yep the not debayered image would be luminance values only that makes sense. Which also give you more precision because you don’t need to account for ColorValues in the RAW signal.
Since the Sensor Photosites themselves are not recording color.
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I think all this stuff is very confusing and pretty far from the original purpose of this thread but I will say that Raw is the answer to @andy_dill question about what is better quality than prores4444 straight from the camera.
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When you start taking into account that the ungraded media could end up being used in a 12bit HDR monitoring environment then every bit can help.
When I have seen resolution issues causing banding, it is generally in the upper mids into the highlights. Things like bright skies, bringing detail in that just is not perceptible to the eye. I have had a few shots that were returned in 12bit ProRes4444 that were worked on externally, even though they were provided in 16bit float exr, and we have not been able to pull back detail into what at first looks like an over exposed sky. You slap them on the wrist, get them to redeliver in 16bit exr as requested, apply the same grade and boom, all this detail in the sky reappears.
We predominantly have been working from X-OCN RAW and I wouldn’t work on anything bar 16bit lossless files. As Finn has mentioned though, we are sadly lacking a 16bit lossless integer format suitable for log images. I’d prefer to not have to linearise log data but there is not an option at this stage. ACES it is.
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i once put 10 000 gain on the red levels of a brick cg comp for a playstation Star wars commercial. I was forever called the 10 000 gain guy at that studio. deadly serious. LOL
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My serious two cents here is that i use DWAA compression on EXRS that i request from company 3. There is a great variable number… at 45 its lossless, and when i export frames for Roto companies i do the same but at 300 so the compression is a lot greater but the edges are still good enough for Roto. I love the simplicity of just using EXRS with Aces or rec709. Love some conformity in our world of everyone doing different things between studios! The lossless frames are bigger than DPX but not massively so. Keeping it EXR means i know my container is big enough to fit it all and i love the comfort in that
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DWAA is awesome I agree.
CG in DWAA is also great because it is not compressing the AOVs but only the contribution passes, really clever thing they did there.
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+1 on dwaa! I use 150dwaa instead of jpegs for proxy renders , previs etc where it doesnt matter , still linear cause you know I will never write a non linear exr file - ever (write this on my grave) 
Its as small as jpeg and I can have the whole pipeline apply the ocio stack and everything is always acesCG everywhere at any time , makes life so much easier!
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Just rereading this thread.
To me there is a lossless 16bit RGB integer format that isn’t supported in flame unfortunately. It is open source too. Cineform. It really would be a great option if it had Flame support. Resolve supports it. It is similar on system resources to compress/uncompressed as Piz.
Is this something we should request as a format for Flame?
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even better would be dpx-c which is a file based format based on cineform… but yes both would indeed be great options.
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I didn’t even know dpx-c was a thing. There is pixspan compression which is an efficient lossless compression for dpx but the license is far from affordable.
I have never seen it implemented either but it “exists”
There are plugins for Eyeon Fusion and The Foundry Nuke compositing systems to read and write the CineForm DPC, AVI and MOV files natively. These plugins have been developed by Magna Mana Production.
but it seems all long gone, what about 16bit PNG? is probably the best we have as a integer format that is compressed?
Tbf, nothing beats the versatility of exr and its compression settings regardless.
It amazes me that Pixspan s still trying. Flame is the only VFX software that supports it. Their licenses fees are ridiculous. The use case keeps diminishing as storage/network are linearly getting faster and cheaper.
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Only issue with exr is dealing with anything that is not linear gamma.
This seems much more a technical/theoretical issue in testing I have done using exr to transport log images, but it is definitely not best practice.
PNG is a good suggestion but you cannot render it from Resolve and it can be slow to work with too depending on level of compression. It is all lossless but you can create smaller files if you have the time and power to compress/decompress.
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agree