Animation workflow for adding animation to long video edit

https://forums.adobe.com/people/Pieter+Voorhout  wrote Thank you for the reply Rick Gerard! I've started animating now and the workflow I'm currently going by is indeed cutting up and pre comping all the shots that need animation from the single ProRes file. My question then is, when the edit get's updated and I receive a new ProRes file, how do I handle this new (time shifted) ProRes file? The episodes are largely shot on consumer handycams. Would rendering in lossless codecs still be necessary in this case?

First off, don't even think about going near Dynamic Link. It's the spawn of a hideously inadvisable drunken night between two pieces of software that should never have even been in the same bar. Every professional studio uses the tried and trusted "old-school" file handoff workflow, where the editor exports in the best practicable format, then the FX department take the files, do their stuff and send back the same thing. The editor then just drops it into place, faffs about and hands off to color in the same way. Nobody has to care about broken plugins, missing fonts, or what software everyone is using.

However it's important to understand that most of the time the footage sent to/from FX is ungraded (and often linear). It's a lot easier to work with frames 'as seen by the camera' rather than trying to match some funky teal post-Instagramopalyptical grade that will of course be completely changed once the director sees it. In theory you could be sent the actual camera files, but that's very uncommon in big productions and not an option for raw footage since you cannot re-save it.

As Rick says, standard practice is to send every shot (or part thereof) to post as a standalone file - never the entire show. Every NLE application worth bothering about can export a single clip, or export the entire timeline as a series of clips, with handles. It might take a few more mouse clicks, but what they're expecting you to do with a full-span video is just stupid. Maybe if they gave you an EDL file you could automate the process of splitting it up into sections, but you will never have handles because they are parts of the source footage that have already been cut out of the timeline. Since you're saying that the edit isn't locked, you absolutely need handles.

As to file formats, it depends on a number of factors, which only you and your studio know. Of course you want to preserve quality, but without going overboard. If the source is handycam then you aren't bothered about cinema-quality 8K frames that will be zoomed up the wazoo, but naturally you'd avoid using a heavily compressed format like h.264, if nothing else because it's a pain to edit with. The three main contenders these days for FX post are ProRes, DNxH* and EXR frame sequences:

• ProRes is close to visually lossless but is only an option if everyone works on Macs. File sizes range around a few GB per minute for 1080HD. You could probably get away with ProRes HQ (422) rather than ProRes 4444 if you don't need alpha.
• DNxHD / DNxHR are as good as ProRes in terms of quality, and work on Windows, but some legacy editing suites don't support them. You also need to agree on the settings, as there's a long list of flavors to choose from. File size is about the same as ProRes.
• Don't use Cineform. Blegh.
• EXR has the advantage that you only need to re-render specific frames, and it has a full floating point range so you can send back footage with HDR effects, like lens glares, which react correctly when someone adjusts the exposure or adds a filmic transition. They support layers, so you can render glow or shadows separately. EXR is the standard mezzanine for big studios these days but the footage can run to over 2GB per second. Not something to download on hotel WiFi.

You could still use image sequences with a lower bandwidth format (e.g. PNG or TIFF) and get the advantage of frame-by-frame updates, but there can sometimes be problems with color shifts if the editing software doesn't understand how to profile the footage in and out of RGB. Quite a few 3D effects artists use 16-bit PNGs (approx 40MB per second for 1080HD).

So talk to the editor and see what formats they can actually read. Then ask what the colorist plans on doing to your returned files - for example if they will never crank the exposure, you don't need to worry about HDR data. Discuss each of the effects, because that can have a major bearing on what you need. If they crop in on a shot, then expect you to add camera shake, of course you need the uncropped footage or there's no way to fill in the edges.