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I shot this video as part of my Farnham360 project - a personal project to document life in Farnham, Surrey (UK). This video focuses on Jo, who has just opened a textile gallery.

It was shot with a Canon 600D, using my own picture style (first time I've tried it out properly), and ML2.3 with the CBR at 1.3 (H.254 recording). This video has had no colour correction, grading, sharpening applied - it is straight out of the camera.

Part of my Farnham360 project to document the life and people of my home town.

Today I took a walk through the Bishops Meadow on my way to collect my wife's car, and figured I would take the short cut through the Bishops Meadow. It's been raining here for days, and today is stopped and the sun came out (for a bit anyway), before the next tranche of rain coming in tomorrow for the next two days! I had my camera with me, and this is what I found...

Camera: Canon 600D, running ML 2.3 nightly build for raw recording.
Edited and graded in Davinci Resolve 10 Lite, titles and music added in FCP X.

Hi everyone,

I've been asked some questions about using Davinci Resolve to grade raw footage from the raw recording of Canon + ML, so I've started to create some tutorials about how to get it working.

Resolve is just amazing, but if you are a first-time user of it, it can be completely overwhelming and you can spend hours looking for information on how to complete the most basic of things - like finding your media files to include in your project, or setting up the project defaults.

There will be odd little snippets of useful information too - like using the BMD Film colour space to get a good starting point for grading the raw image, etc.

The tutorials are / will be based on Davinci Resolve 10 Lite, and clips shot with a Canon 600D running a nightly build of ML.

You can find them at http://www.davidvickers.co.uk, and more specifically the first four are up...

Davinci Resolve Part 01: Creating a project (link - http://www.davidvickers.co.uk/2013/12/davinci-resolve-part-01.html)
Davinci Resolve Part 02: Configuring master project settings (link - http://www.davidvickers.co.uk/2013/12/davinci-resolve-part-02.html)
Davinci Resolve Part 03: Configuring camera raw settings (link - http://www.davidvickers.co.uk/2013/12/davinci-resolve-part-03-configuring.html)
Davinci Resolve Part 04: Renaming a project (link - http://www.davidvickers.co.uk/2013/12/davinci-resolve-part-04-renaming.html)

Hope these, and the future tutorials will be useful to someone!

All the best,
David.

I've been plagued by dots on raw recording since moving away from Tragic Lantern [New System]... I'm now using NewMem as the base, and updated with the nightly build from Dec 22nd. Whether I just use NewMem, or the nightly build, I get dots; for a long while I thought they were black dots which you can clearly see in this video, especially where there is a very light background.

And then I took a much closer look at them, and there is a sort of pattern to these invaders, as the image below shows:



You can see that the dots are not black at all, but take on the surrounding hue; there's always a central 2x2 pixel formation which is surrounded by a sort of brighter halo.

I've seen and read loads of posts about pink dots, green dots and all sorts of dots, but haven't seen anything about this particular pattern... anyone know why it occurs, and how to get rid of it? It's the only blot on the otherwise excellent raw recording. Unfortunately it's a bit of a showstopper for me - I love using the raw workflow and the capabilities it brings, but an image full of clearly visible dots is of no use (to me).

I've tried the MLV recording too, using chroma smoothing options, but that made it worse 

Really quick comparison test of different versions of raw recording on the 600D.

I started using the Tragic Lantern [New System] back in June, and then updated to [NewMem] late November (2013). I've been plagued by multiple dots in the image when using [NewMem], that I didn't recall seeing in the older [New System].

So I ran a quick check... there aren't any dots in [New System] as you can see in this video. Take a look at the upper centre of the first clip, in the sky area, to see the dots. Same camera, same lens, same workflow (RAWMagic -> Davinci Resolve) for both raw recordings... interestingly applying the exact same 'look' to both recordings resulted in a different response by the clip.

To be fair, on another check I did, [New System] did suffer from some banding in the image, but I need to do further checks on that.

I'm about to go and do some lowlight checks with [New System] and see how that looks - if it's OK, I may just go back to that raw recording.

Having tried some tests with raw recording at high iso, and having amended how I approach it, I had the opportunity to pop down with the camera gear to shoot a quick video.

The Farnham Art Society had opened a 'pop-up' gallery for the second year in a row, and on the day it was closing, I got in to shoot some footage and interview one of the committee members. This gave me a chance to try out the higher ISO settings (800-1600) as well as the Tascam DR-60D audio recorder.

There has been no noise reduction applied to the footage, and you'll also see that I haven't removed the dreaded dots that appear with raw recording.

This was shot using just the Canon 600D, with the 18-55mm kit lens, audio recorded with a phantom-powered RODE lavalier mic, fed into the Tascam DR-60D.
Edited and graded in FCP X and Davinci Resolve 10 Lite.

A while ago I ran some tests comparing raw recording against the standard H.264 recording in the Canon 600D. I rather liked the ability to use raw, even with the additional work that's required, but I completely changed my view when I saw how it reacted to lowlight situations, as even the slightest grade seemed to make it fall apart completely.

Coming back to it 6 months later, and with a new build of Tragic Lantern, and now using Davinci Resolve 10 Lite for grading, I decided to try lowlight  (ISO 1600) again. The results couldn't be more different, and I now wouldn't hesitate to use raw for lowlight recording.

How have others found raw lowlight capabilities with the 600D?

(None of the footage in this short sequence has had any noise reduction applied).

Canon 600D, Tragic Lantern [NewMem], ISO1600.
Lens was an old M42 mount Prinzflex 70-162mm f3.5-f22 macro (set at f5.6 or f8) for this test.
Graded in Resolve 10 Lite.

So, there I was sitting waiting for the fog to clear on a cold, damp December day; it never did clear, so I figured I go out shooting the following morning. When the morning came, it was foggy again. In the end, I went out anyway to grab some shots around Farnham, in Surrey.

'Farnham 360' is a personal project to try and capture the essence of my home town; it's a place that sits on the Surrey / Hampshire border and from the centre of the town you can be in wide open spaces within minutes, or sitting next to the river, or walking around an 11th century church.

There's so much to see, little details that people just don't notice as they go about their daily tasks. 'Farnham 360' will be providing some insight into these things.

----
Camera: Canon 600D / T3i.
Lenses: Prakticar 35mm & Kaligar 135mm (both vintage M42 mount lenses).
Magic Lantern 2.3 + Tragic Lantern [NewMem] giving continuous raw recording at 1088x448. {Canon settings at 640x480}.
Davinci Resolve 10 Lite (DNG files loaded as "BMD") & FCP X.

I was asked to create a short video to be used as a resource for a new horticultural book that should be out in the new year. I decided to shoot it on RAW (Tragic Lantern 2.0, [600D] New System) and it's been under wraps until now (it was shot in June!). Anyway, here is that video...

... at the time, I had a tortuous workflow involving a Windows laptop, Adober Premiere Elements, then transferring it to the iMac and FCP X.

Shortly after this, I gave up using RAW, and just the other day I thought I'd check out ML2.3 and the latest Tragic Lantern RAW. So, I've now loaded up with '[600D] New Mem', sorted out the exFAT filesystem on the SD cards so I don't have to worry about the 4GB limit, and I'm now using a much better workflow with Davinci Resolve 10 Lite and FCP X

This is the latest using the new workflow / ML/TL, it's just a quick trailer for a new idea that I've got...

Having completed the simple highlight / skin tone test for my camera, I wanted to find out more about how it would deal with lowlight conditions; so I set up a simple test using a single candle to light a 'scene'.

The results surprised me...

Having the ability to shoot is great; not without its issues to be fair, but I wondered what it looked like compared to H.264.

This isn't a scientific test, but I did shoot to try and learn something about what the limitations were and to directly compare the formats. The video is below, and I've written up my findings at http://www.davidvickers.co.uk/blog

Cheers,
David

Hi,

I spent several hours last night reading the forum, getting to grips with how to get my camera to shoot RAW, and then trying to work out a usable workflow Then this morning I went out and short a little RAW footage

Canon 600D, ML2.3 and Tragic Lantern [600D] New System. RAW, 960x468 to provide continuous recording.

The RAW was then converted to a DNG sequence by BATCHelor2 and imported into Adobe Premiere 8, which seemed to accept it just fine. I did convert each clip into MOV then import that into FCP X, but I got loads of aliasing, so went back to Elements 8! The video above is from Elements 8.

The Vimeo version (via FCP X) is here...