Alright it is important to note the difference, log versus raw is very different. It not only comes down to the dynamic range of the footage, but more importantly the bitdepth. I will shoot with a log picture style for most of my work if I don't have to/plan to push the image to hard in my manual grade in post. If you push the h264 files to hard the colours will heavily band and you will get blocking artifacts due to the heavy compression. RAW on the other hand is 14bit (depending on RAW settings) versus h264's 8bit, it can be worked very hard before breaking down. Personally my workflow is to take the RAW MLVs colour balance them and convert them to an arri standard log with some noise reduction before outputting them in Cineform, a GPU accelerated codec that outperforms ProRes and is resolution agnostic, to use in my NLE where I preform my final grade.
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I wasn't talking about fake log color profiles for H.264 (IMHO you're better off trying to get the most out of your 8 bits by exposing your shot properly and using standard/neutral profiles, and getting your utilising all 0-255 data values. The sacrifice to color tones is just too great to force log into 8 bits).
What I'm referring to is converting 14bit RAW to a 10/12bit Prores using a log colourspace such as VisionLog / Cinelog-C via ACR or other method, which seems to be the workflow of choice for some people on this forum.
Real high bit depth Log colourspace files like this (like their in-camera counterparts Arri Log-C / BMD Log etc) are really not so different to RAW at all when it comes to grading latitude. But of course we don't have that option, we can only go H.264, MLV, or MLV->Log Prores.
And yeah..... if you're a FCPX user you'll know that Prores is lighting fast. I can have 4+ layers of 1080p with FX all in butter smooth realtime. Prores and FCPX were designed for each other though, if you're using Windows or another NLE, YMMV.
If Cineform can beat that, I'd like to see it.
Sidenote: With the trend pointing at universal adoption of H.265 HVEC in GPUs and camera SoCs, things are about to change rapidly for codecs. With an All-I (GOP1) highbitrate 10bit 444 H.265 file rivalling Prores 444 in quality and edit speed, at a fraction of the file size, it's not hard to see where things are going.
These new chips from Ambarella (
https://www.ambarella.com/news/94/122/Ambarella-S5-IP-Camera-SoC-Delivers-4K-10-bit-H-265-Video-and-Multi-Imager-Capabilities-to-the-Professional-Surveillance-Industry) means even tiny action cams will be encoding this on their hardware very soon, and you GPU will be decoding it realtime back at the computer. That will be hard for 3rd party codecs to beat!