Reconforming to original H.264 after editing 5D footage in ProRes 422?

[Ryan Loetscher]

I dont know if anyone is going to read this at this point, but it seems there’s a lot of work going into pointless quality testing. As I understand it, you convert to ProRes so you can edit because H.264 is horribly taxing on your CPU due to its extensive GOP structure and compression techniques. There will be no actual QUALITY difference between your H.264 and ProRes, or even Uncompressed. You cant increase quality that’s not there. Now, once you do color and other effects, it makes sense to go out to a higher quality codec so you don’t lose any information you just added. ProRes would probably be fine… if your doing extensive color grading it might make sense to use the 4:4:4 flavor. But there’s an argument not to go back to H.264 right there, those original files don’t have the same color space at 4:2:0 with predictive frames to faithfully hold all the information you just added (of course I’m not sure how accurate that part is, but it sounds convincing!)

[Nthabi Serote]

ok this all sounds like something i know, yes you cannot work on h264 files, but i have 5D transcoded footage and it seems i can not go back from here, i have also checked on mpeg streamclip to see if there is anyway i can go back to the original file, but i cant, i would have to compress it AGAIN! but i need to get back to the original file and i dont have the drive with the original footage on it, I would like to cheat the system and make proxy files with the current format i have (prores 4444).

is there any way i can take it back without messing up the quality?