Anyone work with HDE compressed Arri Raw footage? We have a shoot going in Italy and they want to use this to compress the raw footage. I’ve never worked with it before and they didn’t mention this until today and they’re asking if it’s ok.
I looked at this recently as a test. I got some test files from the Arri site and it all worked well.
I lifted this extract directly from my notes at the time:
TLDR - I got some test files from Arri and they worked fine for me on Flame 2023.3
I usually dismiss ARRIRAW outright. It is a very heavy format and may seem excessive for commercial work with tight schedules and small budgets, but the High Density Encoding (HDE) format seems like a good compromise.
HDE provides a bit-exact data reduction of uncompressed camera ARRIRAW files through encoding. With HDE, the overall storage size of RAW images can be reduced by up to a 2:1 ratio.
HDE stands for High Density Encoding, and it is an encoding technique optimized for Bayer pattern images. ARRIRAW images encoded with HDE are approximately 60% of the original size. Importantly, HDE encoding is completely lossless - when an HDE file is decoded, it perfectly matches the original file bit-for-bit.
There are two options to convert ALEXA 35 ARRIRAW MXF files to HDE MXF files; the ARRIRAW HDE Transcoder or CODEX Device Manager 7.0 and later.
the one annoying thing - if they dont shoot on a alexa35 it can only do hde as individual arx files, which is extremely annoying.
Resolve for example has a fun little thing with conforming to those .
if you import the arx files into resolve they get named a00xc00x.[235347-2847483].arx so the “clip name” includes the framerange on default, usually proxies arent exported with that so then the proxy would only be named a00xc004.mov or whatever.
This leads to resolve at least completely loosing its mind on re-conform as the clip names dont match, in which case resolve uses the timecode only - if you have overlapping tc from multiple shoot days this becomes NASTY - to make sure this works the proxy files NEED to have a reel name so you can conform using the reel name and TC , usually you either use the source reel name or a new one “from source clip”.
also filesequences are much much slower to read from the filesystem compared to mxf, so if you have a alexa35 there is no issue but you should go with mxf HDE.
Oh and btw, you can see of something is hde based on the filename as well (arri has a cheat sheet on filenaming)
there is a conform option to help with this. Located in Project Settings → General Options
Thanks all! We told them it was ok.
This production company is stressing me out, they keep asking weird questions they should know the answer to and then sprung this on us after the first day of shooting.