Ulrich W. wrote:In general I agree that loss-less compressed audio files or WAV are best quality, and that lossy compressing already lossy-compressed audio (like Vorbis or MP3) is not good, but those lossy formats typically only need 1/10th the size of an audio file (talking about 16bit 44.1kHz stereo). That can make a big difference if you have an audio library of 3000 titles or more on your disk. When you have 24bit 96 or 192kHz, those uncompressed WAV files need significant space.
Not really. On a typical project, I wind up with 5-6-7TB of image files (typically Red or Alexa or BMD Raw files), and the audio rarely goes about 100GB at most. This is trivial. It's the picture files that require a lot of storage. Our solution in 2024 is: buy a spitload of drives.
Also the audio-tracks of most consumer cameras use a lossy format even for audio already, AFAIK.
The decoding power needed for some formats may actually have an influence on the ability of real-time playback (unless using cached data).
We've been trying to convince everybody we deal with, "don't use consumer cameras for professional projects. Use professional cameras with real timecode, real lenses, and raw file capability. Do all that, and you'll rarely run into any problems. If we do get in H.264 files for a project, we have a workstation set off to the side that converts it all to ProRes 422 and WAV files over night. In the morning, we just relink to the better files and start working.