Compositing with Apple Animation Quicktimes??
by filmasart
on
Apr 26, 2007 at 5:27:06 am
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. Thanks for your quick responses!
Re: Compositing with Apple Animation Quicktimes?? by Arniepix on Apr 26, 2007 at 11:18:25 pm
Animation is an 8 bit, lossless codec. It's possible that the lack of dynamic range you saw perviously is due to some luma clamping from whatever application make the quicktimes? I don't know why they'd recommend animation codec, or why they can't give you an image sequence, perhaps they can give you a 10 bit uncompressed QT?
Arnie
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