My simplest and cheapest MLV workflow (Any Camera)

[iRedM]

And the quality wow!! Okay basically I am using a Canon 5D mkiii, shoot with a flat profile at 1920x1080 on a San Disk 64GB 160MB/s Extreme Pro Compact Flash Card and here's my workflow:

MLVBrowseSharp - FREE (MLV to DNG; if it stops for any reason in the future, just uninstall the .NET framework and reinstall it again.)
Lightroom 5 - CHEAP (Okay; here I do pretty-much most of what you'd do on a raw photo, vignetting and export sequence as .tiff)
Blender 2.72b - FREE (Convert my .tiff image sequence to .H264 while retaining all or most of the quality (Everything looks perfect))

You can make your cuts on Blender (FREE) as well or any editing software of your choice from then on. I use the DSLR Controller app on my LG G3 smartphone to setup and monitor my shots and then switch it completely off during raw recording. I also heard that it helps to disable Global Draw and set your CF card to capture RAW images on you camera. Check the VLC snap shots of my videos below for reference. Oh; forgot to mention that while I wait through the processes I read my FREE 'King James Pure Bible Search' software  by Pastor Mike Hoggard (YouTube).

[rbrune]

Two things:
1) when you shoot mlv/raw your flat profile doesn't have any effect at all.
2) You can have a completely free workflow by using Davinci Resolve Lite, it can read in DNG sequences, no need to convert to TIFF files, you can color correct etc and you can export to h264.

[iRedM]

But my worry rbrune is that H.264 is somewhat of a GOP than an I-frame in terms of compression, considering that I still need to edit the file in FCP7.

[iRedM]

Hey guys; I just figured out that one can actually import image sequences with Apple Compressor and here are three tutorials that I think are helpful:

http://larryjordan.com/articles/compressor-x264-improve-video/

[rbrune]

You can edit in Resolve. Exporting to h264 is only for the end result of grading+editing. Hence the cheapest and easiest workflow is to just load the cdng sequences in Resolve, grade and edit them in there and export as h264 for delivery.

[theartofweb]

When I use Mlrawviewer to convert raw to dngs does it matter what the curve is (S-log etc) or if I set Bilinear or AmaZE or they only account for ProRes transcoding?

Anyway, I think one ca use Resolve lite to edit first and the export to a single intermediate file to do color grading, always in Resolve.

So, you can do everithing with just Mlrawviewer and Resolve Lite (except denoising).