DNxHR conundrum / by Jesse Glucksman

I know I'm not alone in being very excited that Avid finally opened up to 2k & 4k workflows, and thought their new proprietary codec was an exciting thing. In my experience, I have generally left the finishing to editors but, of course, that hasn't been possible with Avid-cut projects that wanted UHD renders. 

This has been problematic on my current project, The Church by Dom Frank. This independent supernatural horror film was shot primarily with a Red Epic but had multiple reshoots on a variety of cameras in the Red family. Superstar editor Ed Marx transcoded all the footage to DNxHD for editing and has been attempting to online the footage up to 4k DNxHR for color correction. 

When doing so, he is faced with days of time-killing errors & crashes. When onlining to 2k DNxHR, no issues whatsoever. It's an odd thing.  

Ultimately, the plan has been to master the film in 2k, and any shots that require post-zooms & repositions can be delivered to me in the original r3d, so we are going with a mostly-2k based round trip from his Avid to my DaVinci Resolve. 

The question is if the DNxHR codec itself has some quirks to it that Avid will be smoothing out--typical anytime anything new is introduced--or if the issue is on our end due to the various cameras with various versions of Red all mixed together. 

 

Either way, I'm happy to see what I can do with DNxHR 444 footage transcoded from r3d.