Canon EOS 5D MK III color grading workflow

In my experience, COLOR doesn't mind H.264 camera originals one little bit. I know this is contrary to what you may have heard out there but it's the truth.

You may for example have a FCP editorial sequence in ProRes 422 or ProRes Proxy.
The key to this workflow is that the naming of the files didn't change when transcoding from h.264 to the proxy codec used for editorial.
Then it's just a "create offline" and straight reconnect back to the h.264's in FCP and send that H.264 sequence to COLOR.

Grade as you wish and then render out ProRes from COLOR. It totally works.

Well, I wouldn't recommend EDITING in H264 as it's computationally intensive for FCP, though you could turn off the dropped frames warning.. I'd edit ProRes Proxy then reconnect back to the H264, then send to COLOR. What I WOULD do is as soon as you send to COLOR, IMMEDIATELY send that back to FCP (Don't render, just send to FCP). So if you run into any funkiness with the XML, you'll know straight away. It's just a precautionary measure.

Okay, great! Thanks for your help.

Anyone who shoots H.264...and then insists that you "retain every ounce of quality throughout the process" is a person who doesn't know what they are talking about. Encoding to ProRes is fine...good...proven.

And people need to concentrate more on STORY than all this. Hurt Locker...shot super 16...looked grainy as hell...and was a far better movie than Avatar that was beautiful and full of quality.

Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Marek Kremer] "H264 into ProRes4444 or HQ, edit, grade, export keeping the same codec up to the end. That's it. Any conforming to H264 is pointless I believe."

Agreed in principle, although its still overkill. H264 is really a pro-sumer highly compact codec, which might be great for extremely low budget field acquisition, but in no way is it an efficient post format, requiring i-frame interpolation for every operation, and massive, intensive CPU attention. Maybe worse than HDV, the use of which seems to be tailing away, finally. However, even HDV seems to have had a better overall ability to keep well-exposed source images intact. "Well exposed" being the key phrase.

Anything shot in H264 is still a cookie being shipped in a boxcar if you use anything higher-bitrate than ProRes 422 (standard). Sequential frame formats like dpx or tiff only make sense if you have done some chroma smoothing and gamut expansion and you are intending on a DCP or filmout, both of which seem very unlikely here.

On the same page as Shane.


jPo

"I always pass on free advice -- its never of any use to me" Oscar Wilde.