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Hi Tomsemiterrific

I'm in a bit of a hurry here but here are some notes that I've collected over the past few months. Hope this helps.

Canon C-LOG
18% Middle grey = 32.79% IRE
90% White = 62.74% IRE
http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?300371-how-do-I-know-I-m-properly-exposed-when-shooting-in-C-log/page2&s=d408a43004d503887fd6bc7fd4a2ab77
On another forum, James Longley, who has been using C-log for his Afghanistan documentary, posted this:
"One thing about exposure: Don't overexpose the C300. Just set the zebras at 90% (+/-5) and don't let anything go over unless absolutely necessary. You may think that the shadows are gone, but they're not. The camera is very forgiving – you get so much more than what you can see of the darks on the LCD screen in daylight. You have to just have faith that the shadow detail will be there when you bring the material home."
It is always important to test, but I think you can expose highlights in C-log up to 90% on a waveform.
Using a lower ISO won’t cause more noise, but will result in less dynamic range, in particular in the highlights. Instead of using a lower ISO, use an ND filter. Also, to reduce noise, I recommend overexposing by about a half stop. Canon doesn’t recommend this, but Shane Hurlbut does and my testing has confirmed that this camera needs a little extra light to keep the noise down.
Ebrahim Saadawi:
Activate waveform, expose until just before 100%. Trust me, this is the best image for the C100 C-Log in noise, DR, colour, skin. You'll see when you try it. The image is so much thicker and nicer when brought down while falls apart while pulled up. It's so easy to expose as the waveform is super fluid (real time at 25 fps). And yes ETTR even by pumping up ISO, on the C100 an under exposed 850 image is noisier than an ETTR 3200 image. But ideally, ETTR with iris and shutter and lights at 850 native ISO. 
Yes if you don't want to spend the huge effort of neat video in post, in shoots where you're going above 6400+ ISO, increasing the NR to 5 in the menus gives a ENORMOUS lowlight advantage with no detail loss. Beyond that you start losing. 
Also test using WDR instead of C-Log. Especially for +6400 ISO with +5 NR. I would actually shoot the first one shot in WDR at 850 ISO under sunlight just to avoid the initial momentary disappointment  you might get with seeing your first shot in C-Log, especially if it's in lowlight, with Cinema Lock (no DR) and exposed down a bit. WDR serves GREAT in fast jobs, some people even prefer it for grading. So compare both too as a test. 
http://www.hingsberg.com/index.php/2013/01/canon-c-log-exposed-literally/
The chart below that I put together is based on information provided from Canon’s whitepaper on C-LOG. From the chart you can see how image brightness values are remapped to new values. For example 18% middle grey which is normally 50%IRE moves down to around 32-33%. 90%IRE (white) will appear on your waveform monitor at only 62-63%. It’s really important to use these new values (even if you don’t understand them) when setting your exposure in C-LOG mode since it will maximize the dynamic range your sensor is capable of and preserve as much of the scene information as possible. This “maximum” amount of information is needed later when you de-LOG your footage and begin grading and color correcting in post.
http://blog.abelcine.com/2012/10/05/working-with-canon-log/
http://www.hdvideopro.com/columns/help-desk/the-rules-of-log-exposure
Canon C-LOG-18% Middle grey .textClipping

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Yes, looks like the Sony AX100 to me, flipped of course and is and has been my workhorse for ceremony & speeches at weddings for quite a few years (since whenever it came out).
I actually shot an entire wedding video on it once, but then immediately went back to mirrorless.
It’s good for static stuff but the result is not exactly what you might call ‘cinematic’. At least not in my hands 🤪

Sennheiser AVX

Camcorders can be great in the right hands.
Here's Mr Herzog for his latest film...


 

Maybe the image is horizontally flipped. [you beat me to it]

I think its a Sony AX100 (or one the variants as they have a few cameras that share the same shell) and the images themselves been flipped horizontally.
Unless Sony have released a limited edition left handed version.

On topic please people.

IMO I bag you pardon, maybe it would be better to involve some more time to really investigate where all of this one and thousands similar cases are proved to be pure sad true? If you have a will, I can provide it to you, but not here to further contaminate thread already polluted  with superficial news level.  I think, It's surely not at all about someone's favorite side (dirty and immoral ones are everywhere the same) - which you introduced with something that has to be a provocative joke and default fact - but about favorite and really independent state of mind.
And of course, my big apologize to you and all others - it is always my dilemma weather to answer to something I feel as superficial provocations that sometimes arise at inappropriate  place. Maybe just only to remind all of us (with me as so sadly often first-place-candidate!) and add suggestion at called-out level of picture-to-picture answer

https://lists.bcn.mythic-beasts.com/pipermail/bitlist/2008-October/000400.html

They did that before. On the C100/C300/etc the backup battery is welded in place on the most inaccessible location you could imagine (requires complete disassembly) .  Took me like half a day to change that one.

I am absolutely not saying that someone who had an R5 could use a good old fashioned CR2032 battery eliminator in the camera then bring it out through the camera enabling them to provide a switchable power source to it to effectively remove/re-insert it without taking the camera apart each time they want to reset the recovery time.
I'm absolutely not saying that.
Someone else might say that.
But, just to be clear, I'm not saying that at all, OK?

C'mon, no need to you apology : )
This is a big company, I doubt they would ever do it. They simply don't give a damn. You don't want it, don't buy it. As simple as that in their mind. And they will even address a smile to you in the end. That's the way it works.

You need to prioritize. You can't have everything. It seems like your understanding of cameras is not that great, and in that case I would put off investing too much in cameras until you understand what you actually need. If you really need to get close to a subject while it's pitch dark, you should get a lens with a shorter zoom range and larger aperture. Learning how to use noise reduction properly is also much more affordable than quadrupling your ISO performance.
An all-in-one 1" camera and putting the rest of your budget into sound equipment might be good. This is not at all what you asked for, but it might serve you well.

Maybe electronic design was outsourced to China and software to India 🤣

Next step, test it in liquid nitrogen! 

Lighting is pretty much the most important thing for what we do. It’s what makes your images sing. 
Here’s a bunch of lights I highly recommend:
1. Falcon Eyes F7
Ridiculously awesome light for the price. Everyone should have at least one.  Super bright for a small light. Very useful. Essential. Possibly my favourite right now. 
 
2. Falcon Eyes 24TDX II 
Flex lights are expensive. Not this. Build quality is great. Super useful. Waterproof.  Put anywhere! 
 
3. Luxli Taiko 
In my opinion, better than the Arri Skypanel which is 3-4 times the price. Best colour accuracy I’ve ever seen and very easy to use. Only downside is the power unit. Feels a bit cheap and not long enough. 

4. Godox S30
I think this makes the $3k Dedolight equivalent almost obsolete. For 10% of the price? Super optics for the projection attachment. Downsides are the power goes down to 10w from 30w when using batteries.

5. Colorspike
The light pattern customisation is immense and looks way more organic than preset effects from other lights. An incredible tool. Only downsides is the carry case is a bit “meh” and diffuser is fiddly. 
 
6. Astera Titan Tubes 
These are way more expensive than other mentioned lights. They share some ideas with the Colorspike’s but on a much higher level. These things are insane and worth every penny. I don’t own them but what they can do.... wow!! Downsides... 8 tube case is very very heavy. They are expensive. 
 
What are your current favourite lights? 

So much time being waisted on this camera. Yep, it overheats! Yep, it's not fit for purpose! Yep, you knew this and still gave Canon your money. Be disappointed in yourself, rather than Canon. Canon made a huge cock up, but you decided to buy into it rather than avoiding it.
 

On Mac you can use Invisor which also enables spreadsheet-like side-by-side comparison of several codecs. You can also drag/drop additional files from Finder to the comparison window, or select a bunch of files to compare using right-click>Services>Analyze with Invisor. I think it internally uses MediaInfo to get the data. It cannot extract as much as ffprobe or ExifTool but it's much easier to use and usually sufficient.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/invisor-media-file-inspector/id442947586?mt=12

Ok, here's the second attempt.....

and graphed:

So, it looks like:
UHD Prores 422 HQ from Resolve can be matched in quality by ffmpeg h264 422 10-bit ALL-I at around 170Mbps and a similar bitrate for h265 which is about a 4X reduction in file size UHD Prores 4444 and 4444 XQ from Resolve can be matched in quality by ffmpeg h264 422 10-bit ALL-I at around 300Mbps and around 250Mbps for h265 which is about a 3-4X reduction in file size There doesn't appear to be a huge difference between h264 and h265 all-i efficiencies, maybe only 10-15% reduction Happy to answer any questions and to have the results challenged.  Let's hope I didn't stuff anything up this time 🙂

I tried to download it.
It lets you download 8K of it but then you have to wait an hour.
Or you can continue to download 4K at a time every 10 minutes for two hours.
If you are downloading to an external drive though you can carry on downloading as much of it as you want.

You're right, assuming you're talking about using these things as intermediaries, but if you've got a camera that doesn't have Prores (like most prosumer cameras) then you don't have that choice.  
OR, you do have that choice, but the option involves adding an external recorder for many hundreds of dollars, plus all the extra size, weight, and complexity of additional battery types, chargers, etc.
With things like the P4K/P6K and others making Prores more affordable now, I suspect that many will be tempted towards one camera or other because "Prores is a professional format and h26x is a consumer / delivery format" but I wanted to test if that really did matter.
After all, the only comparisons I could find were that h265 was 100x better than Prores 4444, which is obviously ridiculous.
I'm about to update my ageing MBP and am looking forward to the better h265 support that will come with a new OSX and latest Resolve (I can't upgrade Resolve until I update OSX and there's a limit to how new your OSX version can be on a given hardware setup, so I'm kind of stuck in the mud until I upgrade my hardware).
I just uploaded a test file to YT right now.  H264 10-bit All-I.  Worked just fine.
ffprobe reports:
I've found YT to be pretty good with input file formats.
Absolutely.  I wouldn't advocate for h264/h265 as intermediaries at all.  
DON'T DO IT KIDS!! 😂😂😂
No worries.  Personally, I find that doing a few hours / days of testing is far more effective than doing hours / days googling (which often does not lead to the truth) or, worse still, is hanging out online and hearing from people that just repeat misinformation and you end up making a bad decision that either wastes many hundreds / thousands of dollars or means you have to deal with lower quality footage for months / years until you realise that you were mislead.
I've wasted thousands on equipment I don't use and also spent years shooting with bad settings or flat-out with the wrong equipment because of misinformation gathered online - even from EOSHD, although it's definitely been better than average for camera forums.  
I also finding that posting the results forces me to do everything properly as I will be explaining it, and it's a bit embarrassing if you get something wrong, so that's motivating too!
Of course, I stuffed up my reference file above, and am re-rendering and re-evaluating all the modes again...  such is life and learning 🙂
I'd really like to be doing perceptual quality testing, as we look at our footage with our eyes and brain, not our statistical analysis software, but typically this involves having massive double-blind tests, which are beyond my ability to perform, so I leverage off of metrics like SSIM, which are reliable and repeatable and comparable.  
Does Prores at a given SSIM have a different feel than h264 at the same SSIM - you'd imagine so.  
At this point I'm still very satisfied with my testing though, as at least I have some idea now of what is what.
I would imagine that cameras would increasingly offer h265 10-bit ALL-I codecs, and I think that's a good move.
h265 is better than h264 (more efficient, giving either better quality at identical bitrates or same quality at lower bitrates) and ALL-I formats render movement nicer and are dramatically easier to deal with in post.
One thing I am very conscious of is that you can go two routes for your workflow.
The first is to render high quality intermediaries and abandon your SOOC files.  For this you'll typically choose a friendly ALL-I codec, which trades decoding load for high data volumes, requiring an investment in large and fast storage.
You will edit and grade and render from these intermediaries.
The second is to render low quality intermediaries, which you can use for editing, but then revert back to the SOOC files for grading and rendering.  
This is my workflow and I use 720p "Prores Proxy" which cuts like butter on my ageing MBP and also fits neatly on the internal SSD for editing on the go.
The challenge with the second workflow is that you can't really grade on the proxy files, and you definitely can't do things like post-stabilisation or even smooth tracking of power windows.  This means that you're back to the SOOC files for grading and which means that you can't play the graded footage in real-time.
This compromise is acceptable for me, but not for professional people who will have a client attend a grading session where they will ask for changes to be made and won't want to wait for a clip to be re-rendered before being able to view it.
Having SOOC footage that's ALL-I significantly helps with performance of grading from SOOC footage, but it's why professional colourists have five-figure (or even six-figure) computer setups in a sound-proof cupboard and run looooong USB and HDMI cables out to their grading suite.
Anyone who balks at the cost of the Mac Pro for example has never seen someone do complex colour grades with many tracked windows on 8K footage live in front of a client.
Anything that cannot be explained simply isn't sufficiently understood.
I'll get there, I promise 🙂 

Most commonly H264 is 8-bit Long GOP, sometimes called IBP.  This may date to the original H264 standard, but you can also have All-Intra H264 and/or 10-bit H264, it's just less common.
I don't have the references at hand but if you crank up the bit rate sufficiently, H264 10-bit can produce very good quality, I think even the IBP variant. The problem is by that point you're burning so much data that you may as well use ProRes.
In post production there can be huge differences in hardware-accelerated decode and encode performance between various flavors of a given general type. E.g, the 300 mbps UHD 4k/29.97 10-bit 4:2:2 All-Intra material from a Canon XC15 was very fast and smooth in FCPX on a 2015 iMac 27 when I tested it, but similar material from a Panasonic GH5 or S1 were very sluggish. Even on a specific hardware and OS platform, a mere NLE update can make a big difference. E.g, Resolve has had some big improvements on certain "difficult" codecs, even within the past few months, at least on Mac.
Since HEVC is a newer codec, it seems that 10-bit versions are more common than H264 (especially as an NLE export format), but maybe that's only my impression. I think Youtube and Vimeo will accept and process 10-bit Long GOP HEVC OK, I tend to doubt they'd accept 10-bit All-Intra H264. There are some cameras that do 10-bit All-Intra HEVC such as the Fuji X-T3. I think some of these clips include that format https://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/fuji-x-t3/fuji-x-t3VIDEO.HTM
But there's a lot more involved than just perceptual quality, data rate or file size. Once you expand post production beyond a very small group, you have an entire ecosystem that tends to be reliant on a certain codec; DNxHD or ProRes are good examples. It almost doesn't matter if another codec is a little smaller or very slightly different in perceptual quality on certain scene types, or can accommodate a few more transcode cycles with slightly less generational loss. Current codecs like DNxHD and ProRes work very well, are widely supported and not tied to any specific hardware manufacturer. 
There's also ease of use in post production. Can the codec be played with common utilities or does it require a special player just to examine the material? If a camera codec, is it a tree-like hierarchical structure or is it a simple flat file with all needed metadata in the single file?
Testing perceptual quality on codecs is a very laborious  complex process, so thanks for spending time on this and posting your results. Each codec variant may react differently to certain scene types. E.g, one might do well on trees but not water or fireworks. Below are some scenes used in academic research. 
https://media.xiph.org/video/derf/
http://medialab.sjtu.edu.cn/web4k/index.html
http://ultravideo.cs.tut.fi/#testsequences

@kye Yes, your H.264 files are 8 bit. So in your initial run, were all your tests generated using either resolve or ffmpeg using your reference file, or were any made directly from the source footage?
1% of the file size is not remotely true, unless you start with a tiny H.265 file and then render it into ProRes which will increase the size without extra quality. I wouldn't trust much that comes from CineMartin.
Of course, the content matters a lot for IPB efficiency. So I guess you might be able to engineer a 1% scenario if your video isn't moving, and you use the worst ProRes encoder that you can find. (Stuff like trees moving in the wind is actually pretty far on the "difficult for IPB" spectrum, though it looks like only about half your frame is that tree).
Just btw, in my experience Resolve does a lot better with encoding when you use a preset rather than a defined bitrate. Emphasis, a lot better.

Great tests! One thing I will say is that when I did my ProRes vs H265 tests, I tested on a >HD Raw file in order to maximize the quality of the reference file, to avoid softness and artifacts from debayering. Additionally, my reference file was 4:4:4 rather than 4:2:2... fwiw.
The other thing that would be nice is some files to look at, since while SSIM is great to have it's not the only way to look at compression.
Also quick question: Are your H.264/H.265 files 4:2:0 or 4:2:2? 10 bit or 8 bit?

Some cameras shoot RAW and Prores, and some shoot h264 and a few shoot h265.  There's lots of bitrates on offer too, 50Mbps, 100Mbps, etc.  Some are ALL-I and some are IPB.
But how good are they?
I couldn't find any comparisons, so I did some myself.
What I did was take a few shots from the BM Micro Cinema Camera shot in uncompressed RAW of a tree moving in the wind, and made a single UHD frame by putting them in each corner, like this:

Also, they were of different lengths, so I just repeated each one, like this:

So we have a test clip that was shot RAW (maybe compressing already compressed footage is easier?  I don't know, anyway..), that includes decent movement but isn't some stupid test case that means nothing in real life, that doesn't repeat (because the clips are different lengths), and has some deliberately almost crushed blacks to test the pixelation that h264 and h265 sometimes get in the shadows.
Then I exported an uncompressed 10-bit 422 YUV file to use as a reference.  After some tests and seeing the file sizes and processing times, I decided to only use the first 12s of the timeline.
Then I rendered a bunch of clips, either h264 from Resolve, or h264 and h265 from ffmpeg.  I tried rendering h265 from Resolve but had issues, and in this test all the maximum bitrates I tried all created the same size file, so I abandoned that.  Common wisdom online is that Resolves h265 export mechanism isn't the best and you should use ffmpeg anyway.
Then I compared the compressed clips with the uncompressed reference file, which gives a score called SSIM, which goes from 1 (a perfect match) downwards.
Here's the results so far:

Here are some observations / thoughts, and some answers to some questions I'd had:
In Resolve, H264 seems to top out, as I couldn't get it to export at more than about 400Mbps IPB, but ffmpeg went higher than that quite happily ALL-I h264 doesn't seem to be that different than IPB, at higher bitrates anyway - slightly lower quality and slightly higher file size, but not the 3x I've read around the place Prores isn't that much worse in terms of quality vs compression than h264 or h265, despite being an older codec (although maybe there are versions?  I have no idea how prores works.. maybe that's important for this topic?) Different encoders have different levels of quality, so what's in a given camera is likely to differ from these results I guess the real question is, how much h264 do you have to have to equate to Prores?  The answer seems to be "about the same bitrate, but probably a little less for an ALL-I codec, and a little less bitrate again if it's an IPB".