S.Stefan

  OK, thanks. I hadn't thought of possible different implementations within the codec. I'm pretty familiar with JPEG stills and if MotionJPEG is just a series of JPEG stills I think I have a fairly good idea how much editing leeway I have. Not familiar with how much editing H.264 will take. 

  Thanks, does Motion JPEG have more wiggle room than H.264?

Thanks. This makes sense.

Thanks for your reply jgharding.   You were a couple of minutes ahead of my last post.

Thank you both for replying, Zach and Axel,   Axel, I totally agree with the creative importance of post. I do not consider it a pita. I've been shooting raw for stills for over a decade and love the flexibility it offers for tonal/color editing. I do not have a raw capable video camera yet and although I'm keeping an eye on the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera I probably will not be shooting raw video in the near future. I expect it will be too taxing on my current computer equipment. Possibly later.   In the meantime my thinking was it might be a good idea to come pretty close to a final image in-camera in order to minimize chances of banding etc. in post due to possible heavy editing. I realize some editing will in my mind always be necessary to fine tune the look one wants but if one can do that with reasonable confidence that the image will not degrade and the light touch needed will not be very time consuming it should be worth the in-camera effort.   Being new to video I have come across recommendations on the internet to just shoot with a very flat profile and fix in post. Just sticking an arbitrary flat profile in there and fixing in post didn't seem to make perfect sense to me if I have a live curves tool in the camera where I can adjust highlights and shadows separately.    

I'm new to video so bear with me. I've shot stills for a long time though, both professionally and for my own pleasure.   Now that I'm educating myself in the various ways of the video world I find myself pondering a question regarding tonal and color editing, i.e. grading.   I'm currently shooting micro 4/3 equipment, specifically the Olympus OM-D E-M5. I will be getting the E-M1 soon. While these cameras are generally not highly considered in terms of video specs they are fantastic still cameras and I am getting perfectly good results shooting Motion JPEG's and editing short sequences in Photoshop. This codec seems reasonably easy on my computer's CPU and seems to allow for some editing leeway. Unfortunately the camera only has a 30fps option which is not ideal for me as I live in a 25fps PAL area. Very impressive in-camera stabilization though.    Anyway, it seems to me that since video is highly compressed 8bit it tends to break apart with heavy editing. Getting it as close to perfect as possible in the camera would seem to be a good idea. Bearing that in mind the live curves tool built into both cameras should be useful tool for shooting video. Using that in conjunction with the live on-screen histogram available in both cameras and the new Color Creator feature in the new E-M1 camera for custom tailoring individual colors should allow one to get pretty close to a final look in the camera.   If I'm right this could both be time saving and serve to maintain image quality in post.   Is my reasoning on this correct or am I missing something? I am after all new to video.