Sony a7s III Internal Codec vs. ProRes 4444

ProRes RAW HQ transcoded to ProRes 4444 is brighter, less green, has greater contrast, increased saturation and significantly higher resolution than the internally recorded S-Log3/S-Gamut3 XAVC S-I codec. Below are screenshots of the HDR footage dropped onto a rec. 709 timeline with a custom curve added to preserve highlight detail and a hue adjustment to normalize skin tones. ProRes RAW has 23.7% greater resolution than the internal codec. Click on screen grabs to enlarge.

And here’s the same ProRes 4444 clip with a small amount of spatial noise reduction in addition to the temporal. Mode faster – radius small – Luma 2 – Chroma 2.

There’s also more color information in the RAW clip than in the XAVC S-I clip:

Mark Spencer demonstrates how the Sony XAVC internal codec falls apart much more easily than the ProRes RAW one when doing an extreme grade:

For the video, we spent a couple minutes trying to match the footage as best as we could without making any adjustments to sharpness.