pc2099:

I found this link: .........

The linked page dates back to almost two years ago, in the meantime the Avid DNxHD codec has had many minor revisions, and one major revision, the faulty dialogue box has been slightly improved among other things, (while Avid keeps claiming that it's a QT problem, not Avid's); perhaps the info on that page are a little outdated... an Avid codec is the best option if You want to fast export and import in the Avid realm, and even from/to Avid and other platforms, moreover, it's free and open. Just my 2c. Luca

You're absolutely right about the freshness of the info Luca – which of course holds true for ALL the codecs which as far as I can tell have all improved to this date. DNxHD is awesome and yes its free – problem is when you’re in the professional arena and earning  a living from your tools – when said tools start costing you money (in time) trying to find solutions for problems then they are no longer technically free are they? Not that Avid are alone in having issues – no one offering is ever perfect, but still...

I could be wrong but when DNxHD came out Avid were trying to position it as the de facto codec standard for the industry – I simply don’t see how this could ever be possible when its limited to quicktime only and plagued by these niggling deficiencies that surly would take any skilled coder a day at the most to fix.

On that note I would again point out the difference to DNxHD and Cineform, the later of which is not only better quality, faster to edit with but also has unmatched support. David who runs the show is a regular on the DVinfo forums and always there to answer questions, help with problems and ensure that updates flow regularly at the request of their users.

If Avid can take a leaf out of Cineforms book on service, fix DNxHD and increase the resolution beyond just HD AND include .avi support – well then that would change the game.

I see, but my point is that if You move files between Avid systems, or to third party for that matter, especially if those files have to go back to Avid, say after compositing or colour correction, then the DNxHD codec is the most convenient mean; as for the AVI format, do You really care? The first and most compatible revision has strict file size limits, the second revision has no file size limit but it has too many variations, it is not as compatible like revision 1 and seems more suitable for DVX than for editing.

I think its horses for courses - in a predominantly avid workflow then DNxHD would be most logical - irrespective it still doesnt solve the problem of what you do when on a 3rd party system / application like after effects and you need to render with an alpha channel does it?

And for me avi does matter as quicktime is simply not optimised for realtime editign on a PC like Cineform is. SO Im assuming if DNxHD was available in avi wrapper it may improve the playback / editing speed? Could be wrong there? Anyway all Im saying is yes Avid have a GREAT codec and good on them for meking it freely available BUT if they expect it to be adopted fully as a complete end to end solution then it needs to work across the board.

FYI you can edit with Cineform in Avid on Media Composer - again if your predominantly Avid end to end I cant see the benefit BUT for me - nice to know my lightening fast realtime codec of choice can be easily worked on if I have to throw it to anyone on MC.

I'm running Media Composer 3.5.1 and have to deal with some AVCHD footage - after much trial and error I managed to get the clips into Avid using Adobe Media Encoder or After Effects to transcode the clips from their native .MTS to an .MOV using DNxHD.

As previously mentioned you can navigate the broken properties page but despite the selections I make the files always end up encoded as 220 X and 709 colour space (I want 145-TR and RGB). This is really frustrating... should I just bite the bullet and upgrade to MC 5??

I'm on 5.0.3.5 at the moment and the DNxHD properties dialogue box allows all sorts of settings except that it always defaults to embed the alpha channel, no way to get rid of it... this is encoding from Sorenson Squeeze, don't know what is like when exporting from Avid, sorry for the bad news.

jcbel:

I'm running Media Composer 3.5.1 and have to deal with some AVCHD footage - after much trial and error I managed to get the clips into Avid using Adobe Media Encoder or After Effects to transcode the clips from their native .MTS to an .MOV using DNxHD.

As previously mentioned you can navigate the broken properties page but despite the selections I make the files always end up encoded as 220 X and 709 colour space (I want 145-TR and RGB). This is really frustrating... should I just bite the bullet and upgrade to MC 5??

Take a look at the release notes for the DNxHD codecs (separate download - I can never find them). In the last year or so Avid updated these to fix problems similar to those your are describing. I wonder if downloading and applying the latest codec pack would help?

The current release of MC SHOULD include the current codec release, whenever there's a codec update we are notified in the forums, and there's been none that I can remember of recently; with MC 5 the dialogue box has been improved, it keeps opening at the very top of the monitor with the title bar off screen, but all of the options now work as for compression, frame rate, colour space, PAL/NTSC, except for the alpha channel, always included by default, this will increase file size, and I think it slows down import.

Have same issue MC5X

Radman.

For what it's worth, I was able to render DNxHD with alpha from After Effects (mac) by first rendering to good ol' Animation codec, then opening that movie in QT Player and Exporting to DNxHD from inside QT. I had full access to all the buttons in the config window using QT.

It's dumb, but it works.

Hi mograph, and welcome to the forums; for what it's worth, exporting with alpha is not a problem: the export settings default to Million+, no matter what You do the exported file, even if the source has no alpha channel, will be exported with alpha information, see the thread that I linked a few posts earlier for additional info.