I’d like to keep the film look as close to the original as possible (color correction aside), but I’m struggling to find the appropriate codec or setting to do so.
So far I think I want to use DNxHR HQX 12-bit for storing a “Master” copy of a film. It looks pretty much indistinguishable from what I’m seeing in DaVinci, but it’s also incredibly huge, so nothing I can just hand out to anyone.
For “delivery” the natural choice seems to be H.265 or H.264, but the compression really wants to get rid of the film grain, so the original grain becomes slightly blotchy. It does look a little bit like noise reduction, which I’d be okay with if it didn’t also reduce the sharpness of the film.
I’d like to figure out how I can avoid that - either through a more suitable codec or through different settings - as long as the film itself stays mostly untouched. It’s probably less of a problem if you prefer to make the film look more “contemporary” with de-noising and upscaling etc.
I think you can see the difference even with the (also compressed) upload.
^ H.264 (Using Handbrake: Quality 20, 10bit, Tune: Grain*)
No idea what happened to the vignette!
(*) With “Tune: Grain” it’s already better than without, but maybe there are a few more tips/tricks around.
haha. I guess it’s all relative. We did a project last summer that was 27TB - 16bit DPX because it’s what the client wanted.
If you’re on a Mac, ProRes 4444 is a good bet. If you’re on Windows, DNX is your closest equivalent - it’s effectively uncompressed in terms of image quality but it does have light compression - for ProRes, about 6x. For the output formats you’re talking about, like H264 it’s typically more like 20-30x compression, which is going to eliminate a lot of high frequency information and smooth out randomness (grain) in order to achieve those numbers.
If you’re outputting to HD from Resolve, 20mbps H264 is similar to what you’d get on a Blu-ray. That said, you have to watch out a little because resolve does MP4/H264 encoding differently depending on the platform - Mac, Windows, or Linux.
We decided for Sasquatch (update coming soon, I hope), to capture everything to EXR Half-float. It’s huge, and we’re working with 16bit images at 14k x 10k pixels. But it’s built into OpenCV, where we’re doing all our image processing anyway so we get that for free. It opens up in Resolve or Phoenix, which we can use to export it out to a saner format for day to day work.
I’m on Windows, so no ProRes for me.
Video editing has always only been a hobby thing for me, so I can’t properly dispute what I’m suggesting here, but after a bunch of encoding tests I’ve found these settings to come very close to the look of the source material:
4.2.2 subsampling seems to have the biggest impact. Unfortunately I need MPV player to properly decode this format, but the player is portable, so it’s not too impractical.
Screenshot is from “Handbrake”.
ProRes works on Windows. there are several ways to go about this:
Quicktime for Windows gets you the ability to play it back in any quicktime-aware application (ignore the dire warnings about security updates - those apply to the Quicktime player application, which is only one part. The underlying quicktime engine is available to apps that support it, and there aren’t security issues there).
DaVinci Resolve can play, but not write to ProRes files. Adobe Premiere on Windows can read or write ProRes. And ffmpeg can make ProRes files as well.
You’re always going to be better off working with a less compressed format that’s not using inter-frame compression (most, but not all, MPEG variants do this, though under the hood, ProRes is a very high bit rate MPEG file format). It will also give you 4:4:4 color sampling. On a practical level, you don’t necessarily need this, but when dealing with things like faded film every little bit counts.
For DaVinci Resolve, there is a program called Voukoder ( https://www.voukoder.org/) that lets you code in Proress and many other formats easily from the Resolve Deliver page.
This programme used to be free, but since December 2024 you have had to buy a licence for $69.
From what I’ve read, DNxHR HQX is comparable to ProRes, and I think I don’t need to switch - I’m only scanning family films.
However, something just occured to me (and you seem to know what you’re doing, as opposed to me just following instructions…): In DaVinci I’m making a color space transform to Rec709 on the “Timeline” node since my display only supports sRGB. When rendering for DNxHR HQX @12-bit , do I ‘lose’ all the color information that goes beyond sRGB/Rec709 (and that the PiHQ camera might have captured - I’m not sure about the biggest color space it potentially covers)? Or is that just the “displayed” or interpreted color space and all the rest of the data would still be there in case I get a better display at some point?
