DNxHR and DNxHD are Avid's family of intra-only production codecs — the broadcasting and editing industry's counterpart to Apple's ProRes. DNxHD ("HD" stood for "High Definition") was the original 2008 codec, designed for 1080p workflows. DNxHR ("HR" stands for "High Resolution") came in 2014 to extend the family to 2K, 4K, 8K and beyond. Both are visually-lossless, intra-only codecs that encode each frame independently — perfect for editing because any frame can be jumped to and any cut made instantly without needing surrounding frames.
The family has tiers labelled by quality and bitrate. DNxHR LB (Low Bandwidth) is the dailies-and-offline-editing tier — visually lossy but small. DNxHR SQ (Standard Quality) and HQ (High Quality) are the most common online-editing tiers. DNxHR HQX adds 10-bit and 12-bit support. DNxHR 444 is full 4:4:4 colour for VFX and grading. Each tier produces files dramatically larger than streaming codecs — a one-hour 4K master at DNxHR HQ runs around 250 GB — because that's the price of being intra-only and visually lossless at every frame.
For a product team, DNxHR/DNxHD shows up in two scenarios. Receiving production masters from broadcasters and post-production houses: DNxHR is one of the formats you'll commonly see arriving alongside ProRes. Delivering deliverables to broadcasters: many TV networks specify DNxHR-HQ or similar for masters they archive. The streaming-side decision is unchanged: transcode DNxHR masters into your delivery ladder (H.264 / HEVC / AV1) and keep the DNxHR master in archival storage for future re-encoding. Pure delivery never uses DNxHR — it's a production format, not a streaming one.
