Hey everyone,
I have a question about restoring an archive on a different machine.
If I archive a project with the framestore set to ProRes 4444 XQ / EXR (PIZ), and then restore it on another system by creating a new project — will the media remain uncompressed (since it’s coming from an archive), or will it be re-encoded to ProRes 4444 XQ / EXR (PIZ) if I set the new project to that format?
Media is archived uncompressed.
i actually do not know thats a great question, havent used media containing archives in so long
@randy i think he means once he restores the caches/renders what format will they be on his framestore.
So lets say you rendered prores444 from batch , archived it - it becomes uncompressed , then on restoring what happens to it? is it following the original projects compression or is it then suddenly uncompressed in your framestore?
I would assume they do not re-compress so itll just fill your framestore with the same data thats in the archive so uncompressed but its super easy to find out
restore something and see what gets written to the framestore
It restore in whatever format the current project is set to. You could have original project set to JPEG 10% quality. Archive, it goes to un-compressed RGB. Then restore it into a new project set to OpenEXR and that is what it would be.
The contents of the archive itself will be unarchived in the archive’ orig format (ie: Uncompressed RGB) on your framestore. But inside your new project, the moment you cache an unarchived clip or re-render something, say a freshly revised soft FX on your unarchived timeline, or a pre-render inside an unarchived batch or BFX setup, this new render will be in the format which the new project is set to, whatever it may be.
So yes, technically, depending on the bit depth of your timelines and the bit depth of the orig sources or the bit depth chosen in your setups’ render/write nodes, a ProRes source (whichever ProRes flavor) can technically go thru another ProRes compression pass.
Thanks everyone for the replies! We had a bit of a debate at our studio about what exactly happens on restore, so this really clears things up.
Here in Japan, it’s pretty standard practice to always include media in archives. But lately we’ve been seeing projects balloon to 20–30 TB, so it’s becoming harder to justify.
We’re going to start looking into a no-media archive workflow. Really appreciate the input!
@katuzetu39 - happy to show you an alternative.
ping me if you wnt.
we saw the same balooning a while back.
While cameras shoot higher res they usually also compress more (which defeats the purpose but .. whatever) and that in uncompressed just makes everything super huge.
UHD is 4x the size uncompressed vs HD.
its a pity flame does still not allow at least losless compressed archvies / EXRs
No….it is absolutely shameful. Not even the setups embedded in the archive are compressed, just straight TAR’d….. those things get like a 10x space saving if they would just add --zstd to their TAR syntax.