Hello Forum,

AVID intermediate user who just upgraded from the late Xpress Pro to Media Composer 8.  Question regarding import quality.  Is there a virtually lossess import setting that will keep the image quality up but the space down.  Have tried to look the differences between all the options.  DNxHD 175x seems the best bang for the buck.  Is DNxHD 115 worthy?  Any other suggestions?  Thanks!

Well it depends on what your source is but unless it's uncompressed most likley not.

Most aquisition formats wrk very hard to produce heaviely compressed content to maximise storage often as long GOP.

The compression and long GOP format make it NLE unfriendly. So we are normally compressing to a framebased codec and suffering a space increase to store it.

Import isn't often used (unlike in Xpress Pro days) the normal route is Linking (better known as AMA linking) this just creates a clip to the source media at its current location. That can be consolidated (if MC supports that codec) as a data copy with no loss or Transcoded at a loss in quality or a hit in storage space.

The DNx codecs are very good. Visually transparent tey claim. But that depends on  the datarate (the DNx number. DNX36 is small but low quality. DNx175 is higher DNx220 even nore so) The x makes it a 10bit (as opposed to 8 bit storage) not much to gain if sources are 8 bit and you plan to deliver 8 bit.

So I'd buy a couple of 4TB drives and make space not an issue!

Thank you!  This was incredibly helpful!