Thank you Blackmagic and John Brawley for kindly making these RAW files available.
I understand to get the most latitude when grading this footage you need to use the Blackmagic Divinci Resolve Application, Photoshop, or something of that nature. In this test though I thought I would give the footage more of a challenge and did all grading in Final Cut Pro X.
Here's the video I created with the shots testing various color corrections:
Workflow:
1.) Opened Final Cut Pro X and created a New Event and Project for the test.
2.) Imported the DNG's into the test Event.
3.) Put all the DNG's into the timeline and set the duration for all of them to one frame.
4.) Selected all the DNG's for a particular shot and Command+G to make each shot a compound clip therefore separating each of the four shots out for editing as a video clip.
Steps one through four took about a minute to do.
5.) Corrected and colored the clips one step at a time as shown in the video. Including the use of Motionvfx.com's mLooks 2 Color Correction Plugins in combination with Final Cut Pro X's Color Board. I can't tell you how much I love the Color and Shape masking abilities that are right there within the program!
6.) Exported 1080P
Also notably, and amazingly, Final Cut Pro X played back the 2.5K footage un-rendered in the 1080P timeline no problem, even with all grades, color and shape masks, and titles applied. Put that on the list of things that make me smile as an editor.
In the end I was very impressed with how clean the footage was as I largely have had to work with DSLR footage. It's a big difference. It held up incredibly well to grading directly in the application. It was very resistent to the normal color noise and artifacting you see when grading DSLR footage. There is some noise in the final low light shot but it is mostly luminance, not color noise. That I can deal with.