Grading Samples with XF Codec

[cowpunk52]

In other threads on this forum, there have been some people that expressed 'concern' about Canon's XF codec, and how robust it is for grading - especially since it's the on-board recording format of the new C300 digital cine camera. I thought a thread where we can demonstrate the capabilities as well as the pitfalls of grading Canon's XF codec would be useful. One of the more strident concerns with the XF codec is it's ability to handle gradients, since it's an 8-bit codec. I pulled a clip from a plate I shot earlier in the summer on my XF300 and applied some fairly hefty coloring and gamma shifting of the sunset sky here and found it could take a surprising amount of pushing and pulling around in post - it's quite durable.

This is my first quick and dirty sample here, but please keep in mind I would probably never actually grade anything to look like this. It's done for demonstration purposes only. Colored in FCP 7 with Colorista II.

ungraded

graded

Feel free to post your own examples!

 

[dustylense]

Nice!

 

[dustylense]

Per your suggestion Cow,
Here is some simples from the XF105. Ungraded with the BBC cine profile -3db. Graded Single chip looking this good? Helllz yeah! Looks outstanding on my 82in. DLP!

 

[Nuno Dias]

I know these are not XF codec samples, but were made with 8bit 24mbs H264 image resolution. These are a couple of scenes from a short made on a 5D (pre-Technicolor). The film was graded on a DaVinci Resolve at 32bits from the original H264 camera files.

Note that the frame grabs are not from the original high res files. The ungraded frames are from converted ProRes LT files and the graded frames are from a 720p PAL MOV file. but its nonetheless easy to see the grading work that was done.

For anyone interested, the film can be seen here: http://www.wix.com/shadowsthefilm/shadows

If I had no problems whatsoever on this job, I can't see any problems coming with the current C300's 50mgb MPG2 codec.

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