I'm starting a new project for a client in the end of this summer. Will be shooting at over 150 historical locations (ancient ruins, settlements etc...) and going to be travelling a lot. The work will be about introducing the historical heritage of my country. I will do short pan and tilt shots, slider shots for up to 10 secs and then combine them into a final 2-3 minutes of videos for each location. The videos will end up on YouTube.
As camera, have the 650D and a 95MB/s Sandisk Extreme Pro card. So I am able to do 720p raw recording long enough for this work. The question is whether I should go RAW or not. Because I can also do high bitrate 1080p h.264. Which one do you think is going to look better?
Another limimation I have is the hard drive space. Since all i have is a portable 1TB drive, do you think it will be enough? Theoretically how long of RAW footage this drive can hold?
Thanks.
Two minutes of raw video is 4 gigabytes.
Depends on how much time you have to do post processing.
I would prefer the raw-workflow, because of the two main advantages: sharpness and color-sensitivity. 720@24fps would be about ~40MB/sek (~2.4GB/min). So if you just use a simple premiere workflow with cdng's (instead of h.264), the result will be much better (without acr) and the difference in preparing data depends only on byte-reconverting to cdng (not on demosaicing before edit).
regards chmee
Quote from: chmee on April 11, 2014, 01:10:29 PM
I would prefer the raw-workflow, because of the two main advantages: sharpness and color-sensitivity. 720@24fps would be about ~40MB/sek (~2.4GB/min). So if you just use a simple premiere workflow with cdng's (instead of h.264), the result will be much better (without acr) and the difference in preparing data depends only on byte-reconverting to cdng (not on demosaicing before edit).
regards chmee
I see. I wrote my RAW workflow below. Is there anything wrong with it?
Convert raw file to .DNGs using raw2dng_cs2x2.exe (which removes pink dots as well)
In After Effects import the DNGs as camera raw sequence.
Render it as Lossless avi.
Quote from: Nautilus on April 11, 2014, 09:05:31 PM
I see. I wrote my RAW workflow below. Is there anything wrong with it?
Convert raw file to .DNGs using raw2dng_cs2x2.exe (which removes pink dots as well)
In After Effects import the DNGs as camera raw sequence.
Render it as Lossless avi.
Our setup is RIDICULOUSLY similar... down to the same lens.
I'm assuming you're on Windows.
You probably want to export to an MOV file... because you can import those into Davinci Resolve, but you can't import avis. (at least not that I know of.)
resolve would add a couple more steps... You'd also need to export from After Effects to Premiere... or whatever your NLE is (After Effects is typically for compositing... not editing.)
if you want MAXIMUM Quality, you have to go the typical ACR or Resolve-Way. If you want much better Quality than H.264, but not the tedious converting-path, its quite ok, you're working only with premiere and the right cdng's. (thats my choice)
Quote from: chmee on April 12, 2014, 01:35:25 PM
if you want MAXIMUM Quality, you have to go the typical ACR or Resolve-Way. If you want much better Quality than H.264, but not the tedious converting-path, its quite ok, you're working only with premiere and the right cdng's. (thats my choice)
Could you please go in some details such as what ACR means or what is Resolve-Way?
ACR = Adobe Camera RAW
Resolve = da Vinci Resolve
DaVinci Resolve - I didnt tested the new version 11. but as an old Premiere-User there was no real workflow for me. Works with 14bit-DNG-Sequences as well. Colorcorrection/Tuning in Resolve, often used via edl and proxies with another edit-app.
ACR (Adobe Camera Raw) - most Adobe-Apps are using the ACR-Importer - After Effects, Photoshop (simply saying Lightroom is the bigger ACR, its the same way). Reads all DNGs, does the best quality, but needs a lot of time. and thats only the first step before editing video.. no one seriously edits videos in ae.
Premiere with according CDNGs - convert, import, work. (thats what i wanted for myself) (if i need some more finetuning, i could use speedgrade as dynamic link)
All Apps need DNG-Files, so the first step is necessary in every way: converting to a dng-sequence.
Quote from: chmee on April 12, 2014, 02:49:19 PM
DaVinci Resolve - I didnt tested the new version 11. but as an old Premiere-User there was no real workflow for me. Works with 14bit-DNG-Sequences as well. Colorcorrection/Tuning in Resolve, often used via edl and proxies with another edit-app.
ACR (Adobe Camera Raw) - most Adobe-Apps are using the ACR-Importer - After Effects, Photoshop (simply saying Lightroom is the bigger ACR, its the same way). Reads all DNGs, does the best quality, but needs a lot of time. and thats only the first step before editing video.. no one seriously edits videos in ae.
Premiere with according CDNGs - convert, import, work. (thats what i wanted for myself) (if i need some more finetuning, i could use speedgrade as dynamic link)
All Apps need DNG-Files, so the first step is necessary in every way: converting to a dng-sequence.
Well then I was using ACR method without knowing. Camera Raw automatically launches the moment i import DNGs into After Effects anyway. Btw, i don't edit videos in AE, i just use AE to export the footage as lossless avi. Then I do my editing in Premiere Pro.
One thing i noticed about RAW recording is that it has more contrast and is darker than h.264. Why so? Can it be because h.264 benefits from Canon's image profiles (faithful, monochrome, neutral, user def...) and raw doesn't? The difference makes it diffucult to compare raw and h.264 footage. So far i couldn't see any tangible difference between RAW and h.264 on my camera.
I shot a few seconds of 1728x972 raw (the highest res 650D can do), upscaled that to 1080p and then compated it to 1080p h.264. It only looked more contrasty and darker (and that hardly means better quality in my point of view) Sometimes I see raw and h.264 comparisons on internet and they look quite astonishing, i mean the difference is like day and night. But I couldn't see such a difference for myself. Perhaps i'm doing something wrong, perhaps i didn't record the right footage for comparison...
if the modellID is set accordingly, you've got the same profiles for the dng's in ACR (look on tab profiles). And DNG's (raw) are linear coded, whereas h.264 had to be coded with some nonlinear gamma. thats no disadvantage, but just lack of knowledge.. :)
Quote from: chmee on April 13, 2014, 01:44:28 PM
if the modellID is set accordingly, you've got the same profiles for the dng's in ACR (look on tab profiles). And DNG's (raw) are linear coded, whereas h.264 had to be coded with some nonlinear gamma. thats no disadvantage, but just lack of knowledge.. :)
I assume DNGs don't contain modelID. Because ACR shows a different footage than h.264. How do I add modelID to dng files?
"most" of the mlv/raw-converter write the modellID into the dng's. what converter did you tested?
[h.264] so, there's more than just the right profile, to get the same picture. but this is not really an intention. raw/mlv gives you more possibilities to get more out from the footage than h.264-files straight from the body.
regards chmee