Blackmagic Forum

Hey,

I'm building some grades that involve bringing in some high quality grain plates to integrate into the footage at the clip level (using layer mixers). After some testing, the best compromise of file size for the grain plates vs quality comes down to ProRes 444 XQ vs 8bit Tiff sequence. The Tiffs come in at about 3x the file size of the ProRes, with both at UHD resolution.

My question - which of these two codecs (Please don't suggest a third option!) will have the least performance impact on playback fps, assuming all other variables are equal?

Just wondered if anyone with a more intimate hardware knowledge of how DR handles codecs might know this. If the performance difference is negligible, I'd rather stick with the 8bit TIFFs as they hold onto texture a little better than the Prores 444XQ, comparing with the original EXRs. But if there's a significant playback advantage to the mov, I'll go with that.

Can't really tell on my end as they both play back realtime on my machine, but wondering how a lesser system will fare.

Thanks!

If you provide enough bandwidth TIFFs are the fastest as they need no decoding.
ProRes will need less disk bandwidth, but more CPU.
You build workflow based on your abilities/systems. There is no single answer. Provide fast RAID and TIFF should be working fine, but take it to other system with no RAID and you may struggle.
Same with ProRes, but then CPU is the key part although it may be easier to provide enough CPU than disk speed. It's all so dependant. If you need not much of this TIFF footage then single NVME will do (SATA6 SSDs are too slow even for 24p), but if there is a lot of footage then you run out of space.

For 8bit ( I assume you don’t need 10bit) there should be not much difference between different formats like TIFF / DPX etc.
This could easily change if files are 10bit and use packing (3x10bit into 32 bit). There are few ways of packing and in case of GPU some of them can be pushed directly to GPU where they are natively supported. If I’m correct one of DPX packing options is natively supported by GPUs.
It all also depend on app. Resolve is a very closed system and those questions should be answered by BM.

There is also other question. Do you need 1:1 full quality preview all the time? If not then there is 3rd option as well which allows to always have real-time playback for the cost of lower decoding quality/preview (this is not possible with TIFF- you either have rt playback or not) . If you have no control over machines then it all gets even more complex and answer is not easy. This is why big places use unified setups so projects can be moved between rooms/workstations.

If working on the lesser systems becomes a problem I would also consider doing a bulk resize of the tif to a lower res, basically a manual proxy. Then for the final render just use the higer res TIF. FWIW though I have had slower NVMe performance on Windows esp as a scratch disk. On Mac / Linux I use XFS / F2FS / HPFS and APFS all seem to have noticeably better performance than NTFS.