60D Continuous shooting at 960x540 upscaled vs H.264 1080 – Not bad at all!

[AlbinoWatermelon]

I decided to shoot a bunch of test footage the other day to perfect a workflow and to compare 960x540 upscaled to 1080p vs the original h.264 footage. I couldn't find any real useful workflow posts regarding the 60D.  There's plenty for 5D but 5d doesn't have the dead pixel problem like the 60D does.

I did a series of 10 tests, and here are 2 of them:  The first one is flawless, but the 2nd one I missed the focus, as I just noticed (but I do have other shots of the pear that are very sharp, but the FOV is too different). 

The problem with bringing the DNGs straight into Davinci Resolve is that there are obvious dead pixels you cannot get rid of.  But the flat raw look you get when you apply the "BMD FILM" colorspace and gamma looks amazing for color grading. 

To get rid of dead pixels in the 60D, You must go through Adobe Camera Raw first or After Effects (better workflow) and export your DNG as Tiff sequence or ProRes files .  I'm aware there's a nightly build somewhere that gets rid of the issue, but it didn't work for me.

The problem with working with ACR is the default color profile ACR assigns to your DNGS makes it look displeasing.  So what I did is changed the camera calibration, and adjusted exposure, contrast, and saturation to imitate a Log footage-esque look that you would get if you imported DNGS straight into Resolve.  Grading after that worked wonderfully.

Optionally, you could also download the MLRAW to Log camera profile made by VisionColor (free) which renders it differently but it still works very well for grading.

Sorry if I'm repeating information but I haven't seen this information in the past few weeks that I've been lurking.


Conclusion: 960x540 is viable if you want to shoot Raw on your 60D for more than 1 minute.  (I didn't go past 1.5 minutes because it seemed to be very stable so I assumed it would keep going till I hit the size limit).  Just upscale it!  The downsides are that your Crop factor is increased by 2X so you'll need to shoot with wider lenses.  Your LCD preview becomes really small and harder to nail focus.  Shooting with your global overlays on will help (having them off doesn't increase your time by much anyway).  And lastly, it takes a few seconds after stopping the recording before you can record again.

[AlbinoWatermelon]

The reason I made this thread is for any new people who might be searching for a simple workflow to work with Raw on the 60D.