I came across a real world example of 5dtoRGB's power while setting up some scenes and stuff for some upcoming Color Finesse 3 tutorials I've been asked to do . I previously stated here: http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/530/5dtorgb-for-gh2-advantages-vs-disadvantages#Item_29 that with my adobe workflow and Color Finesse 3, I have had no need or advantages using 5dtorgb. I was wrong. To be honest, I really wasn't expecting any improvement, but 5DtoRGB did a spectacular job at upsampling 4:2:0 and it's chroma smoothing was excellent.

The scene's background was lit with a blue tint and the skintones in the foreground were lit warmly so as to create a complementary color contrast. Now when I brought the footage into AE, I noticed these very harsh edges around the skintones with false color etc. at first I thought it was digital sharpening but at close inspection, I realised it was the 4:2:0 limitation. It looked awful and I could not perform any sharpening as it got a lot worse. Then I thought I'd try 5dtoRGB and it proved it's worth.

NOTE 1: this improvement that 5dtoRGB brings will be augmented with further micro-contrast enhancements like sharpening etc. Try sharpening the avchd file=ugly mess. try sharpening transcoded file= normal.
NOTE 2: Ofcourse, there are space+time disadvantages.
NOTE 3: this scenario with the blue lit background is quite extreme as it's the perfect receipe
for chroma down-sampled footafe disaster, so it doesn't mean I will be transcoding all of my footage ofcourse.

settings and tech stuff: lit with 2 312 LED lights (1 312 Bi-color at 3200K with diffusion in fridge:) and 1 312 5600K with blue gel), nostalgic -2,0,-2,0. ISO 200, nikkor 50mm 1.2 Ai-s @F2.8, drifwood's 100Mb 3 GOP settings, transcend 16gb class 10, graded in Color Finesse 3, transcoded in uncompressed 10 bit 4:2:2 (overkill, 8bit and DNxHD should work fine)

so here goes:

pic 1: 1st detail transcoded (look at improvements) - compare with pic 3
pic 2:2nd detail -transcoded-day and night difference! -compare with pic 4
pic 3:1st detail untranscoded (look at false color and chroma down-sampling artifacts)
pic 4: 2nd detail example- untranscoded ( look at awful false artifacts on skin edge!!!!)
pic 5: untranscoded graded. compare with pic 7
pic 6: transcoded ungraded for reference.
pic 7 :transcoded graded (there is small difference in CC between pic 5+7 cause I changed a few things-this does not affect the edges though)

pixel peepers enjoy!!!