dPx

DPX, short for Digital Picture Exchange, is a digital raster image file format developed for the film and video post-production industry. Originating with Kodak’s Cineon system in the 1990s, it has since become a widely used interchange and archival format for individual frames in digital intermediates and scanned film workflows. DPX is designed to preserve high image quality and metadata across stages of production.

A DPX file represents a single frame and can store image data in various bit depths and color formats. Common configurations include RGB data with 10-, 12-, or 16-bit per channel, and data can be stored in either interleaved or planar layouts. The format supports both linear and log-like color representations, depending on the workflow, and can accommodate different endianness and pixel formats. A DPX file is organized into a file header, an image header, and the image data, with optional user data and time-code metadata embedded in the header sections.

Metadata is a key feature of DPX. The headers include information about image dimensions, aspect ratio, bit depth, color space, and data type, as well as production details such as date, source, frame rate, and telecine or film-origin flags. This rich metadata supports tracking and provenance throughout post-production.

DPX remains prevalent in professional pipelines for film scanning, visual effects, and archival storage due to its lossless or near-lossless image fidelity and robust metadata. It is supported by many industry software tools, though newer formats like OpenEXR are also used for HDR workflows.