Blackmagic Forum

Wanting to ease the computer load when editing, and later transcoding to h264, I would like to transcode my footage to DNxHR. But, which one to use.
Current footage is 1080 50fps MP4 at 35Mbps. It will be graded and upscaled to UHD. Which flavour of DNxHR would be the most suitable?

As far as I'm aware DNxHR is for greater than HD resolutions, you seem to be working in an HD format so DNxHD might be adequate?

I've literally just switched from encoding my H.264 footage to DNxHD from ProRes as I've found it to be more windows friendly, Resolve is certainly more snappy for me using DNxHD 145 as my footage is only in 29.97 fps.

I think I tested DNxHR and the files were way bigger for DNxHR HQ with to my eyes no visible improvement, the original footage is from a GoPro 3 so its not like its amazing quality in the first place.

This is just MY experience, waiting for someone who has more knowledge to come in and maybe suggest I could have used DNxHD 100 or even 45 and still got the same quality based on my original footage.

This wiki link gives a list of the types DNxHD available for a given resolution & fps : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_A ... esolutions

Time for some experimentation I think.

My preference would be for Cineform files.

I too prefer the DNxHR codecs and discuss the differences between them in my document DaVinci Resolve Performance Tuning. You can grab it from my blog.

I tend to use DNxHR SQ (Standard Quality) at Quarter Resolution. The optimised files might then be one-tenth the original size, eliminating performance bottlenecks.

If you are doing extreme colour grading, fine matte work, etc. you may need better quality. Or just double-check your finished render carefully.

As always, it's a balance between performance and on-screen quality.

Avid is in the process of streamlining DNxHD. This means DNxHD will eventually be referred to as DNxHR even at HD resolutions. Both codecs are basically the same. DNxHR just supports a raster size bigger than 1080. It also offers varying degrees of quality for proxy compression.

Thanks for the information guys.

I'm not an expert user, but I did switch away from using DNxHR LB up to HQ.

I was not able to find the post on these boards, but at some point there was a thread where I found out that using the LB quality would cause issues with keying. Now I need to try to find that post to make sure I was not just dreaming.

MrHotter wrote:I'm not an expert user, but I did switch away from using DNxHR LB up to HQ.

I was not able to find the post on these boards, but at some point there was a thread where I found out that using the LB quality would cause issues with keying. Now I need to try to find that post to make sure I was not just dreaming.

444 should be used when keying is involved. LB is Low Bandwidth 8bit 4:2:2 and is the equivalent to DNxHD 36 and ProRes Proxy. Should be used for ...well...proxies only. Or extremely long takes where quality is less of an importance.