Grading Raw vs. ProRes HQ

Sorry, lately I've been mostly reading the back and forth (so to speak) over in the Cinematography forum. I did a search of the forums and could not quickly locate answers to my questions. My apologies if I missed the obvious.

I understand the basic differences between Raw and ProRes HQ. I've also read from the posts of other users that the ProRes HQ footage from the BMCC "grades extremely well".

My questions: Is there a quick summary of what you sacrifice, from a grading perspective, when you shoot in ProRes HQ as opposed to RAW? Are there any source clips of the same footage in both formats with which I can experiment to see the differences? No problem if there aren't straight-forward answers to these questions. Thanks very much.

First off RAW is just that... RAW data. It has no colour. It's a black and white file with meta data. So none of the colour info is baked in.

With ProRes the image is a process version of the RAW data. It has been de-bayered, a white balance has been applied, a LUT has been applied and then its been scaled and compressed before being written to a file.

While the quality is still very high you lose things like:
Resolution (2.5k vs 1080p)
Bit depth (12bit vs 10bit)
Colour (no colour burnt in vs Film or Video LUT applied)
Colour balance (no CB applied vs on of the presets burnt in)
Dynamic range (a lot more data is still on the RAW file so you may be able to get more out of your highlights and shadows)

Once you process your RAW files, set the white balance and apply a LUT, the image you are working with is very similar to the ProRes file. You do however have more bit depth so you can push and pull your colours to much more extreme lengths before you start to see banding.

Adam, thanks very much. This is the info I was looking for. Appreciate your taking the time to explain.
Steve

Agreed with Adam here.

I did both ProRes movies and RAW movies, the latitude in the RAW is better, the resolution is better, there is no compression and so forth.

You certainly can work in ProRes if it is a money constrain, especially if you can manage to make a "log" ProRes (like the LogC Alexa ProRes files).

My preference will be:
RAW first with ACES workflow
RAW with LUT workflow
debayered dpx to Log/Filmlog/Slog/LogC +the appropriate LUT
ProRes Log + appropriate LUT
ProRes baked final color space last.

Thanks, Walter. That opens up some new avenues for further research.

Walter, just curious; do you know how prevalent the ACES workflow is? Has it been widely adopted?

Walter, just curious; do you know how prevalent the ACES workflow is? Has it been widely adopted?

Not at all...

We are doing more movies/advertisement in ACES but it is still not widely accepted yet: is the new kid in town, is strange and ugly, dress weird and speak with a different accent... you get the gist of it...

There is a learning curve form the production / capturing / dailies / DI / Distribution and not all the players are at the same level yet...