Is it normal or it's my camera fault? (RAW, Hot pixels, 5d mark III)

[pickone]

Hi!

     I was filming something in RAW 2.0 and I saw that I have a lot of hot or blinking pixels on my footage. After I read on many forums and stuff, I understood that is about ISO, and the fact that recording RAW in higher ISO, these "hot pixels" will appear, which it happend to me also. I tried to find out if is about the camera sensor or just from ML... Tested with taking a lot of pictures, making a sequence and stuff like that, but I didn't saw the same pixels like in the Raw footage. In the last, I tested on not so big ISO (1600) RAW footage, and also was a good result, no "hot pixel"... So, now, my question is: Is it normal to have those pixels at high iso (6400) ? Or it can be something from my camera sensor?

Thank you in advance!

[Danne]

It is normal. There are ways to get rid of them. MLVFS can fix this and also MLP by adding a dead pixel fix list where you create a map with the coordinates of the hot pixel location.

[pickone]

Thanks for you answer, I will try to find those apps

[pickone]

If I not ask too much, can you help me with some links? I found only something for MAC and I am a PC user... and the other, nothing

I used only raw2cdng

[Danne]

Then I would recommmen mlvproducer I think it,s called

[pickone]

Found it, thanks! I will check it today

[dfort]

The 5D3 doesn't have the focus pixel issue. I think what you're seeing at that high ISO is noise. Try turning on Chroma smoothing and see if that helps. I've also had good results using Neat Video but there are other programs and methods to deal with it.

Perhaps posting an image showing the problem might help us give you some options.

[Danne]

Well 5D mark 3 has hot pixels I can say. Only a few but they sure can be annoying.

[pickone]

Look, this is an image with hot pixels, I put a circle on every one what I saw. I know how is the noise, or grain and stuff... but those pixels were remain all the footage there

Zoom the photo

[pickone]

It was on ISO 6400, ML RAW 2.0 ... some pixels are brighter than others, some are just blinking...

On ISO 1600 didn't saw any hot pixels...

[Danne]

Shouldn,t chroma smoothing take care of this? There are settings for this in mlv_dump.

[pickone]

Well... I don't know nothing about Tell me

[Danne]

Here is the download for mlv_dump. You start by opening you command prompt and explore the binary.
http://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?topic=7122.0

[pickone]

But.... this chroma smoothing, is not combining the 2x2 pixels? or something like that? Which the footage will be not so sharp? I just ask

[dfort]

Actually there is some sort chroma smoothing going on by default in Adobe Camera Raw. My understanding is that chroma smoothing is not combining pixels but averaging the color values so it shouldn't affect sharpness.

RAW 2.0 is more commonly referred to as MLV and the tool to work with that is mlv_dump. It was recently updated but the Windows download that I found has an older version--that's also the one that Danne posted. Anyone with the link to the latest mlv_dump for Windows?

Here's the relevant documentation for that:

Code Select Expand

-- DNG output --
--dng               output frames into separate .dng files. set prefix with -o
--no-cs             no chroma smoothing
--cs2x2             2x2 chroma smoothing
--cs3x3             3x3 chroma smoothing
--cs5x5             5x5 chroma smoothing
--fixcp             fix cold pixels


You can get dcraw from various sources. I have a version that supports wildcards (*.*) in my bitbucket download site. It is in the cr2hdr-Windows_2015-12-20.zip package. According to the dcraw documentation:

Code Select Expand

REPAIR OPTIONS

-P deadpixels.txt
Read the dead pixel list from this file instead of ".badpixels". See FILES for a description of the format.

FILES

:./.badpixels, ../.badpixels, ../../.badpixels, ...
List of your camera's dead pixels, so that dcraw can interpolate around them. Each line specifies the column, row, and UNIX time of death for one pixel. For example:
962   91 1028350000  # died between August 1 and 4, 2002
1285 1067 0           # don't know when this pixel died
These coordinates are before any stretching or rotation, so use dcraw -j -t 0 to locate dead pixels.


It isn't that difficult to do this. Open that image file in Photoshop, Gimp or whatever graphics editor you have and set the rulers to show pixels. Find the coordinates for those bright pixels and put the x y coordinates in a file. Just enter 0 for the date unless you want to keep track of when you mapped them.

Or--

You could try RawTherapee, MLV Producer for Windows and other Windows programs that can work with MLV or DNG files.