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Sorry MrMidnite but what are you actually doing on a forum like this if you don't understand the absolute basics? 

I presume you're on a windows machine!?

Quicktime player is free!

You can change the wrapper (.mov) to .mp4 or .avi and it will play back in Windows Media Player (albeit with a gamma shift).

There are countless players out there that are free and more than capable of playing back the movies you record on your T3i.

If you want to transcode you can use GoPro's Cineform Studio FREE. That will give you Cineform 10bit AVI or MOV files. Google it.

I suggest you jump on Youtube and familiarise yourself with the basics of your camera before getting into anything Magic Lantern related.

OK I think I've finally worked this one out

Copying 1080p.mov files to a windows drive causes CF Studio to crash. 720p files are ok! This got me thinking.

The recorded dimensions of a 1080p file from my 600d/T3i footage is 1920x1088 (with 8 lines cropped off to make it 1080) and CF studio (free) can only work with 1920x1080p. I tried re-wrapping footage, renaming, everything I could think of but still no luck.

I just tried again to convert something but instead of copying the footage to my drives I pointed CF Studio to the SD card. It WORKS!!

Must be something in the way my card reader or Windows 7 64bit handles data.

Weirdly the Cineform transcoded files are only slightly bigger than the H.264 files thanks to 1%'s GOP/BR build.

On a Patriot card? 

My card seems to fall over at about 150mbit (previous builds). I'll try and push it harder tomorrow. Doing some night shots atm to tweak another PS and testing high BR/High ISO for noise performance.

The flat is really the best grading starting point. I didn't even know about sundown:

On the site:
What next? .exe with yahoo toolbar or ask.com. They're making me mad.

Yes, that's a bit annoying but I think you can download without using Facebook. http://shutterdown.com/subscriber-downloads/download-photography-plugins-and-tools/

You need to register though. Tip: http://10minutemail.com/10MinuteMail/index.html

I got 120mb average over 5minutes on iso 80.   

Not bad

I'd still recommend Canon Neutral for very low contrast shots because it's the best way to defeat banding and SN grades easily to match (being based on it). I have flat Neutral PS selected and SN as the REC PS. Easy to toggle on and off depending on the shot.

Marvels is great but I feel I get better results with Cinema or Shutterdown pancake PS when I don't want to grade. I'm learning Resolve so I'm trying to shoot everything flat/log atm.

I'm using a Patriot card too and it's not bad for the money but it's starting to fall apart... literally

Your new Bin seems good

Post a frame grab and BR graph

I would but I've since reformatted the card. I think it might possibly have been a read/write error on my card because one of the .mov files was corrupt on playback. If it happens again I'll be sure to get a framegrab and the BR graph. Gonna try your latest binary. Thanks as ever!

A1ex,

I've generated some luma response curves for Super Neutral Log, Cinestyle, Flat Canon Neutral, Cineplus Lightform neutral, Canon Neutral and Canon Standard all with and without HTP. Might be of interest

I didn't use the binary but shot a 0-255 RGB greyscale gradient strip on my calibrated monitor. Exposure settings are identical for each PS. It's not exactly scientific but must be fairly accurate because the Canon curves look very nice. It shows my PS isn't that far off Cinestyle (although that's not exactly what I was trying to achieve). It also shows that Cinestyle can't be a perfect LOG curve.

I wish that damned PSE software was more useable 

Download the curve sheet here: http://www.sendspace.com/file/hn8quv


I don't suppose you found any way of altering a PS contrast to a point lower than -4 in the FW?

Hi 1%

I've been trying out your latest build and I'm getting some pretty wild BR fluctuations especially when setting GOP greater than 1. BR is  dropping as low as 2000 and seems to happen when I fast pan or move the camera quickly. It's very noticeable on footage.

I've also achieved sustained BR at around 80-90mbit ALL-I but can't remember the settings doh Can the movie logging function be modified to save BR/Encoder settings?

In your tests what have you found to be the best settings for sustaining a higher than FW BR? I'd be very happy with sustaining 80mbit but stopping it from dropping much below that. It's nice to know it can peak above 200mbit+ without stopping but in the end the footage will only be as good as the lowest sustained BR.

If you turn picpc to 0 then py will be 20 vs default of 26. From H.264 spec this was a quality increase.

Best set by slice but then you're at risk of breathing and buffer underruns. Depends on what you're shooting and stability needs. When BR is reported correctly and the quality dropping is spot on it should be better Q than CBR hands down.

Got it

Ah, that kind of makes sense now. So it's probably better to not change factor settings and just set BR and GOP?

I've been using PicPC set to 0. Didn't go any higher. I actually didn't try to 

On the waterfall video, I don't know (I wasn't keeping very good notes  -- I'm sure about the GOP, though, since I can infer it in Bitviewer). I have tried different settings for PicPC, DBlock A/B (with notes). There appear to be differences in what I can only describe as "grain" - and I could only see it at 300% zoom, and even then, it wasn't strong. But, I could just be seeing things. Even so, while there appeared to be differences, I would hesitate to call one "better" than the other. At the same GOP length and bitrate, there isn't a very noticeable difference to me in these settings. In the end, I couldn't determine a preference for one setting over another. Is there a setting for these that you prefer? If so, what should I look for?

I agree that GOP=3 is about the sweet spot. GOP=4 works fine and GOP=2 works fine. But, again, I see very little difference among these in the tests I've done.

I don't really have preferred settings as such but adjusting the DBlock A & B to -1 gives a uniform fine grain look. Setting -2/-1 makes the pixels look elongated. Setting both A&B to 0 seems cleanest.

I've tried setting I factor to 2x when trying out ALL-I but it doesn't appear to do much to the actual image. Also tried setting P Factor to a higher setting than I Factor when shooting GOP 3 etc (my thinking is to bring the slice numbers closer together so the bitrate remains fairly constant?). Not sure this does much either. I'm not sure what increasing GOP0, GOP1, GOP2, GOP3, GOP4 Factor actually does? 1%?

I think we're splitting hairs TBH. Increasing bit rate and setting GOP to 3 or 1 shows a marked improvement over Canon FW defaults which I think is a good enough reason to use it and like you stated you can push the image a little further in post.

I've read a lot about ALL-I and GOP on the GH2 forums and the general consensus is that regardless of image quality gains or losses, shooting ALL-I gives a more filmic look to motion but there isn't much in it if you keep GOP under 6.

Resolution was a wrong choice of words from me. I think there is a definite increase in sharpness without the OLPF in James Millers' test shots but the IR and dust problems caused by removing it seem a step to far.

BTW JasonATL what settings were you using for the GOP test? Did you just increase the CBR and change GOP settings? Also did you alter DBlock A/B settings?

Nice work Miyake!

Thanks guys. re: OLPF - I remember thinking it was a crazy idea at the time but didn't check back to see if they had stuck with it.

Thanks for the test JasonATL. Downloading the original for a better look. Personally I've found GOP3 seems to be the general sweetspot for bitrate vs quality.

EDIT: just looked at the original. The zoomed part of the video really shows the difference between standard Canon CBR and increased BR. Nice job! It will certainly help with chromakey work and when upscaling 720p footage.

Just a thought about resolution. Some guys removed the OLPF from their 5d MkIII's and the resolution was much better though obviously more susceptible to moire and aliasing. Has anyone tried this with a lower spec camera? secondhand 550d's are going very cheap these days so might be worth risking?

Congrats g3gg0  Just read the news on Canonrumors.com

The LUT should be last with any Denoising and CC applied before it. Technicolor recommend this method for grading Cinestyle with their LUT.


I just stick the LUT on top adjustment layer in AE and then add Color Finesse or Colorista on the footage layers. If I'm letterboxing I usually add a broadcast safe levels too because I like the lower contrast look especially if I add film grain.

BTW I'm grading the demo video in Resolve and pushing the look to show how it holds up. Looks sweet

I probably should have mentioned to use the Neutral PS to get correct exposure before recording with the Log PS. I find Neutral profile with contrast at -4 generally works best for this PS. Expose for highlights using the RGB histogram so levels are just about to clip and set zebras at 98-99%. Don't rely on the exposure meter. This will all be in the PDF

Re: ISO's and noise. Anything over 800 will look a little noisy but I've had shots up to 1600 that were useable with some NR in post. The Luts should bring noise back under control. Shifting the black point up will reduce the perception of noise in the same way that Cinestyle does but I prefer to have the shadow information available before choosing how to deal with noise.

BTW I just noticed the LUT I included hasn't quite pulled the highlights down enough and there is approximately 1 stop more of detail to be had If you have the LUT last in your plugin chain you can use a levels plugin or colorista, Color finesse etc before the LUT to lower the highlights and bring back the information. I'm grading through the LUT (i.e. Log to Linear Lut is last in the chain).

Looks good. Going to give it a shot when it comes out.

Check PM's

Skin tones and grading with Super Neutral Log PS

I've uploaded 3 stills from Gettin' High https://vimeo.com/groups/superneutral/videos/49436519 to show how the picture style looks flat, with LUT applied and graded to show how skin tones can look.


Shot 1 - As shot
Shot 2 - with SN Log to REC709 Lut applied
Shot 3 - Graded (only HSL saturation and brightness controls used. No shift in hues)

http://www.sendspace.com/file/uocr0z

Ah well, I wanted to get a 600D for the flip out screen anyway

Don't get it for the flipout screen. Get it for the sensor crop ability

Alex - Sent you a PM here

Well, the bin is fairly old. You can use it to check if the curve matches what you wanted to get, hopefully.

I just noticed as you posted your reply lol.

Should be useful. Thanks