Why you should use Avid DNxHD and Apple ProRes

RedShark by David Shapton

Modern cameras are simply amazing. The idea that you can record cinema-quality video on a still-picture camera that costs only a few thousand dollars still seems unreal at times.

But while it’s true that more people than ever can afford to make top-end video, this new capability poses a few questions for the ideal editing workflow.

The pictures from the latest generation of cameras - and that includes DSLRs and dedicated video camcorders - are stunning. No one expected to be able to get pictures this good for so little money.

The quality of the images is all the more surprising when you realise how much they’re being compressed to fit into the internal storage in the cameras. HD video involves almost unimaginable amounts of data. An uncompressed Full HD image (1920 x 1080 pixels) at 30 frames per second generates the equivalent of seventy five copies of War and Peace per second! Cameras compress by as much as seventy times to fit it into in-camera storage.

What that means is that less than two percent of the original data is left in some cases, which makes it even more remarkable that the resulting pictures look so good. Of course, the codec makes sure that the data that’s discarded won’t be missed too much. What remains is the data that really matters read more...


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