU overhead to avoid OP-Atom MXF issues if I can.

Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney

[Jack Zhang]

Blackmagic saves the audio and video streams for OP-Atom in the same folder as opposed to multiple folders like in P2.

For instance, an SSD recorded in "DNxHD MXF" will have on it's root:

Capture0000V.mxf
Capture0000A1.mxf
Capture0000A2.mxf

At the high datarates of 4K 60p, it makes more sense not muxing the audio stream in the same file. I get that some people want to ensure a single stream to ensure there's no separate file corruption, but moving forward, the recorder companies don't need to use complex folder structures like how P2 does it. All the files will be on the root.

[Christopher Young]

BM's implementation is very basic though Jack.

If you require full metadata access, metadata editing and auditing like you have with both Panasonic's and Sony's apps for handling MXF in a broadcast environment where copyright information needs to go through the process of file ingest and all file manipulations thereafter you need all the information that is contained in those Panasonic folders. Same goes for all the information that is stored in Sony's single muxed file system.

The Sony workflow system is neat and all self contained and when you are working with thousands of hours of archive footage there is far less chance of corruption. To see what you can do with Panasonic's P2 structure have a look at

P2 Contents Management Software | P2HD Series | Broadcast and Professional AV

The BM file structure is not close to to having or offering a professional MXF workflow like the Panasonic P2 Contents Management software offers and I stress workflow for professional network central server applications. Agreed if you don't need these sorts of data manipulation access facilities then yes I would agree a simpler video and audio only root directory folder layout would be a much better idea. If you do need all the workflow capabilities of a true MXF file database management system I for one would rather see it all wrapped up so to speak in one muxed wrapper a la Sony's OP1a way. It all depends on the needs dictated by the given workflow requirements as to what is preferable.

Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney

[Jack Zhang]

Okay, so OP1a is a much better choice for metadata. It's not efficient for I/O purposes but I can see how you can add tons of metadata into the file.

Blackmagic choosing OP-Atom might have faltered for facility based metadata then.

[Christopher Young]

Fully agree with those three observations Jack.

Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney

[Dan Keaton]

Dear Friends,

We have been discussing OP1A versus OP-Atom with many high level experts
(including major television networks) recently.

OP1A has an advantage in that all of the streams, video + audio are in one file.

Thus, there is far less chance of a file not arriving at its destination.

Of course, there may be other opinions.

We certainly have the horsepower to handle OP1A.

And we have lots of expertise in wrapping the files in MXF.

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Dear Chris Medico

Yes, Avid DNxHR will be needed for 4K and Ultra-HD.

To state the obvious, we are working hard to get Avid DNxHD ready first.

Respectfully,