Masters at 4K; what codec do you use?

[Sami Sinervä]

I built myself a PC last spring, coming from a Mac OS X.

Now I have made onlines of two music videos at 4K and would like to output 4K masters for storage, but I have no idea what codec to use for best quality and compression. DNxHD is restricted to 720 and 1080 resolutions. ProRes does not exists on Windows.

Any suggestions, recommendations?

Thanks

 

[Phil Holland]

For 4K masters I use uncompressed quicktimes and DPX. Just depends.

 

[Joseph Coleman]

I would go with OpenEXR for master. I've also used Motion Jpeg in .mov wrapper before.

 

[Björn Benckert]

DPX is standard.
Quicktimes are not recomended since it's kind of all eggs in one basket.. a corrupt mov file means no film... a broken dpx means missing frame

 

[Alexander Mejia]

I would recommend either DPX or OpenEXR as well. There are so many problems with Quicktime files outside of an Apple workflow. The DPX and EXR will be supported for a longer time than Quicktime, considering that Apple doesn't even deliver Quicktime files anymore. (They deliver .mp4)

 

[Caden Nash]

Final Cut Pro 7.0 outputs all these codecs?

 

[Sami Sinervä]

Thanks for the quick replies.

I am pretty unexperienced with DPX, and I've noticed, since it is frames that are saved, there is of course no audio track.

Do you just make a separate WAV export for that and store it in the same location?

Anyway, I guess it is time to buy some new harddrives to have room for all that uncompressed data.

 

[Phil Holland]

I should expand on this.

When a job is complete and for archival purposes what I export is:

-DPX - visual master
-Wav - stereo through 7.1 audio mix down
-Uncompressed Quicktime with audio
-high bit rate 4K and 1080p .mp4 (h.264) for quick review

As other have mentioned, DPX is the industry standard and that's the most important thing to export in my opinion.

Most of my deliveries are in DPX, EXR, or 16 bit TIF when I hand off material.

 

[Sami Sinervä]

Thanks for the advice, Phil!

 

[Petri Teittinen]

Good info, thanks everyone.