6 replies to this topic

[ms sojmon]

what is the good recording format in SI2K ! i tried the 12bit format is it is better than cineformraw?

[John Brawley]

what is the good recording format in SI2K ! i tried the 12bit format is it is better than cineformraw?

Uncompressed will use a lot more drive space but is better than cineform, which is compressed. Cineform compression however is still very good.

jb

[Stephen Price]

Uncompressed will use a lot more drive space but is better than cineform, which is compressed. Cineform compression however is still very good.

From the tests I have done, 12-bit uncompressed is superior than Cineform in image quality. Also the recorder/laptop runs much smoother than when recording to Cineform because no compression is needed.

Correct me if I'm wrong, Cineform is 10-bit Log and Uncompressed 12-bit is Linear. I have not done a latitude test between the two, but I doubt there is much in it.

My main problem with uncompressed is that there is very little that supports it. Iridas supposedly does, but no version of Speedgrade DI I have had has. And yes it will use more storage space, but that is not much of an issue, as long as the image is considerably better.

Steve Price
Digital Camera Technician
London

[Phil Rhodes]

Depends what you mean by "supports", and what you want to do with what.

There's about 101 types of "Uncompressed".

P

[Stephen Price]

Depends what you mean by "supports", and what you want to do with what.

Generally it would mean a software which can natively work with a particular file format. One which can pick up its meta data and allow manipulation of its RAW attributes and allow transcoding and de-bayering. I have not found any other software apart form Iridas Speedgrade which can do this for 12-bit siv files.

Steve Price
Digital Camera Technician
London

[Phil Rhodes]

This is one reason I'm particularly cautious about this growing trend of every camera system producing a file format that's only compatible with custom tools, or with a few tools of favoured partners. It's very bad news from a workflow-flexibility point of view, as well as an inevitable problem with archiving. SI+Cineform is probably one of the smoothest approaches I've seen, as it plugs you straight into anything that has AVI support - and even that worries me.

Personally I think it's plain as day that these things should output DPX files; there may be a need to do compressed, in which case JPEG-2000 is the most obvious answer. I hate to see every new camera creating this whole problem anew.


P

[Stephen Price]

Well said