What is the best file type for archiving this DNG sequence? they are massive on a harddrive, but it would be nice to retain as much information in them as possible. There should be a good tradeoff between filesize and quality. Someone suggests ProRes 12bit but that's only on MAC.
luckie mac pople, jost pro res.
but for rest of mare mortals - the hundred hellish circles of hundred codecs.
I have tried many different ones, and I have not found a conclusive answer, because it depends from content, and also, as I do freelance for tv (mostly editing and graphics, some occasional green screen) once in a while I would have to confirm to their specs and that might change the archival format.
For quite some time I used MOV with PhotoJPEG 95% quality, did not take a lot of space, but was ok for final result archival, but I started to see it fall apart on landscape views, with sky gradients and such (started shooting time lapses). So I gave DNxHD a go, so far I love it as long as I can confirm to broadcast standard frame sizes and rates, anything out of that - no go for that codec. Have tried many compressed raw ones, and to be honest - only one that was not pain to work with was the RED's one, but I can't encode in that back. High bit-rate, high level h264 works somewhat fine, until you have to push it. does not like to be graded at all.
For time lapse stuff mostly I just export the final in as good as I can, and zip/rar the source raw files.