Compositing With Apple Animation Codec Quicktimes? Any Thoughts? (3)

[filmasart]

I was hoping to get a quick technical answer on this if anyone is has one. Here's the situation. I'm sending a music video EDL to telecine so they can retransfer selects then the selects are going to be output as image files of some sort for animation. Since I do compositing as my day gig and freelance editing at night, I suggested that the transfer house output targa, sgi, or tif's files uncompressed. Obviously Open EXR, DPX, or Cineon would be ideal for CG but the transfer house doesn't have that kind of capability. But for some reason the telecine house suggested apple animation quicktimes and the animation company said that was ok. The director is asking me for my opinion and instinct tells me that is a bad idea especially since there is a lot of green screen keys and secondary color correction to be done after the CG is composited. Apple animation is a great codec but am I right in thinking it's not a good idea for this sort of pipeline? I have actually composited with apple animation in the past when there was no other option available and felt like the dynamic range of the image was hindered. Is this codec really "lossless" in a compositing environment? If files are output from an apple animation quicktime codec to an image sequence does this "decode" the quicktime and return it back to uncompressed? I don't know why telecine suggested to give them apple animation, probably because they think it will be faster and easier on their systems.

[user_deleted]

animation on 100% is lossless compressed, so converting it to tga or so should result in identical images (if not there's a bug in your workflow).. note though that animation is 8bit only and you shouldnt use keyframes (had weird artifacts once).

also note that the animation codec is RGB and the transfer house very likely will capture to a YUV codec, so there's going to be a transcoding step with possible problems. so ask the transfer house what their native capture codecs are and make a desicion from there..

options (from best to possibly not so good):
- native blackmagic 10bit 4:4:4 RGB
- native uncompressed 10bit YUV 4:2:2 (note that shake seems to have problem reading those on intel macs, some people had more luck with the blackmagic YUV 4:2:2 version)
- native uncompressed 8bit YUV 4:2:2
- uncompressed YUV converted to Animation or PNG

best would really be to ask them to send you a very short greenscreen sample in different versions so you can see what works best.

hope that helps
++ christoph ++