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If you're just playing the footage back then it's hard to see the loss in chroma information in a typical compressed 4:2:2 file, except maybe on very saturated primary colours where you see the steps on edges. But if you're doing heavy post manipulation then it's much more obvious that it's lacking. If you change the colour space to YUV (YCbCr) and look at the chroma channels (Y being luminance) on something like internal XAVC 4:2:2 Sony footage, there is practically nothing there. It's so blocky and compressed and undetailed. 4:2:0 is obviously a lot worse. That's the difference. But for most people with a camera that costs a few thousand dollars, they aren't going to be bothered by that.

I have looked at 8-bit log footage recorded from a Sony a7s to an Atomos recorder in UHD 4k ProRes, managed through an ACES workflow and then output to HD and viewed on a full size cinema screen and it looked truly stellar. I was amazed at how much that camera could do. But it doesn't stop me from preferring to shoot raw where possible to get that extra chroma information, ability to do exposure changes and apply more aggressive film emulation all without breaking the image as quickly. The "thick neg" comment applies. Since mid-range cameras have more or less bypassed internal 4:4:4 log recording options, possibly due to file size, raw recording is a decent "workaround". It is after all 1/3 the size of an equivalent RGB image, with generally less aggressive compression applied that something like XAVC. Recording log 4:4:4 ProRes is still an amazing option though that is basically indistinguishable from raw, but it seems to be an endangered species.

The issue I'm particularly taking about is separate to this. If I wanted to for example connect a director's monitor from the HDMI out of the Ninja V, there does not seem to be a way to disable the HDR Out to the external display. If you're monitoring in Vlog on the Ninja (with or without an additional LUT) and want to see the same image on the connected screen, then currently there doesn't appear to be a way because HDR Output over HDMI can't be disabled. This transforms the image to HLG or PQ when I want to stay in Vlog. If this works okay for you, I would be interested to know.

Also ideally for a C200 something like a DZO Vespid prime would be nice. So factor in another $1400.

I have enough crap lying around that I can rig out a C200B. Def thinking about picking one up. It seems the sensor noise performance in the shadows is the Achilles heel in this DGO era, but considering it’s so much cheaper than a C70, one can maybe put up with a Neat Video pass. I’ve seen a bit of a nasty horizontal banding in the red channel for night footage, not too bad but it’s there. Maybe that person forgot to do the black balance which is apparently pretty essential with this camera. I have the Sigma fp and would say the s35 crop image is cleaner. But the fp is far from user friendly compared to the c200. Both have their place.

Agreed! I went through a phase of wanting one, but I got talked down by an owner who said they loved it but moved on to an Alexa Classic.

Hi all, I got sidetracked with a work project but coming back to the fp, I was looking at the combo with the Ninja V again and I could not immediately see how to output V-log over HDMI from the Ninja V to another monitor. Meaning, basically pass through the V-log encoded image seen on the Ninja V to a director's monitor or an EVF. I've selected V-log ("Native") for the monitoring and that all looks fine on the device itself. For me, HDR output over HDMI can't be disabled. So the color space needs to be PQ, HLG etc and the gamut also needs to be selected, which should be V-gamut but that's also not available. Its really odd if you can't just pass through the image. I'm going to also contact Atomos support and see what the deal is.

Right, for exposure as you say use the exp slider in the global bit in the HDR panel and in the ... wing menu set the color space and gamma. Then under the hood it does the transform in linear gamma. The color space doesn't matter for a global exposure adjustment, but you might as well set it anyway. Also the units for the slider are in stops. For doing a color temperature change in Kelvins, use the Chromatic Adaptation effect and set the source as the current temperature and the target to where you want to go. And again you set the gamma and color space so it does the operation in linear and knows the primaries which is important compared to the global exposure operation. So if it's not raw then it's just the temperature that was baked into the image, which might be in metadata if you check with exiftool or something like MediaInfo.app. Or if you just noted down what you recorded it at. You can also do tint there, which I assume will also match the raw tab.

I do think that there are times RAW Convertor (sp?) can be inaccurate, so it may be worth trying a demo and comparing to a Prores 4444 log export for accuracy. As far as grading experience and flexibility, there's no real difference between Prores Raw and DNG. Overall, if you export to Prores 4444 log, you will have the same experience as grading linear raw. You can get the same temperature, exposure and white balance controls with Resolve as the raw controls as long as you're correctly applying them.

I'm of the opinion that ProRes Raw quality is very good. Obviously it would be great if Sigma could apply lossless or lossy compression to the internal DNG recordings the same way BMD were able to pre-RED drama. It would also be great if Sigma could take a cue from Atomos about how they managed to implement log + LUT monitoring.

That is likely to be a fair solution for many people. I'm not sure about Premiere's working gamut management outside of 709 though. I mentioned I use Play Pro for conversion in the way you describe (to log master), which is guaranteed to be accurate with their color conversion. It's affordable, but it does have an obtuse flame-style interface which may put some people off.

Just a heads up that I tested this software and I found it didn't do an accurate conversion from PRR to DNG, at least with PRR from Sony cams. I think most users won't mind that slight shift though, but if you want a pretty tightly managed color pipeline then I found it doesn't cut it.

One thing i haven't tried yet is recording both internal (to an SSD) raw and simultaneously trying to output Prores raw to the Ninja V for monitoring. I read somewhere it was possible. What would be the point of that? Well if you could monitor on the Ninja V in Vlog with a LUT, but record internally to DNG, you could edit the DNG directly in Resolve. Also, you get highlight recovery with DNG so you get a bit more dynamic range. Having said that, obviously Prores raw is pretty nice. I personally use Assimilate Play Pro which was bundled with the Ninja V for a while to transcode to log Prores 4444 in order to use it in Resolve. I'm fine with the extra ingest/transcode step, but I know a lot of people aren't. Obviously using the BM monitor is more convenient for going into Resolve, but I don't know if it has any kind of color managed setup or highlight monitoring like the Ninja V offers.

Yeah, would absolutely love to see a Foveon sensor cinema camera! My takeaway from watching the interview was that the sensor might be ready by end of year, but not necessarily the camera. Hopefully I'm wrong though, and they do bring something out sooner rather than later.

Unless there's an error in their matrix transform, the "intermediate gamut" metadata tag being added into the raw stream by the Ninja V already displays the raw image in Vgamut. So under the hood it's already transforming from Sigma RAW gamut to Vgamut. So then all you need to do is apply the single Vlog/Vgamut to Rec709 LUT on the Ninja V. The two step transform is only an issue in FCPX. It's possible that the gamut transform LUT in FCPX is incorrect because it was supplied by Panasonic for their cameras. Having said that, I realize now that the S5 has the same sensor as the fp, so it's not too bad a choice for Atomos to co-opt Panavision's color science as a workaround for the lack of an equivalent from Sigma. If you suspect there may be an error on Atomos' part, what might be worth trying is using Play Pro to transform PRR to Vlog/Vgamut, then apply the standard Rec709 LUT. Then use the Ninja V as output from your computer via HDMI and seeing if it visually matches the way the Ninja displays the PRR clips.