Hmm, I’m not sure I’m looking at the right thing, but I picked a specific moment to evaluate. That is when the serpent slides away and light from outside begins to shine in. I’m looking at the light itself, Rey’s face, and Finn’s silhouette. Doing this I see some fuzzy, compression-y softness. When I look at the ProRes output from FCPX (that is on the Drive) I see it as well. When I look at the FCP7 output (ProRes) that was imported into FCPX for grading, I see it as well. When I look at the raw source material (BluRay ripped to ProRes HQ) I do not see it, and instead see nice, fine grain.

I guess ProRes HQ must just be that much better? It wouldn’t take a lot of effort, just time, to run it through those export/import/encoding passes, leaving things in place. So, let’s see whatever else may roll in for feedback and I’ll tentatively plan to do that after a little while. (What convinced me was seeing it in the ProRes master output, because that’s something I would like to be able to always hand off and have someone do whatever might be needed at any future point.)