DXV 3 Upgrade Guide

So, a few weeks ago we publicly released a new version of DXV, imaginatively called DXV3.0. It's a big improvement, and people love it. To make sure you get the best out of the codec, here's an upgrade guide.

First of all, DXV3 encoded movies will only work in Resolume 4.2 and above. In previous versions, Resolume will think they are very big and slow Quicktime files, and you will not have a good time. If you want to use DXV3, you're committed to Res 4.2.

DXV3.0 has 3 benefits: it's faster at high resolutions, files are generally smaller and it has a high quality option.

In general, we don't recommend re-encoding your entire library. Your old DXV2 files will play fine in Resolume 4.2, and you still get all the benefits of improved smoothness and bug fixes.

So there is no need to re-encode your entire DXV2 library. Especially do not re-encode your DXV2 files to DXV3 High Quality. Because you are rendering from a DXV2 source, any image artifacts are already rendered into the file. Your image quality is not improved at all, the only thing you get is bigger files that look exactly the same. And that's probably not what you want.

There are only three scenarios where we would advise re-encoding.

1. A DXV encoded file shows a lot of banding on gradients. In this case you can re-encode to DXV3 High Quality. But you will need to have the original file as a uncompressed source or render it again straight from After Effects or Cinema4D. Of course, encoding the DXV2 source to DXV3 will show no improvements, because the banding is already rendered into the file.

Expect file size to double when encoding to DXV3 HQ. With great power comes great responsibility, so don't use High Quality as your default render setting. You'll run out of disk space real quick. Only use it on files that have visible artefacts when you render them to Normal Quality.

DXV3 Normal Quality is exactly the same image quality as DXV2. In other words, the picture quality will be exactly the same when rendering the same source file to DXV2 or to DXV3 Normal Quality.

2. You consistently scrape by on performance at high resolutions. We don't have exact figures yet, but DXV3 performs a LOT better when playing back 4K files. When you run 640x480 or 3 or 4 layers of 1080p, re-encoding won't do much for you, but when playing 4K, you can expect around a 30% improvement.

3. You cannot store all your files. DXV3 Normal Quality should be around 25% smaller than DXV2. This can vary considerably between different types of content. Minimal line content can go down as much as 50%, but highly detailed photographic content can stay around the same.

So, hopefully this clear things up a bit. If you have any questions, we'll be happy to answer them.

Posted by Joris on Thursday April 30, 2015 at 12:07 Tags: DXV * Update

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