Changing 5D footage from LT to HQ in FCP?

[Simon Wood]

Hi Jon

I sent your question to the Grader his response was –

Well, it is is true that the camera is shooting less quality from LT but in the process of importing to prores HQ, we found that there are much less banding and sharper edges in the picture and that makes grading much easier , if you look on the original footage from the 5d magnified by 100% especially on the edges, there is a difference . Also for even better result there is a standalone software that gives a better result like the 5dToRGB, so, to sum it up, it is much better to “open up” the footage as much as possible and not use LT or H264…

[John Vonmutius]

If that’s what your grader wants, then it’s probably a good idea to deliver HQ. However, I would disagree with him. I have done color correction on my own footage with FCP and After Effects as well as some color grading with Color and I have never seen any difference between LT and HQ. The codecs are the same color depth and use the same compression schemes. As long as the color grading application is set to render with a high-quality, high-color-depth codec, the results should be identical.

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