A mezzanine is a high-quality intermediate copy of the source — the master from which all delivery renditions are encoded. It sits between the original camera/production master and the compressed files viewers actually receive. The mezzanine is deliberately kept at high bitrate and light compression (often an intra-frame codec like ProRes or a high-bitrate H.264/HEVC), trading storage cost for quality headroom.
The reason to keep a mezzanine rather than encode straight from the original is repeatability and quality: every rendition descends from one clean, normalized master, so re-encoding for a new codec, a new device, or a corrected ladder does not require going back to the raw production assets. It also decouples ingest/QC from the transcoding farm.
Because all downstream quality is capped by the mezzanine, QC focuses heavily on it: getting the mezzanine right — correct color, audio, captions, and no artifacts — is what protects every rendition encoded from it.
The handbook · 7 volumes
Fora Soft Video Engineering Handbook
The mezzanine is the master every rendition is encoded from, so any artifact in it multiplies across the whole ladder. The seven volumes cover the video stack; for mezzanine workflows start with Volume 1 on color, bit depth, codecs, and quality metrics, then Volume 2 on ingest, with delivery in Volume 3. Written by Nikolay Sapunov, CEO at Fora Soft.
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