wanting to keep playback cache fast and small.
can we cache to DWAb using a environment varibale on project creation or some other hack? we can do prores Proxy but not DWAB?EXRs?
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I’d be very keen to have this as an option also 
Good idea. Is it more or less correct to think of DWAB EXR’s as the Prores4444 of floating point?
There might well be something like this. A while back we used one to get PIZ compression on our write nodes before we were given a button with options.
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DWAB/DWAA can compress more or less
45 is about prores 444 id say, 150 is like jpeg.
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use PIZ… it is fast, compresses well, and is lossless. You get all benefits.
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we work in commercials and use lucid link.
Our clients are now shooting 4.6k minimum
they dont want to spend more money.
dwab is great 
Speaking of…has anyone noticed that the compression setting is getting reset to RLE when you reload a setup?
for me it stays ,
i wrote a python script to hange all write nodes after publishing clips to dwab
Our hook sets it as PIZ but every time we reopen a setup it goes to RLE. I could have sworn I saw someone post about it a while ago…
Thanks @PlaceYourBetts for opening the improvement and adding the link of the current discussion.
@kyleobley please open a support defect so the team can investigate the issue.
Will do. For what it’s worth @Slabrie the whole support ticket thing is really trying. Every time I need to go through the steps twice just to get to the form to submit the ticket. It’d be great if someone could streamline this process. Just giving us a link for Flame, we log-in and then have the form would be great.
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Wow, never heard about this issue. Please also report this issue to our support team so they can make this process easier for you guys.
I have been looking into DWA compression and stress testing it out. I have been so convinced that the compression vs quality is an excellent balance that we have adopted it as our standard EXR compression for all commercial work. It is quite simple. I can see the advantages to 4444XQ but we feel that the compression vs quality of 4444 is perfect for commercial work so I have that as my cache and render preference for 10-bit, 12-bit. I would like to be able to make that same decision with 16-bit EXRs. Don’t get me wrong, I recognize just how amazing PIZ compression is, I just think that my commercials can handle the lossy DWA compression and still look amazing.
Obviously we would still need to be able to handle high precision 32-bit files like UVmaps and depth mattes. I like how intelligent renders can give me a multi layered EXR that uses DWA compression on most of the AOVs but when it comes the the utility passes it uses ZIP to avoid any loss.
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exactly!!
Also consider networking speeds , this is a huge money saver with pretty much 0 downsides.
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This. Couldn’t agree more.
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I log bugs all the time, haven’t had any issues.
I wish there weren’t so many best practice approaches with zero compromise from studios as there are so many visually lossless codecs such as DWAB that would lead to many efficiencies and cost savings in terms of infrastructure costs for Post Production. Suddenly you only need 10GbE networking infrastructure instead of 25GbE or greater for instance. As well as a saving on storage costs.
However, lossless compression is so often dictated for workflow so there is no choice in the matter. Yet, they will happily accept a compressed master using a lossy codec. It is all about archival apparently but looking at some of the film scans I’ve seen for film restorations, even a lossy DWAB exr archival master seems like a monumental improvement and would not impede future restoration dramatically.
Alas, sometimes there is too much striving for perfection when a more pragmatic approach would be better all round.
I was asked multiple times to deliver uncompressed EXRs. (?!?)
Also just had a DP insist we dont use HDE arriaw compression because it compresses. (its losless).
A lot of times its just lack-of-knowledge…
10 vs 25gbit is a valid point, as is the insane cost saving for cloud storage and archives, transferring, everything get a lot cheaper.
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