About a year ago I was one of the first to call attention to an HDSLR plugin in development named 5DtoRGB. 5DtoRGB was designed to suck the utmost quality out of HDSLR files by transcoding them in 10 bits without using the ubiquitous, problematic, gamma-shifting Quicktime engine. Now beta releases of version 1.5 of the plugin are available for both Mac and Windows. Chris Marino takes an excellent video look at the new version:
Extra credit to Chris for using one of the greatest soundtracks of all time, Curtis Mayfield's [easyazon-link asin="B00123IAHO"]Superfly[/easyazon-link]. Since he's using Adobe's NLE, it's also worth noting that Adobe is offering 50% off (yes, half) Premiere Pro and Production Premium CS5.5 for editors disenfranchised by Final Cut Pro X. More details here; Adobe's offer is good until September 30th.
In case you're not familiar with 5DtoRGB, here's the original blurb:
5DtoRGB is an awesome tool that extracts every last drop of video quality from cameras that record to the AVC/H.264 video format. Cameras like the Canon EOS series of HDSLRs record video in this format with subsampled YCbCr color. Because of this compression, the video is at risk of massive quality loss during the post production pipeline. By using a very high quality conversion process, 5DtoRGB gets you as close as possible to the original data off the camera's sensor while putting the brakes on any additional quality loss. In short, it'll make your footage look just plain amazing!
Previously, I'd also run some tests of my own (rare, I know). Here's an animated .GIF I exported, which switches between MPEG Streamclip and 5DtoRGB. 5DtoRGB is the smoother one (hint: keep an eye trained on the vertical post of the red bike frame):
Hit the link below to download Version 1.5 of the plugin, which takes advantage of your computer's GPU as well as 64-bit processing. The original 5DtoRGB was slooooooow to render; hopefully the new version improves on that a good deal.
Link: Rarevision 5DtoRGB
[via Wide Open Camera]
