Sony F3 XDCAM 35MB/s and ProRes 422 220MB/s Comparison (Matthew Allard)

Honestly, Matthew should be presenting this sort of stuff to seminars and conferences. He explains things with clarity and a straightforward approach with examples that you can see and compare. That just about completes the picture.
 
Barry_Green said:
As for the initial post in this thread, I'm not surprised at all. On that type of shot, XDCAM-EX will perform quite well; we've been finding on the AF100 board that for many/most shots it's pretty difficult to tell the difference between NanoFlash-recorded high-bitrate footage, and the same footage recorded by the onboard AVCHD codec. And I found in my comparison between AVCHD and XDCAM-EX that as long as the shot doesn't stress the codec to its limits, it does perform quite well, so, yeah, this isn't surprising. If you want to demonstrate the differences, look at the tests that the Convergent Design folks did between the EX1 with and without the Nano, they ran some tests that show when the onboard codec reaches its limits and how the higher-bitrate Nano can retain more detail.

But yeah, you're never really gonna see that difference in a talking head type of shot; for that the XDCAM-EX codec is totally going to perform fine. (although, again, from a 10-bit 4:2:2 head you'd still get better/nicer footage from an external recorder that could take advantage of what the F3's head is capable of delivering).
Click to expand...

8bit is not a "big" problem, as MPEG2 compression is. You can live with it, but massive macroblocking is never nice on your main master.
In the same time 8bit is more visible with F3, because it's so clean. With many other cameras 8bit "issues" are covered with noise, but with F3 they are much more visible.
Same applies to Alexa, Epic- I do loads of feature films encoding and film based movies almost never cause a problem (due to grain). Digitally shot productions need way more attention and in most cases proper dithering during 10 to 8bit conversion is needed.
If you can, keep 10bit workflow, as it gives more headroom for grading and creates much more "reliable" final master. It's absolutely not true that 10bit master makes no difference when your target will be 8bit, eg Blu-ray disc. It does make massive difference- just depends how you use your 10bit main master, but this is separate issue. With a proper dithering 8bit version can look very good in terms of gradients where "fixing" banding on 8bit sources is not easy at all.
 
at the moment i am only able to record s-log on 8bit 4-2-0 sxs card. the desicion which external rec i will use in future is not done - but i will after NAB 2012.

I use Win7-PC, PPro and AE, Blackmagic and MB-Looks, not BM Resolve light becouse of less knowledge at the moment.

May i ask for my further understanding in grading and colour correction, does the following workflow have advantages:
1.record s-log 8bit 4-2-0
2. then transcode the footage to 10 bit 4-2-2 with AME (for examle to DNxHD422 or QT mov 10bit422, Prores is not possible becouse of PC-version)
3. then grade the transcoded exported 10 bit footage in PPro or AE
4. then export again to 8 bit 420 for example to use Blue-Ray or LCD-TV streaming clips

where would the advantages be ?
Alister Chapman once had a blog on his side about this workflow, but for me it was not final understandable. footage 8bit 420 - blow up to 10bit422 to grade or CC - and go back to 8bit 420.
Will (8bit-footage) macroblocks and noise not also be blown up in a bad manner?

thanks for help
klfi
 
no reason to transcode, AE and premiere pro automatically convert to 4:4:4 rgb 32bpc colorspace internally for all operations when the correct settings are chosen (maximum bit depth and maximum render quality in your sequence and render settings)

enjoy the advances of technology and just drop your BPAV folder right into premiere or ae, and have fun. You aren't missing out on any hidden quality by not transcoding to an intermediate codec, unless you're using a dinosaur NLE.

There's a time and place for intermediates, but simple editing such as that is not one of them!
 
Only thing which could improve your footage is special chroma upsampling, deblocking and some noise injection to improve gradients. NLEs use simple methods and have no special setting for this step.
This can be done eg. in avisynth. Will take some time- another step, but it could improve your source file and in the same time final graded footage. It's just a question if you have time and is it really worth- it will show up on some footage more than on other, depending on the nature of your video.
 
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