Tattoo's, a beard, and a RED camera (and a mandatory REDuser account). Glad I'm not the only one that finds that annoying lol. the hipster cinematographer's. In a way they are like the DSLR Cinematographers who buy a camera and think they are graced with skill in an instance. Not sure which is worse lol. The DSLR guy can learn because he didn't drop $20K+ on a camera that comes with a potentially elitist mindset!

You won't lose much converting to ProRes and you won't lose any color. I would say if possible, consider getting an external recorder to record S-Log from the camera straight to ProRes, I honestly think that is the best way to go. Sort of like how the Arri Alexa has ProRes. There motto early on and still is I believe "shoot > edit" which describes how easy it can be perfectly when you start with ProRes.

Umm what?! ProRes being Intra-Frame should retain complex image detail better!

Hey! So it is going to depend on what you are going for but what I will alway's say “NEVER INTERLACED”….of course if you must shoot 1080i or 480i or 576i for TV News type stuff then that is the exception. But for film production, short film’s or anything that you want to have an image that doesn’t look like crap SHOOT PROGRESSIVE! The “i” stands for interlaced scan and the “p” stands for progressive scan.

Here is my long answer which contains things which may prove to be important that you may not know and going into a video project knowing them is extremely useful!:

1920x1080i vs 1920x1080p is an interesting discussion but basically 1920x1080i is only giving you 540 horizontal lines instead of 1080 at a time. Interlaced scan 1080 will produce interlacing artifacts, you have probably seen these before on TV or whatever where the image looks like half of it has been “shredded” or it has teeth or their are weird line artifacts. This is because literally every other line is shown in “fields” so you are really seeing 50 or 60fields per second and only 25 or 30frames per second when seeing interlaced shot content. Obviously this becomes a problem because these fields are captured at slightly different moments in time and the field will NEVER match up 100% percent. It is just WAYYY easier to shoot progressive scan and avoid the mess that is interlaced scanning. Interlacing is an unfortunate relic of the past day’s when getting higher frame rates was not cost effective so using a high field rate as a pseudo high frame rate was used and was important, especially for thing’s where the film look would NOT be good like rugby, football, sports in general or news broadcasting

1080p24 or 1080p30 are going to be your friend and if 1080p60 is available and you like the look of less blur and don’t mind slightly more rendering and slightly larger file sizes go for that. But for short film’s and stuff that is supposed to have “the look” 24p is going to be your starting point. The motion blur of 24p with a shutter speed of 1/48th (aka 180º shutter angle) is part of the “magic” of film.

A lot of people will say "yeah but your footage will need to be converted to interlaced for broadcast TV” this may be true if it ends up on broadcast TV but the conversion is pretty simple. Both 1080p30 and 1080p60 convert to 1080i60 perfectly, in fact, many cameras shoot 1080p30 and output it as 1080i because certain recorders and cables don't support progressive scan stuff, same can be said for 25p and 50i.

Converting 1080p24 to 1080i60 is a little more difficult but IMO I can do this entirely on my MacBook Pro in Compressor. Basically, you use a process called “Telecining” to spread those 24frames/second over the 60fields/second.

In Europe (and PAL land) they shoot a lot of film at 25p because that happens to be their TV standard (25p and 50i) to and it is so close to 24p that the "look" is very similar (which is why I use 25p to "cheat" cameras that don't have 24p :D but that requires knowledge of some other things to avoid strobing and other things). Anyways 1080p25 is not supported on Blu-ray! So European filmmakers have two choices once they have completed a film shot at 25fps and plan to distribute on Blu-ray....
-Convert the 25p to 24p, this can be done by slightly slowing down the footage but it causes audio issues if you don't slow the audio down with it and for things like musicals slowing or speeding audio effects the pitch
-Convert or "put" the progressive scan footage in a 1080i50 container.
--1080p25 can be stored in a 1080i50 wrapper just like 1080p30 can be stored in a 1080i60 wrapper. You will see European blu-ray's of movies that are mainly European (and therefore were shot at 25p because they did not anticipate needing to distribute to other places) use 1080i50 but really it is 1080p25. You won't see any interlacing the way it is stored

(Not sure if you are in a country that is 50Hz or 60Hz so full disclosure: I'm an American so I deal with 60Hz NTSC content [30p, 60i, 60p, etc.] 85% of the time. If you live in Europe, Most of Asia save for Japan and some others, the Mid East, and parts of South America you are dealing with PAL 50Hz content [25p, 50i, 50p, etc.]. Your camera is likely set to your countries standard of 50Hz PAL or 60Hz NTSC, for more information google PAL vs NTSC and have fun :D! So if I mention 30 or 60i/p and you are a “PAL’er” and your camera only say’s 25 or 50i/p that is fine, just replace 30 with 25 and 60 with 50)