avchd to dnxhd for color grading?

[keinan]

Hello people!
I have several videos recorded at avchd 4:2:0 and want to do color grading.
Im thinking to transcode to dnxhd 8bits or perphaps 10bits because i read that avchd is poor for that but im not cofident that after transcode to dnxhd i will get better color correction....
What do you think about that?

 

[Bruce Watson]

I have several videos recorded at avchd 4:2:0 and want to do color grading. I'm thinking to transcode to dnxhd 8bits or perphaps 10bits because i read that avchd is poor for that but I'm not confident that after transcode to dnxhd i will get better color correction. What do you think about that?

If you transcode into dnxhd, you'll still have AVCHD's 8 bit 4:2:0, just in a bigger space. It's like clipping -- once clipped, you can't recover the clipped data.

I'm not saying you can't get decent grading performance from AVCHD; you can, I've done it. What you can't get is great grading performance, or large changes without artifacts. For that, you need to record more bits and better chroma sub-sampling. 10 bit 4:2:2 is better, 12 bit 4:4:4 is better still. But you knew that already.