Okay so I recently decided to play around with the RAW feature. I own a canon 600D (t3i) and I tried to do a lot of research on shooting RAW with the 600D but I couldn't find much.
So I decided to join the community and post about my turn out with the raw and also to help with any troubleshooting you might have or just work together to discover something new. Okay so for starters my workflow is convert the RAW to dng open in after effects to edit with in camera raw then color corrects, denoise, grade and export as quicktime video with apple pro res 4444 as codec. the first thing I noticed when editing my RAW footage was this. NOISE IS A THING OF THE PAST. Now this isn't entirely true but I will explain. I mainly use my rokinon declicked 35mm cine lens. Its a great lens however with canons compression I still get grain and noise and not the very cleanest images unless its perfect controlled lighting. Now I use neat video to denoise because it is simply amazing. So I have two shots that I will upload soon. It's a video of these little trophy models on my nightstand. Its late afternoon so the lighting is low and there is no visible light sources hitting the objects at all so its one even tone poorly lit image. so without RAW you already have the grain and noise. Then you boost the exposure and such to relight and you start to get even more noise. It's one of those situations where you know you wont completly get rid of the noise but it will be reduced. The same shot this time in raw however, It took at literally all visible noise and made it a perfectly clean image. I was in shock. So what I have noticed right off the bat is denoising RAW footage works unbelivably well.
Now for the RAW setup. As said I have the canon 600D, my sd card is a digital film 32GB class ten card. No idea what the write speed is. However I have read that no matter how good your card is the 600D has a write speed cut off of like 45mbs. I'm not certain if this is true its just something I read. The big issue as we all know with the RAW right now on the 600D is you cant shoot full 1080 RAW straight from the camera. It crops off a certain section for you to use. There is a few annoying things about this. One being its very hard to focus correctly. Secondly its hard to get an idea of how your shots will frame up. Lastly its limiting your use its like a crop on top of a crop. So here is my solution to all of this that has worked best for me and will hopefully work good for you and better your RAW technique. In the RAW setup I shoot 1024x448 with the aspect ratio of 2. 35 : 1 This is the the highest my card will allow me to go I am not sure if you can crank yours higher im certain my memory card isnt the best. The reason why I use this feature is because if you plan on upscaling to like lets say 1080 for youtube its not all too far off in a way. This however is persumed that you have the intentions the letterbox your film. Meaning the most common letter box so cropping 132 off the top and bottom of the image. If you resize the image equally (hold shift and stretch) when the outter edges reach the edge of the composition its almost a perfect 132,132 crop. so this gives you a wide box to shoot with in camera and a pretty nice upscale quality. I usually letterbox most of my work so it works in my favor. Now adjusting to the small frame box on your camera.
I took my viewfinder magnifier, (the magnetic one that connects to the live view screen and you look through it). I took that and i blocked off everything on the screen that was to the outside of the RAW box. This magnifies what you are seeing and also helps you frame up your shots much much better and it also helps you keep the subject in focus. That's really it so far. I will be uploading some test clips for you all to view soon. Hopefully this was both informative and helpful to someone just starting with the RAW feature. My opinion, I will most likely use this for wide shots such as a huge plate of a city or anything that doesnt require a specific subject, If I have a wide open space enough to move far enough back to get the subject(s) in frame I will use it. However, Until there is a way if ever to use full frame I'm not going to use it constantly its one of those nice little features to fool around with if you have nothing but time to perfect the image. Never the less you do get some great images out of it. Hope you enjoyed my first post!
So I decided to join the community and post about my turn out with the raw and also to help with any troubleshooting you might have or just work together to discover something new. Okay so for starters my workflow is convert the RAW to dng open in after effects to edit with in camera raw then color corrects, denoise, grade and export as quicktime video with apple pro res 4444 as codec. the first thing I noticed when editing my RAW footage was this. NOISE IS A THING OF THE PAST. Now this isn't entirely true but I will explain. I mainly use my rokinon declicked 35mm cine lens. Its a great lens however with canons compression I still get grain and noise and not the very cleanest images unless its perfect controlled lighting. Now I use neat video to denoise because it is simply amazing. So I have two shots that I will upload soon. It's a video of these little trophy models on my nightstand. Its late afternoon so the lighting is low and there is no visible light sources hitting the objects at all so its one even tone poorly lit image. so without RAW you already have the grain and noise. Then you boost the exposure and such to relight and you start to get even more noise. It's one of those situations where you know you wont completly get rid of the noise but it will be reduced. The same shot this time in raw however, It took at literally all visible noise and made it a perfectly clean image. I was in shock. So what I have noticed right off the bat is denoising RAW footage works unbelivably well.
Now for the RAW setup. As said I have the canon 600D, my sd card is a digital film 32GB class ten card. No idea what the write speed is. However I have read that no matter how good your card is the 600D has a write speed cut off of like 45mbs. I'm not certain if this is true its just something I read. The big issue as we all know with the RAW right now on the 600D is you cant shoot full 1080 RAW straight from the camera. It crops off a certain section for you to use. There is a few annoying things about this. One being its very hard to focus correctly. Secondly its hard to get an idea of how your shots will frame up. Lastly its limiting your use its like a crop on top of a crop. So here is my solution to all of this that has worked best for me and will hopefully work good for you and better your RAW technique. In the RAW setup I shoot 1024x448 with the aspect ratio of 2. 35 : 1 This is the the highest my card will allow me to go I am not sure if you can crank yours higher im certain my memory card isnt the best. The reason why I use this feature is because if you plan on upscaling to like lets say 1080 for youtube its not all too far off in a way. This however is persumed that you have the intentions the letterbox your film. Meaning the most common letter box so cropping 132 off the top and bottom of the image. If you resize the image equally (hold shift and stretch) when the outter edges reach the edge of the composition its almost a perfect 132,132 crop. so this gives you a wide box to shoot with in camera and a pretty nice upscale quality. I usually letterbox most of my work so it works in my favor. Now adjusting to the small frame box on your camera.
I took my viewfinder magnifier, (the magnetic one that connects to the live view screen and you look through it). I took that and i blocked off everything on the screen that was to the outside of the RAW box. This magnifies what you are seeing and also helps you frame up your shots much much better and it also helps you keep the subject in focus. That's really it so far. I will be uploading some test clips for you all to view soon. Hopefully this was both informative and helpful to someone just starting with the RAW feature. My opinion, I will most likely use this for wide shots such as a huge plate of a city or anything that doesnt require a specific subject, If I have a wide open space enough to move far enough back to get the subject(s) in frame I will use it. However, Until there is a way if ever to use full frame I'm not going to use it constantly its one of those nice little features to fool around with if you have nothing but time to perfect the image. Never the less you do get some great images out of it. Hope you enjoyed my first post!