Editing and CC in ProRes

[tuckertota]

I'm thinking of filming an upcoming project in RAW on a 5D III. My workflow is editing and color correcting in FCPX. I've been testing with MLRawViewer and exporting ProRes and it's working fine.

My question is, if I'm going from RAW to ProRes and never going back to RAW or DNG, then is it worth it to film RAW at all? Will there be major benefits in quality and color depth? I know ProRes 4444 is better than H264, but enough to warrant the whole process and file sizes?

If anyone has a better workflow for FCPX, please let me know.

[kyrobb]

In my experience so far, Raw converted to ProRes still looks miles ahead of H264 in quality. It just looks way better. ProRes is also 10 bit as opposed to the 8 bit h264 codec.

[reddeercity]

ProRes is also 10 bit as opposed to the 8 bit h264 codec.

ProRes 4444 is 12bit, 422HQ is 10bit and the New ProRes 4444XQ 16bit and rumoured to be linear in color space.
I use the new ProRes 4444XQ 16bit  at a data rate of 550 Mb/s for full HD 1080p Video.
With the 5D2 I'm limited to 1872x936 2:1 and I see data rates of about 450 Mb/s in a A.E. acr to FCPX 10.1.3 workflow.
Unless you use ffmeg to encode then 10bit is the limit and no 4444XQ support.

[kyrobb]

Yeah if you're using MlRawViewer to convert it will be 10 bit, as it uses ffmpeg.

[TKez]

Yes, I've gravitated to this workflow as well.
Filming normally in in H.264, on top of only 8 bits, you suffer very low resolution color (4:2:0 chroma subsampling), nasty H.264 artifacts and usually clipping at either or both ends.
RAW->Prores gives you full color res, virtually lossless, and if you use one of the log curves via MLRV, you can retain nearly all of your highlight and shadow info.

Cinestyle / Marvel profiles were a good idea but if you've ever tried CC with them you'd know that log and h.264 don't work very well together. We're trying to compress info into the middle of the color range so we can play with it later, but H.264 was designed to discard all that extra info as it's barely visible to the eye when viewed as is.

Even at 10bit it's a huge advantage over standard mode.

[tuckertota]

Thanks for the responses.

In MLRawViewer, is S-Log the best way to get the flattest color? From the clips I'm testing it always seems to be the least contrasty.

[TKez]

Well I'm hoping someone can chime in here swell as I'm not exactly sure what they all are!
Eventually Im hoping we'll be able to use visionLog etc which are specifically designed to get the most out of Canon sensors.
Until then, if you're going for the flat log look anyway, just choose one that looks good.
Or if you intend on going back to a more contrasty look and just want the grading latitude, choose one that has a corresponding 'undo' LUT in resolve.