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Should I colorgrade in ProResHQ or dslr h264 codec?
I shot my footage on a Nikon D7100 that compress the material to h264. So I suppose that h264 is the original, highest possible quality that I’ve got. But it is very compressed and at least for editing, it takes more processing power than working on a bigger prores file.
I have exported my material to proresHQ and used the scene detection tool to get it on a timeline in davinci. But before I get much further I would like a confirmation from someone more knowledgeble than myself, that I am not loosing quality, in any significant degree by grading ProResHQ rather than the original H264 files.Anybody have an input on this?
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8 Replies
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PR because h.264 functions really poorly in Resolve and many a post-production application.
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Thanks 🙂
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Use 5D2RGB for the conversion. It five some nice chroma filtering to help with it being 4:2:0
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That was a bit to technical for me.
What is 5D2RGB, what conversion are you referring to and what does ” It five some nice chroma filtering to help with it being 4:2:0″ mean?
Color grading is not my day-job so I’m not that familiar with the lingo.Thanks.
Andreas
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It’s software that you use to convert dslr h264 to prores.
I meant to say it does some nice filtering of the chroma information in the image to help with the low colour sampling of dslr footage (4:2:0 chroma subsampling)
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Ok, great. Thanks. I’ve been using mpeg streamclip and premiere for that. I’ll check it out.
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ProRes HQ is way overkill for editing or grading h.264 at 24Mbs. Even ProRes LT is 81Mbs, but ProRes 422 is a good choice if it makes you feel better. Plus I know that my Fox delivery spec for output to HDCAM-SR is ProRes 422 (and this is for Red and Alexa originated material).
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I would definitely go with ProRes 422 HQ, or otherwise as high quality as you can. Bitrate is not directly comparable between codecs, both in quantitative terms (h.264, being interframe, can be expected to be between 5 and 10 times as efficient as an intraframe codec like the ProRes family), but also because the types of artifacts are not the same, and just because a stream has been compressed to a bitrate with one codec, it doesn’t mean recompressing it with another codec, even at a higher bitrate, will not introduce more artifacts.
This goes double for material that you’re going to grade, since the “visually lossless” compression of most codecs, like ProRes, will compress highlights and shadows more, since they’re perceptually less important, but that might not hold when you start grading.
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Joakim Ziegler – Postproduction Supervisor
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