What exactly does Preferred Format do?

Flame Flame Questions
1

I’ve tested and tried different configurations but haven’t seemed to crack what Preferred Format does in Project Settings. Anybody know what precisely is going on under the hood?

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2

From the user guide:

The settings in the Cache and Renders tab are used when the application writes to its managed storage, for example when:

  • Caching media. On demand (contextual menu > Media) or on import (MediaHub > General > Clip Options).
  • Rendering a Timeline FX, a clip using a Tools module, or when using a Render node in Batch or Batch FX.
  • Creating virtual media such as coloured frames.
  • Creating proxies. On demand (contextual menu > Media) or on import (MediaHub > General > Clip Options).

Preferred Format

Select Uncompressed to store rendered media as DPX or OpenEXR. Select Legacy Configuration for customized uncompressed configurations. Select a compressed format to control storage capacity and bandwidth use. It does not affect CPU-bound performance. Preferred formats are all available with or without RAW. RAW formats have only DPX and RAW, non-RAW ones have DPX, OpenEXR, and RAW. As a rule of thumb, use the RAW formats, unless exporting material as OpenEXR using linked publish.

http://help.autodesk.com/view/FLAME/2021/ENU/?guid=GUID-07E8517A-75E0-4979-B226-22D03A941060

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3

Yup, got that. But when I choose 4444, for example, and import stuff, and cache it, I don’t see a smattering of .movs on in my framestore, and my archive sizes aren’t smaller.

So…?

4

You don’t?
I think I’ve seen .movs in a framestore folder before, but I’m not entirely sure right now.

Archives are a different story, as they store everything fully uncompressed, at least to my knowledge.
I wish that wouldn’t be the case though.

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5

Oh wait…I actually do see .movs on the framestore…but the archiving thing…argh. that’d be nice.

6

Yes. It’s one of the reasons I almost exclusively work with externally managed media these days. No caching, no wasted space, slim archives, happiness.

7

I know if you pick one of the prores formats it only applies the compression to files of that bit depth or below. So float files will stay as EXRs.

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