best Quicktime codec from PC....
 

hey guys, I need to deliver a small project Ive done to a TV station,
they have requested it as a .mov,
its about 90 sec of Cineform Neoscene 720p,
so, i can easily give them H.264 (easy to upload too), but if I wanted to give them a better quality codec which should I use?
I tried 10bit uncompressed, but it is 5.5 Gb and they need it by tomorrow morning. my internet here only uploads about a Mb a min.
so as a final Cut user what would you like to receive?

H.264 is not a low-quality codec, but a high efficiency codec. With H.264 you will always get the lowest bitrate for a given quality level (and this quality can be as high as thinkable).

As a FCP editor well versed in working with PC's, I'd like to receive and Avid DNxHD file. Outside of that, maybe motion JPEG. FCP isn't exactly the codec king. It really likes ProRes. And that's not available to PC users, so anything else is something of a kludge.

You need to ask someone at the station. Someone on the engineering or post production staff can tell you what they will and wont' accept.

thanks guys,
last night I ended up converting the cineform to quicktime 10 bit yuv on the PC,
then split it in 2 to get it on a thumb drive, put it on an imac, converted to prores,
and then finally hit the yousendit button and went to bed......
woke up this morn and it had failed at 88%, :(
So now I have to quickly send them at least a crappy h.264 version for their presentation this morning, and then the prores later.

Nice to here from you Perrone, dont see you much around the Vegas forum anymore, are you still using Edius as well, or did you change to FCP exclusively?

I moved to Avid. Still use Vegas for quick and dirtys... Got a project in it right now for proofing before I do the real one in Avid.

Can a Premier or Edius user easily export an Avid DNxHD file? Right now I am recommending AVI Motion JPEG for all the PC producers who are sending files to me. h.264 is useful, small and can look great but the quality varies from source to source.

Oops, just saw that the original post said it's coming from PC. As ProRes is only a decoder for PC that really won't work. I agree that Avid DNxHD would be best.

A decoder for ProRes on a PC has been available for quite some time. It works great.

Apple ProRes QuickTime Decoder 1.0 for Windows

The Avid DNxHD also works well.

Yes. It's the same as outputting any other .MOV file.

AVI is fine. I like DNxHD because it's available in any NLE that can read and write a .MOV, it moves from PC <-> Mac seamlessly, it's quality is similar to ProRes, and it's absolutely free. It also supports an alpha channel which many other codecs do not.

Thanks, I'm updating my delivery specs right now!

Read the whitepaper and familarize yourself with the codec:

http://www.avid.com/static/resources...ents/DNxHD.pdf

As long as the encoding codecs are free, AVID DNxHD seems like a good way for PC/Mac video file compatibility.