A Close Look at the Gradability of H264

allupons said:
If I am off base though, please let me know as transcoding everything I shoot before I edit is a step I would love to eliminate, heh.
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You should continue to transcode everything because, as almost anyone here will tell you, editing H.264 natively is a huge pain.
 
Paul Jay said:
Did you convert the H264 files into a codec with a higher colorspace before grading? ( like ProRes or Uncompressed )
Or did you grade the H264 files directly.

This will affect the final quality of the grade.
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I converted to Cineform HD before grading. My machine isn't the newest, and editing+grading H264 natively takes more than just patience.
This said, if you have a fast machine and you're working inside of a 16 bit or 32 bit project, it really shouldn't make a difference whether you converted or not.

Ryan Farnes said:
I downloaded the original file from Vimeo. I'm wondering if you'd be willing to put up the matching 4 seconds of the original video so that we can see how dull it looks and how much noise that has, so that we could see how much is perhaps coming from your grade, and how much is preexisting.
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Right, good point. I can only upload one HD vid per week to Vimeo, so here's the original MOV:

http://rapidshare.com/files/306845062/MVI_2243.MOV

Thomas Lew said:
Great post Chris. Question for you - how did you achieve that look? What steps did you take in terms of color wheels?
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Okay, here are all the things I did:
1) Pulled white and black levels inwards just enough to maximize overall contrast without introducing clipping
4) Raised the gamma to 1.4, brightening the scene
2) Added an orange colored graduated ND to the sky (-0.2 stops of exposure)
3) Pulled the shadows considerably into the blue
4) Pulled the mids about as much into orange
5) Pulled the highlights extremely far towards orange/yellow
6) Using a Curves adjustment, I darkened the mid-section of the curve
7) I increased the overall saturation, but with a bias towards the oranges (oranges get saturated more)
8) Another Curves adjustment, this time bringing the shadows down just a hair
9) On top of all that are the sharpening and grain filters
 
Ryan Farnes said:
Awesome. Thanks!

Definitely clear that nearly all the noise is from the grade. Good to know. You can see some noise if you're looking for it in the original, but nothing like what is in the grade.
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What you're seeing is the purposely added grain. The only compression artifact that was made visible by the grade is the posterization in the sky which is barely noticeable.
 
@ Chris,

A faster system does help but still.
H264 is a distribution codec. Not an editing codec.
Even on fast machines converting to an i-frame 4:2:2 or 4:4:4 codec before editing and grading is the way to go.
You'll be able to do much more realtime fx, multiple streams ( a dissolve in realtime is 2 streams ) and compositing without losing quality from the original H264.
 
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