Best Source Footage format?

V-Ray V-Ray for 3ds Max General
1

I use a lot of different formats to output to when rendering, depending on the use of the footage; but what format do people generally consider the best to encode to once all post production has been done and you hand the footage over to the editors?

For instance - i might render to an 8-bit .png sequence if i know i’m not going to do any compositing, similarly, i might render to 32-bit .rpf or .exr if a lot of post production changes are necessary. Once i’ve made all my post production adjustments, what which format should i render to - it’s got to be pretty much lossless quality, i.e. data rates above about 16meg / sec and also hold things like aspect ratio’s.

We’ve been using either QuickTime with Animation or codec, or .avi with the HuffyUV codec - anyone else dabbled with this codec?
Anyone recommend using the DV codec - i’ve heard this is pretty naf. Previously we’ve rendered out to a .tga of .tif sequence, but i’d prefer to keep it one file, rather than thousands if possible.

Anyway, just wanted to know people’s opinions.

Ta very much.

2

i remember being told at a post production house in soho that their preferred format was quicktime mjpeg-a or b on maximum quality… however that has to be 6 odd years ago now so im not sure wether there is a better option now…

3

i bought footage from artbeats 4 years ago and their material came as quicktime photo-jpg files (95% quality).

i use this format when sending finished movies to clients over the internet.
i am sure that there are better formats now but so far every client was able to import this format into their editing systems.

never had complaints about picture quality or artifacts.