Cinewanna,
This probably ties in with something I found from helping someone on another forum earlier in the week ... and first, I don't have any total raw footage, though I do read everything that comes in both the PrPro & Sg forums here and a lot of things elsewhere ... I figure, within X period of time, I'll be doing that also so it's part of my current learning curve. I've been through some lengthy threads of what happens & how folks have or have not found ways around things. And I've some people I routinely drill for questions I've got. No shrinking violet here. Sigh.
Apparently ... PrPro applies a limiter of some kind to footage it sends to Sg, or it compresses data ... I don't have footage & scopes setup to be able to prove one way or the other. The other case was someone who shoots a rather wide DR camera. In other software on his scopes, he's got data clear to near 120 IRE. It seems to be that high in PrPro ... yet when he sends through the DL process, in Sg it only shows about 102 IRE of top-level signal whether clamped or unclamped. His footage was such that he could import directly into Sg in "native" mode, and the same clip in Sg with the scopes unclamped ... showed the same setting on Sg's internal scopes, just below 120 IRE, as he'd received from his external scopes. (Which, I'd note, shows the usefulness & decently close accuracy of the internal SG scopes.)
His feeling ... impression ... what his eyes saw, as neither he nor I could prove anything ... is that he'd just lost data. But even he was unsure. I tested with some of my GH3 footage, and found that I also had one that went to near 120 on account of over-exposure. It showed that way in PrPro, yet ... in a DL to Sg ... the scopes there again when unclamped only showed it topping out at 102 or 103 IRE. When I created a Speedgrade project and put that same clip onto the timeline, the unclamped scope reading was ... just under 120 IRE. So without even RAW footage I was able to determine that something I don't understand is happening.
Again, it could be simple clipping, but FAR more likely, I would think the gain of the footage is somehow compressed ... dialed down, if you will ... through the DL process. It's a guess, however ... I don't have evidence to prove either way other than something changes the range of data shown in the scopes in Sg between DL and native mode operation using the same unaltered clip.
I'm trying to get this figured out, as I want a BMPC too ... and will report back on it when I do ... or maybe someone like Dennis Weinmann or Fran Roig will hope in with a nicely precise answer, as they would know this much better than I. Read the below, and you'll see why I think it's just limiting the initial data displayed, not clipping.
Now ... as to the log-footage correction workflow, the way that is supposed to run in Sg is that you get your footage into Sg ... then click the " + " icon in the bottom lower left area, under the layer's panel, and then click the "disclosure" triangle left of the heading "Film" ... scroll down, select "LUT" ... and then in the middle of the suddenly empty area the color wheels were in ... use the drop-down list to choose the LUT for your camera ... so:
Notice my nasty handwriting ... near the top, there's some ARRI profiles ... then some BMC ones (yes, built in!) ... and near the bottom, the GoPro ones. In between are some Canon and Fuji cameras also.
The reason I suspect the DL link simply dials-down the range ... is that they wouldn't have these here, and have people using those cameras, IF they couldn't fit an Arri or RED or GoPro clip into these built-in LUT's properly. So, using these ... which are then placed in that layer in lighter gray right over the "base" primary layer ... should simply re-map the footage into the appropriate range for processing.
Especially as you just got that new wonderful toy OOPS ... tool ... I'd DL over and try out the BMC LUT's that are built in.
Have fun! (not that I'm jealous or anything ... but my skin tone does look a bit ... oh, I dunno ... odd somehow ... )
Neil