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

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

Interesting read - I was also searching for a good codec to use that included alpha channel support - Cineform Neo does BUT only in their Neo4K and up offerings which is $999 ($500 more than NeoHD which lacks the ability to encode with an alpha channel) Anyway I found this link: http://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=7&ved=0CEgQFjAG&url

lol - yeah I think Im just going to bite the bullet and spend the $ to go with Cineform. The way I see it with DNxHD is you've got 3 camps - Adobe - Apple and Avid - all competitors and neither wanting to step in and fix anything that isnt directly related to their piece of the pie. Also from the limited testing I've done with Adobe Mercury

Im running CS5 and quicktime is 7.6.6 - as I said I dont have any avid products or NLE installed - just the DNxHD 2.1LE codec from their website.

Yes well the Alpha radio buttons are 100% broken - not just unpressable as you can actually tab navigate through the various buttons and elements - the two radio buttons at the top which is 709 or RGB you can just hit the space bar and it will change the selection - this also works in After effects BUT the space bar simply will not turn on the radio

Im on a PC Win7 and using Adobe Ppro and After effects. I did install the DnxHD codec 2.1LE I downloaded from the AVID website. With the config window I can see options for Alpha channel but no matter I cannot highlight any of the radio buttons to enable this. Im trying to render out an animation from After Effects with alpha but using DNxHD it doesnt