Blackmagic Forum

Hi,

I was just curious, what is the best codec to edit in on DaVinci Resolve? Would it be ProRes422?

lmac666 wrote:I was just curious, what is the best codec to edit in on DaVinci Resolve? Would it be ProRes422?

ProRes or DNxHR are both fine. Choose the quality level appropriate for your source footage.

On a PC, Cineform is working well too. It's a bit slow on Macs.

The flavor of ProRes makes a big difference, and it depends on what you need. If you need responsive editing, ProResLT is significantly faster than ProRes422. There’s not as much of a difference between proxy and LT as there is from LT to 422.

But all of those are only suitable for editing, not grading. For grading, it’s best to stay in RAW if you can, but if not, at least use 4444.

This all depends on your machine, too. If you can decode better quality with no hitches, go for it. Do some A/B testing between different flavors and use the scopes to judge where you’re sacrificing quality.

The amount of fast drive space you’re willing to dedicate may also be worth considering.

Also, the quality of the source footage matters. If the originals used 411 chroma subsampling, transcoding to 4444 wouldn’t improve the quality, for example.

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You can also use a split workflow if your space or transfer speed is tight:
Do a first-light correction on your source to get it into the ballpark for the intended look and convert to ProRes 422 HQ. Not as flexible as 4444, but far less space needed and still good enough for final output in 8 bit.

Awesome, thanks for the replies.


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Edit with native codec unless you have performance issues. There is no better choice

If you have to choose ProRes will be the choice for Mac and on PC DNxHR (or Cineform). Do not use DNxHD (it's just outdated version of DNxHR) unless you specifically need to.
With Cineform you have 1 important feature- fractional resolution decoding, which means you can work on 6K sources on i3 laptop (with HD preview).