The master, and the versions to make while the project is open

One export that everything else comes from

There is a difference between the file you send somebody and the file you keep. The one you keep is the master, and making one properly is the difference between a five-minute job and a two-day one when a request arrives in November for a square version with the logo changed.

A master is a single, high-quality, destination-neutral render of the finished programme. Every delivery is made from it. If your only surviving artefact is the project, then producing anything new requires the project to still open, the media to still relink, the fonts to still be installed and the plugins to still exist. A master requires none of that. It is a file. Files keep.

What format, and why it is not H.264

Masters are written in intra-frame codecs: ProRes 422 HQ, DNxHR HQX, or their higher variants. Every frame is compressed independently, there is no prediction between frames, and the quality is high enough that a second encode from it is indistinguishable from an encode from the timeline.

This matters because of generation loss. Encode a file with H.264, then encode the result again, and the second encoder faithfully preserves the first one's blocking while adding its own. Three generations in, faces have plastic edges. Intra-frame masters at high bitrate are not immune in theory and are effectively immune in practice: the losses are far below what the next encode will throw away anyway.

The arithmetic is unsentimental. ProRes 422 HQ at 1080p25 runs about 184 Mbit/s, so ten minutes is roughly 14 GB, and an hour is about 83 GB. At 4K, multiply by four. A 4 TB drive holds a lot of ten-minute films and not many hour-long ones, which is a real budgeting consideration rather than an abstraction.

If storage is genuinely tight, ProRes 422 rather than HQ is about two thirds of the size and visually very hard to separate for delivery purposes. ProRes LT is thinner again and starts to matter if the file will be graded further. Do not master to H.264 to save space; master to a lighter ProRes instead.

What resolution and frame rate the master is in

The highest you will ever need, and the frame rate you shot.

If the timeline is 1080p25, master at 1080p25 even if a client wants 4K later — upscaling at master stage bakes in an interpolation you cannot remove, whereas upscaling at delivery stage is a decision you can revisit with better tools next year.

If you shot 4K and delivered 1080p, master at 4K if you still have the media and the disk, because the reframe request is the most common late request there is.

Never master at a platform's aspect ratio. Master at the full frame, and crop at delivery.

The versions worth making at the same time

While the project is open and your head is in it, render the variants that are expensive to reconstruct later.

The textless master. The same programme with every title, lower third, subtitle and logo switched off. It costs one extra render now. It is the only way a translated version, a re-branded version or a corrected-spelling version gets made without rebuilding the graphics. Broadcast specs frequently require it, and clients who did not ask for it are delighted when it exists.

The clean version, meaning graded picture with no burnt-in captions, distinct from the caption-burnt web version.

Audio stems, at minimum three: dialogue, music, effects. The sound block covered how to route them. Rendering them now means a future dub into another language is possible at all; without an M&E stem — music and effects with dialogue removed — it is not.

A stills export of three or four frames at full resolution, for thumbnails, press and your own portfolio.

These four together are perhaps fifteen minutes of render time at the end of a project, and they are what separates a deliverable archive from a folder of one file.

Intermediates during the edit

A master is an end-of-project artefact. The same idea appears mid-project under a different name.

When a sequence is finished and expensive — a heavily composited title sequence, a long graded montage, a stabilised drone shot with noise reduction — render it out as an intermediate in the same intra-frame codec and re-import it as a clip. The timeline plays it instantly, the effects are frozen, and nothing recomputes.

Keep the original nodes and layers in a parked timeline so the intermediate can be remade. The rule is: freeze what is finished, keep the recipe.

This is also how you work across applications. A shot sent to Blender or Fusion for compositing goes out as an image sequence or a ProRes clip and comes back the same way, because intermediates are the only currency two different programmes reliably share.

The one thing people get wrong

They make the master after burning in captions or cropping for a platform. Then the master carries decisions that belong to one destination, and every other destination inherits them: a square crop with a caption block baked into the middle of the frame, from which no landscape version can ever be made.

Master first, clean, full frame, no text. Then derive.

Honest limits

Masters are large, and for a lot of ordinary work — a weekly vlog, a social clip, a wedding highlight nobody will re-cut — a good H.264 at 40 Mbit/s is a perfectly reasonable keeper and costs a fortieth of the space. The question is whether anybody will ever encode from it again. If the answer is genuinely no, the intra-frame master is ceremony.

Today

Take the last thing you finished, open it, and render a textless version. Note how long it took. That number is what you will be comparing against the day somebody asks for the titles in Tamil.