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prores 422 hq vs prores 422 vs prores 444
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Actually someone saying they recorded RAW video on a Canon DSLR isn’t that out there anymore with Magic Lantern…that said I naturally assume its meant that its H264 unless someone specifies other in the post. In the case of H264 I don’t need to repeat what others have said 100x in this thread but Canon RAW from Magic Lantern is a 14-bit (well 14-bit padded to 16-bit) DNG image sequence with no chroma subsampling so it takes full advantage of ProRes 4444 from the start (minus the alpha channel of course). 12-bit 4:4:4 in a compressed format is SOOO nice when working from high quality sources, apart from image sequences I can’t think of a better codec thats similar.
For H264 I usually start at ProRes LT or ProRes SQ and if I start to go through more than 3 generations I just subsequently render out ProRes HQ but I’ve done compression tests in photoshop to compare the loss of info over multiple generations and its quite impressive. For any skeptics just open up Photoshop CS6 or whatever version you have and take screen shots of your original footage and your ProRes footage and make two layers, set the ProRes footage to difference and then adjust the exposure and you’ll see compression artifacts. I was plain shocked to see how miniscule the difference between codecs was, I’m convinced ProRes HQ is 95% as good as Uncompressed 10-bit 4:2:2 and I’m quite happy as Uncompressed 10-bit is so beyond my storage capacity for anything but tiny projects. I might post a video showing how to do this in Photoshop and then pictures for comparison but its likely someone already has done this.
Anyways that was an old post so I digress…happy shooting>editing>enjoying!
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Richard, you are absolutely right, and 100% more qualified than most to have accurate knowledge on the topic. For those that don’t know codecs, perhaps they are not educated in it enough, though it’s a whole other ball game to act like you know what you are talking about (not directed at anybody, just general) for example, if you take a Ford Mustang and “transcode” it to a Lamborghini body kit, on the surface it will look like a Lamborghini, but when it comes time to take it for a test drive, it will have the same performance as the original Ford Mustang, there is nothing you can do to change that fact, but to get the genuine Lambo – much like if you shoot with 420 there is nothing you can do to transcode it to get 422 or 4444 – all you will have is a nice wrapped file on your drive that says 4444 for example, just like the Mustang Lambo exterior, and in that 4444 file you will find your original 420!
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Arsen, that’s a great analogy!
My one footnote to that is though your source footage may have been acquired as 4:2:0, depending on the grading/VFX work you do, you will probably want to be working in a 4:4:4 or at least 4:2:2 color space to retain the new data that has been added to the original image.
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