Cineform, DNxHD or Lagarith?

S

shooter_

Well-known member
Which does it offer the best quality? 1) Cineform? 2) DNxHD? 3) Lagarith?

Does Lagarith compare with the others in terms of quality?
 
I would choose CineForm beacuse you can playback 1920x1080 files without problems from one (1) 7200 rpm HDD. You cannot playback 1920x1080 Lagarith footage without a fast RAID. CineForm files takes up significantly less HDD space as well and that makes backups more convenient to do because it can be done a lot faster than Lagarith files because CineForm files takes up less HDD space. (Yes, i know that HDD's are cheap, but time is money...)

And, you can easily convert AVCHD footage to the CineForm codec with HDLink if you prefer the transcoding route over the native workflow. HDLink is lightning fast. (The same application is bundled with NeoScene as well and i think its name is NeoScene in that bundle and has less functions than HDLink that is bundled in Neo HD.)

For me the quality, CineForm vs Lagarith, are equal. But the non-playback-able Lagarith files and the loooong time it took to backup the master files made me choose CineForm.

When in doubt, download and install all three and test and compare them to see what suits you best. Be aware that CineForm footage looks slightly blurry in the NLE, so export still images to compare the codecs. The blurriness can only be seen in the NLE, so when you export to SD or Blu-ray the footage is crisp and clean! :)

All three codecs you mention are really good, so its up to you to choose one! :)

/R
 
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That is a bit faster than the Seagate that I use. But my guess is that it'll still be too slow for Lags at HD res.
 
shooter_ said:
So do you think it wouldn't be feasible to use SSD only for editing, grading, etc and let the 7200 rpm HDD for storage?
Click to expand...
I can playback 10-bit uncompresed 1920x1080 Blackmagic Design footage from my SSD drive. That cant be done from one 7200rpm HDD, so the SSD outperform one 7200rpm disk when it comes to reading the data from the disk. I have not tested 1920x1080 Lagarith footage but it may work. The disk was empty, so i dont know how it performs when there are lots of GB video files on it, nor do i know how many overwrites the SSD can take before it starts to give trouble.

But, since the files are huge you need *many* SSD drives since the Lagarith files takes up *lots* of disc space.

So, is it cheaper to buy a couple of 128GB/256GB/512GB SSD drives or buy one (1) license of CineForm's cheapest product, NeoScene? If you got the money, try SSD disks and see how the SSD drives perform with the Lagarith codec. :)

The SSD drives are amazing as system drives with your OS on and is one of the best investments you can do to get a snappy computer experience, but i will only use them as media drives when the have larger capacity, are cheaper and the overwrite thing has been solved, if it ever will be. :)


/Roger
 
The bottleneck for Lagarith at 1080p is not drive speed as much as it is CPU. (Resource Monitor gives you the obvious proof - the CPU is always maxed out, whereas the HDD runs along at 50 MB/s - most modern drives are capable of 90+ MB/s) Try UT Codec. Similar to Lagarith, but much, much easier on the CPU. Even if the file sizes are larger than Lagarith, plays perfectly well in real-time.
 
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