Hello everyone,
as it comes up to me on almost evry job I would like to hear your opinions on the right codec to use.
There is a very nice post from Daniel: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3730
which explains the different options, but I did make different experiences and I'm still looking for the best solution. So let me know your opinion!
Here are my personal experiences and opinions to the different options mentioned by Daniel:
DDS
DDS with alpha
not usable due to bad image quality on intense colors and very heavy color bending on any gradients. Comes out a bit better on real footage, but with computer animatuons it is worse than mpeg.
PNG
PNG with Alpha
Good quality on colour and gradients, but most of the time to performance heavy even for Rev3 Hardware. Everything with more than 1920 pixels wont work well.
BMP
Good quality on colour and gradients, but files are way to big for fast workflow and most storage systems. As long as Coolux workstations do not come with more diskspace on SSD Systems this is also not suitable. No Alpha
BMP with Alpha
Same like above but even worse as the Coolux image converter does not support BMP with alpha yet.
YCoCg
Here are actually two options. First is DDS as YCoCg out of the image converter. This will not improve image quality compared to DDS. So same issues as DDS. Conversion from PNG to DDS takes quite long.
Another issue here is that this version introduces a bug while using x-files. You will see a pink flash on loading this content onto a x-file. I did report that to Coolux, so there should be a fix soon.
This is so far my experience with image sequences. Daniel also mentioned the option to use single .mov containers with these codec options. For me this option does not work at all as there is no suitable way to encode delivered content into this. On the one hand the conversion takes way too long, on the other hand the Coolux Quicktime converter does not support image sequences as source material. And most of the content producers do reject to install the Coolux Quicktime converter on their systems as it tend to crash the export and is not working very well.
So in most of the cases I do get png with alpha delivered and so there is no suitable way to play such content on PB.
So what is your opinion and experience for the best option and workflow to palyback high quality content with Pandoras Box?
Thanks for your thoughts
Patrick