Best Native Codec for Premiere? Cineform?

[kawasakigu37]

Whats currently the fastest codec for premiere CC 2018 to playback? Im looking for maximum 4k performance. I know in the past ProRes sucked because it had to go through the QT32 app and something similar with avid DNXHR. All the footage were shooting is 4k either from a FS7 in XAVC 10 bit or DSL H264 (mix of 1080P and 4k)

Also Im wondering  - theoretically we dont have a problem with storage space (we have a MAM) so we could just pre transcode all footage to something like Cineform masters and skip H264 all together right? Im assuming AME exports now to cineform pretty fast now that GoPro has open sourced it?

Cheers

-Chris

[R Neil Haugen · Accepted solution]

I've seen a number of comparisons about playback, and really ... ProRes, Cineform, and DNxHD/R were pretty close to each other and WAY ahead of any h.264/long-GOP format. Some people prefer one or the other for their work. I don't know there's that much difference.

Easy test ... take some media that's got a lot of motion, transcode to each of those, and test playback. Even maybe with say a Lumetri color preset added to up the load.

Neil

[kawasakigu37]

Does premiere do native Prorress now or still have to go through QT32? Or does it different windows vs OSX?

[R Neil Haugen]

I'm on Windows10, so not really a great 'resource' for ProRes/Mac-OS stuff. Very little of what I deal with is ProRes, naturally.

Neil

[Kona_Bob]

I used Cineform codec for years.

IMO it is a great master codec for Windows/PPro machines- fast, easy to digest, lossless...

The only issue is the very large file size, but if storage is not a problem, you could hardly do better than Cineform.

[Jim_Simon]

I would recommend using Cineform proxies.

Work offline using proxy media |

[TehThird]

This was indeed very helpful, thank you. Trying it out now.