Our server was down this morning.  I know everyone starts their day with The Chron.  It may even be your home page, I dunno.  It might not, I’m just saying it might or maybe even should be.  So I hope you can recover from this misstep and still have a great week.

Zacuto finished out their Great Camera Shootout 2010 over the weekend.  They cover green screening for effects, resolution and what benefits there might be, if and when the cameras start shooting in a RAW video format instead of a compressed one like h.264.  They did this by taking a single video frame (h.264) and comparing it with a RAW still frame.  Meaning, they took video of a scene and captured a single frame, then they took a single photograph of the same scene for the pseudo RAW comparison.  The results were strongly in favor of RAW.  Wider dynamic range from light to dark, more color information, more detail.  Although the native resolution of the still image (21 million pixels) and the resolution of the video (~2 million pixels) is dramatically different.  Like, which one do you think is going to have more detail?  Still, RAW would be nice.

I touched on the RAW issue in my post the other day when I professed my love to Premiere CS5, so I award myself the thumbs up for being on that ball.

One thing that’s still unclear to me is that they were claiming that converting your native footage to one of the new lossless codecs like ProRes or Cineform actually seemed to increase the quality of the footage in addition to making it feasible to edit.  I think by quality they were talking mainly about color depth.  It was unclear whether the change in quality was immediate or at the end of the day after processing.  It stands to reason that moving your footage to a format with more depth is going to allow you more latitude moving forward.  These tests were done before Premiere CS5 came out for the public though, where you can now edit native h.264 files.  So I’m wondering, and many folks on their message board are wondering, is converting your footage to an uncompressed/lossless codec before editing still the best route?  The only response I’ve seen so far is that CS5 has ‘the most sophisticated (workflow) that currently exists’.  Which doesn’t really address the question.  All I know is that the days of converting my files are over regardless of what the pros say.  People are generally impressed with the quality of the footage that comes directly out of the camera.  I see no need to waste my time taking it to a level no one else I know will appreciate.

Oh, I wanted to add a link to the Vimeo account for this dude Carlos Lascano.  They feature one of his videos at the end of the Zacuto shootout.  I had seen some of his stuff before and he looks to have progressed the technique a lot.  Really great.