Does anyone know where I can find/download some somple footage of the Inspire 2 with Zenmuse X5s camera in prores and cinemadng file? I'm thinking of buying the license if the quality still holds up in 2023, what are your thoughts? How much recording time would I be able to get on a 240GB cinessd?

Thanks

The footage you get from the x5s in the proress format is far far better than what you get in the standard mp4. Proress 422 on it is fantastic, its honestly a massive step up, especially when you take it into editing software afterwards and do some color work on it.

There should be plenty of examples on youtube at this stage, but its worth it if you can get your hands on the SSD and the reader. Off the top of my head a 240gb drive recording proress 422 should get you an hour or so of footage. Ideally if youre working youd have 2 drives so one can be offloading while you shoot on the second one. If you buy the licence and record in CineDNG (raw) youll likely only get about 20mins worth of footage on that same SSD. It puts out an extremely big file for very little gain.

Mike9129 Posted at 4-19 08:57
The footage you get from the x5s in the proress format is far far better than what you get in the standard mp4. Proress 422 on it is fantastic, its honestly a massive step up, especially when you take it into editing software afterwards and do some color work on it.

There should be plenty of examples on youtube at this stage, but its worth it if you can get your hands on the SSD and the reader. Off the top of my head a 240gb drive recording proress 422 should get you an hour or so of footage. Ideally if youre working youd have 2 drives so one can be offloading while you shoot on the second one. If you buy the licence and record in CineDNG (raw) youll likely only get about 20mins worth of footage on that same SSD. It puts out an extremely big file for very little gain.

I'm mainly interested in quality rather than easy to edit/work with uncompressed footage. For me resolution and color depth is important. Do you get 12bit with prores as the current 8bit mp4 really really sucks and hinders the quality without buying a license in my opinion.

To be honest, I'd be lying if I said I knew for sure.

Long story short tho, proress 422 has let my clients do as much colour work and matching as they've wanted apart from once where they requested raw, in all the 6 or 7 years I've had the I2. If you're really after quality there's also 444 which is a lot bigger and you won't see much of a difference from the 422 files.

The DIT on that set nearly shot the DoP when they saw the file sizes they'd be dealing with on the day.

It's not like braw where you can do 4-1 and so on, it's straight up here's a folder of 12bit dng photos taken at 24fps. Go stitch them and that's your video clip.

The end of the day opinion I have is the big jump in quality you'll see is when you go from mp4 to proress. After that it's very much diminishing returns.

The only other big improvement you'd see is if you moved from the x5s to the x7. And for reference, the x5s prores files are a long way ahead of even the x7's mp4 files if you want best bang for buck