16mm Telecine File Formats?

[Nicolas Surgalski]

Hello, I am preparing to scan 610m of 16mm color negative in 2k. The telecine operator offers uncompressed ProRes, DNG, and DPX. I will be editing /grading on a macbook pro that can't run DaVinci. I have graded raw files before (RED and Black Magic), but never a scanned negative.

 

My question is, which format should I ask for? I want to be able to adjust the color and exposure to the same extent I was able to with RED and cinema DNG files. The operator said that these DNG's are not the same as BM DNG's

 

please help!

[Dirk DeJonghe]

On a Macbook you will be best served with Quicktime ProRes 422 HQ or 4444. DPX will never play back in real time unless you have a fast RAID array.

[Phil Thompson]

Get them scanned in as dpx and then make your own pro res files. That way you have top quality dpx files as source.

[Tyler Purcell]

Unless you plan on doing theatrical release, the DPX files aren't necessary. Pro Res 4444 is 12 bit, 4:4:4 color space and pretty high dynamic range. Unless the project will need major correction for some reason, the pro res will work great AND doesn't need anything special to playback, unlike DPX. When your done editing and coloring, you can make a DPX for archiving purposes out of DaVinci, but in terms of your scans, just use Pro Res.

 

Yes it's true, Blackmagic uses a compressed version of RAW, so it's not quite the same.