Messages

1

Raw Video / Zhiyun Crane-2 Works Well with 5d3 Magic Lantern 1.23 crop_rec_4k June 2018

« on: July 13, 2018, 03:20:04 AM »

I've never used a gimbal, but decided to try out the Zhiyun Crane-2 after the new price drop and included servo follow focus. I saw one video showing no functionality between the Crane-2 and 5d3 with Magic Lantern, but was thrilled to find the combo actually works well (at least with the setup described in the subject). Being able to start/stop recording, adjust ISO, shutter speed, aperture, and focus with manual lenses from the crane-2's grip is very convenient. The only downside so far is the weight.

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Raw Video / Re: Color grade when in the RAW-to-ProRes process?

« on: June 07, 2018, 04:56:17 PM »

I also prefer using Resolve with cdngs. To save extra disk space, you can use Slimraw with lossless 10-bit log compression. The file size isn't much larger than some of the higher quality Prores versions.

My workflow is:

Open CF Card with MLVFS
Compress Files with Slimraw
Edit in Resolve

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Share Your Videos / Re: Commercial Aditorial Travel Project - ML RAW - 50p 3x3 12bit

« on: April 28, 2017, 02:49:06 PM »

Wow, beautiful work! They dynamic range on some of those shots looks almost unreal. I don't think higher resolution would have added much to this, and your video reminds me how much more important content, composition, and proper exposure are than higher resolution.

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Share Your Videos / Re: Filmed Jason Mraz in North Dakota for the #noDAPL protesting going on

« on: December 03, 2016, 03:45:04 AM »

Great video! The orange/teal worked really well with the filmed subjects. Any notes on your workflow?

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Raw Video Postprocessing / Re: MLVFS - a FUSE based, "on the fly" MLV to CDNG converter

« on: December 01, 2016, 01:23:49 AM »

I just wanted to say how awesome MLVFS is! I decided to give CompressMLV another try today, and was elated that it worked without incident. For whatever reason, I was unable to get it to work when I initially tried it over a year ago. I have been trying to keep the original MLVs as backups, and cinemadngs compressed with slimRaw as my working media. Unfortunately, this has become too tedious and time consuming. With CompressMLV, I can use the MLV files for both my working media and archive copy while using half the space. Thank you dmilligan for your brilliant work!

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Share Your Videos / Re: Filmed an Artist for a 3 Day Tour in Chicago...500GBs Later // 5D Mark III RAW

« on: November 20, 2016, 02:38:14 AM »

For the quickest, space saving ML raw workflow, I mount the cf card with MLVS and use slimraw to copy lossless compressed cdngs to my hard drive. This reduces the raw storage requirements by 2/3 with zero loss in quality.

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Share Your Videos / Re: 5d mark III RAW video with dynamic range test, lighting and slowmotion

« on: November 14, 2016, 02:41:20 PM »

Great shots! Do you use the Highlight Recovery checkbox in Resolve? If so, do you ever get artifacts (pixelation, aliasing, etc)?

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General Help Q&A / Re: Kind of off topic but I need advice about my MKIII and if I should upgrade

« on: November 12, 2016, 04:26:22 AM »

My vote would be the 5dIII. FRSP, trap focus, raw video, full frame, intervalometer, battery life, ergonomics, moire, etc are all in the plus column for the 5dIII when you factor in ML. With tools like MLVFS, the workflows become mostly identical. Image quality can very between the two depending on the shooting conditions. My only warning would be it's hard to go back to lossy video codecs once you've made the switch to raw.

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Share Your Videos / Re: 5DIII - Fall Break 2016 Home Video

« on: November 11, 2016, 07:10:31 PM »

Thank you axelcine. I'm a sentimentalist, so the photos and video of my family are my most prized possessions, which is why I can't say thank you enough to everyone that contributes to ML including yourself and DeafEyeJedi.

DeafEyeJedi, thank you for the heads up on the new SlimRaw version. I think SlimRaw gives me somewhere around a 65% reduction from the original MLV file size without loosing any information, which is awesome.

In Resolve, which I still can't believe is free, I never found any benefit in using LUTs or a colorspace outside of Rec709; mostly because I have no idea how to use them correctly :-(  I have the engrained workflow of a novice Lightroom user, so the recent Resolve upgrades in the Camera Raw tab have made the transition palatable. I try to expose to the right, so I usually have to use the Highlight Recovery checkbox.

Settings are usually within a range of +/- 10 of here, unless I completely missed the exposure:



Midtone Detail and Sharpness settings are swapped when I don't have any artifacts from the Highlight Recovery.

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Share Your Videos / Re: 5DIII - Fall Break 2016 Home Video

« on: November 02, 2016, 03:32:36 PM »

Thank you for the nice comments PaulHarwood856 and DeafEyeJedi! Sorry in advance for the long post. I'm going to use it as a cathartic outlet for my workflow frustrations

This was shot in the Florida panhandle along a stretch of 30A highway.
 
I shot at both 24p and 35p which I slowed down in Resolve. I was very limited on storage space, so I made the unfortunate decision to delete the MLVs. At the end of the day I mounted the CF cards with MLVFS and used slimRaw's lossless 10bit log compression to convert them to dngs. I had some early problems with the FRSP timelapse footage, I didn't turn on the necessary Exp. Override setting in ML, which caused me to focus on the timelapse footage and the strobing footage to go unnoticed. 

I don't know what's causing the flickering/strobing footage yet. I know ACR can cause a similar effect, but this flickering is present in the dng sequence before any grading in the Resolve viewer. I was pretty upset when I saw it in a large number of clips when I returned home, so I though I would try LRTimelapse to correct it in Lightroom. Here you can see the graphed representation of the flickering in LRTimelapse (the pink line represents visual luminance ):



LRTimelapse was able to correct the flicker with the Visual Deflicker tool on my first test sequence. However, this ended up being a curse. I decided to go all in with processing everything in Lightroom in conjunction with LRTimelapse.

To greatly reduce the number of dngs I'd have to process through Lightroom, I decided to edit the final video together in Resolve, export the project as an .xml file, and write a script for Nodejs to use the xml file and copy only the dngs used in the final timeline to a separate destination. It took much longer to write the script than I hoped, but it worked.

About 4 hours into the LRTimelapse/Lightroom workflow I had processed maybe 30 seconds of footage. Between xmp syncing errors, user errors, new ACR flickering problems, and slow Lightroom rendering times, I gave up on this workflow.

I realized, for my specific situation, the content of the footage vastly outweighed the quality of the footage. I ended up going back to the original Resolve timeline and color corrected everything in Resolve. The ease of grading/correcting the dngs directly in Resolve was frictionless. I still had the strobing problems and less than ideal highlight recovery in some clips, but again, for my situation, I can live with some flickering and highlight artifacts.

I didn't do much in Resolve's color panel, mostly because I don't know how. I stuck to the camera raw tools, tone curve on occasion, and the stabilizer. Now I just need to find a workflow solution for the vertical stripes and the cause of the strobing.

Thank you again to the ML Team!

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Share Your Videos / 5DIII - Fall Break 2016 Home Video

« on: November 02, 2016, 06:51:35 AM »

Just more amateur home video. The dreaded vertical banding (highlights) issued showed up for the first time for some reason. Unfortunately, I deleted the original MLV files I also must have mixed some exposure settings that caused a strange exposure fluctuation strobe effect in some shots. Full res silent picture timelapses are awesome!

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Camera-specific discussion / Re: Canon 5D Mark IV

« on: August 20, 2016, 01:28:44 AM »

Why would they need to buy one? Surely the leaked photos are enough to allow the devs to have ML working on day one. If not, I'm sure they are highly motivated by all the $ and thank you posts that are heaped upon them daily. 

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Post-processing Workflow / Re: Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) and DaVinci Resolve (DR) Workflow

« on: August 19, 2016, 11:29:59 PM »

I didn't find noticeable difference with sharpness between the two, but ACR(Lightroom in my case) was much better at recovering highlight information without introducing artifacts to the image. Lightroom has a nice auto-stacking feature that makes browsing clips much easier, depending on how you structure them. Lens correction, Hue vs Luminance, and spatial noise reduction in Lightroom are a few other tools that are lacking/missing in the free version of Resolve. I'm still trying to figure out an efficient workflow, but 90% of the corrections I do to the image can be done in Lightroom. As of now:

1. Mount MLVs with MLVFS ( Resolve naming and vertical stripe fix options on)
2. Run the cdngs through slimRaw 10bit lossless encoding
3. Import the dngs in Lightroom, auto-stack, and collapse all stacks. (Default processing includes applying CinelogDCP with a basic starting grade, eg sat. and s-curve)
4. Edit while avoiding Shadows, Highlight, Contrast, Clarity, and Whites ( > 0 ) controls
5. Shift + Click to select all photos in stack then sync settings
5. Export 16-bit tiff with zip compression
6. Open tiff sequence in Resolve and edit

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Camera-specific discussion / Re: Canon 5D Mark IV

« on: August 12, 2016, 03:18:56 PM »

I'm most curious about the resulting floor on reduced mark III prices  I'm hooked on ML raw video and would love to pick up a second body "for my wife".

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Raw Video Postprocessing / Re: Preventing Color/Luma Shifting When Processing DNGs in Adobe Camera RAW

« on: July 30, 2016, 11:47:10 PM »

@Andy600 - Sorry, my description was not very concise.  I was trying to show that Lightroom's Highlight, Shadow, etc sliders still introduce the flickering. Cinelog DCP solved that problem by exporting the dngs as 16bit tiffs using the Cinelog-C DCP profile in Lightroom and adjusting them in Resolve. I wanted to show how I was able to achieve a very similar look in Resolve from the Cinelog-C tiffs compared to the Lightroom version that had the flickering. Cinelog is awesome, thank you again for your help!

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Raw Video Postprocessing / Re: Preventing Color/Luma Shifting When Processing DNGs in Adobe Camera RAW

« on: July 30, 2016, 10:34:55 PM »

I wanted to follow up with a video showing an altered Lightroom clip that flickers and a similarly altered Resolve version using Cinelog-C DCP 2016. It may have been better to leave the mask static, but I wanted to be able to scrub between the different areas to compare the outputs. The flickering is more subtle after uploading it to youtube, but if you keep your eyes on the shadow on the left dune you can see it. The Resolve version is the sliding center strip. Sorry for the shaky footage.

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Raw Video Postprocessing / Re: Preventing Color/Luma Shifting When Processing DNGs in Adobe Camera RAW

« on: July 30, 2016, 02:05:26 AM »

@Kharak - I took your advice and purchased Cinelog-C DCP 2016. After swearing off trying to grade Log footage, I still have a7s slog-2 nightmares, I'm determined to find a quick and effective workflow between Lightroom and Resolve.

My objective test quickly turned into subjective tests. I edited 10 clips shot earlier this month using Lightroom's controls, including those known to introduce flicker, to obtain the aesthetic results I was looking for. After exporting the files to 8-bit tiffs and loading the sequence into Resolve, only 2 clips exhibited visual flickering. Rather than doing individual slider tests to verify which controls introduced the flickering, due to time constraints, I reset all the controls that are known to introduce flicker and verified that the flickering was gone, which it was. I'm optimistic that introducing Cinelog-C DCP 2016 into my workflow will allow me to recover the highlight information I know is in the raw files without introducing additional artifacts.

Before deciding to purchase Cinelog, I wanted to give grading in Lightroom and Resolve one more try and compare my results. After selecting 4 clips and spending a few hours doing my best to achieve a similar look in both programs, I committed the easily avoidable sin of forgetting to save my project in Resolve. It crashed during rendering. Instead of trying to get the clips to match again, I edited them together to demonstrate the differences I experienced in editing the same footage in both. This is the result:

I mostly wanted to show the pink cast and artifacts that often occur in Resolve when trying to recover highlights. The moving center strip is the output from Lightroom. I was fairly happy with the results I obtained within Lightroom while avoiding the Highlights, Shadows, Contrast, Whites, and Clarity sliders. But that was only the case for footage which was exposed to the right by a stop. The footage which was exposed properly or slightly under-exposed, e.g. the third clip in the video above, was easier to grade in Resolve since highlight recovery was not necessary. My fingers are crossed that Cinelog-C tiffs exported from Lightroom will allow me to more easily grade both types of footage in Resolve.

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Post-processing Workflow / Re: Upscaling to 4K for YouTube and Vimeo

« on: July 28, 2016, 03:13:29 PM »

I am using Resolve 12.5, which allows you to use a 4k timeline and 4k export. I wouldn't think setting the project to a 4k timeline vs 1080p timeline would have any effect on 4k rendered output. But, unless someone beats me to it, I will attempt to test it out and see as I have no evidence to support that claim.

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Raw Video Postprocessing / Re: Preventing Color/Luma Shifting When Processing DNGs in Adobe Camera RAW

« on: July 27, 2016, 10:13:14 PM »

I am curious as well, and hope to do some simple objective tests in the next couple of days. I have several clips I plan to test, but I don't expect any improvements in results for the controls as outlined by stevefal. However, unless I have incorrect project settings in Resolve, the debayered results from Lightroom's Process2012, before using the highlight or shadow sliders, appears to do a better job preserving dynamic range than the results from using Resolve's highlight recovery slider.

After originally deciding the results from Resolve were good enough, based on how much easier it is to skip Lightroom as part of the workflow, I'm finding that following the ETTR methodology is resulting in too many instances of distracting blown highlights when using Resolve alone. Avoiding the controls that cause issues when using Lightroom's Process2010 profile avoids the flickering problem, but doesn't give results as nice as using Resolves highlight recovery tools. Using Resolve's highlight recovery tools works well, but often introduces bizarre artifacts too the image. I know there are several other raw editors, but Lightroom's stack and auto-stacking features makes it extremely easy to manage clips and apply develop settings to the dngs.

If anything new and helpful is revealed I'll post it here.

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Raw Video Postprocessing / Re: SlimRaw – CDNG compression tool

« on: July 26, 2016, 05:50:57 PM »

After seeing Danne's post, I was curious as to where, or if, there is documentation for command line options for slimraw. The Lossless 10bit log compression is awesome!

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Raw Video Postprocessing / Re: Cinelog - True logspace conversion for DNG and CinemaDNG footage

« on: July 26, 2016, 01:34:53 AM »

That's fantastic! So, was this done in Resolve from the exported tiff, or Lightroom, or something else? Sorry for being so obtuse, I just want to make sure I'm understanding what the workflow looks like to get your result. 30 seconds makes me want to cry.

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Raw Video Postprocessing / Re: Cinelog - True logspace conversion for DNG and CinemaDNG footage

« on: July 26, 2016, 01:15:17 AM »

@Andy600 thank you for the file! Wow, your tiff shows much more information than is present in Resolve and Lightroom pre highlight recovery versions. I suppose I was hoping to use the results shown in the tiff you uploaded as a starting point for grading in Lightroom, which is what I was trying to ask in my original question, but doing a poor job of. I'm guessing it would make more sense to export the tiff from Lightroom and correct the file in Resolve with the added option of applying Cinelog-C luts? Thank you again for your help!

@Danne thank you for the feedback and alternative solution. The added dimension on the tone curve tool is a step too far beyond moving a slider left and right for my limited skills I'm always looking for the quick and easy solution to fix my footage, but as Andy600 alluded too, I should probably spend more time on getting correctly exposed material. If it wasn't for the ability to correct white balance with MLV, I'd probably never bother recording video.

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Raw Video Postprocessing / Re: Cinelog - True logspace conversion for DNG and CinemaDNG footage

« on: July 25, 2016, 11:23:50 PM »

Thank you for the quick reply Andy600. I think my question was based on a bad assumption as to my understanding of how Lightroom might work in conjunction with Cinelog DCP 2016. To use a bad analogy, my project level probably requires a plastic bubble level, and I'm wanting to use a self-leveling rotating laser level, so I appreciate your response given my lack of understanding. If the following is already answered by your previous post, I apologize, and will take a lack of a response as an indication of such.

My problem is finding a solution to recovering as much dynamic range in my footage as possible, without introducing additional image degradation, and maintaining as simple a workflow as possible. I'm sure that problem is unique to me   For a specific example, I opened this http://db.tt/dPPBr3wH file in Resolve.

Here is how it looks without changes directly from Resolve:


Here is how it looks after checking the highlight recovery box and moving the highlight slider completely to the left:


Here is how it looks in Lightroom after adjusting exp., highlight recovery, and shadows:


Here is what I would typically consider my desired end result, which was edited in Lightroom:


The clouds in Resolve exhibit an odd pink cast and a slight posterizing effect. This example is one of the better outcomes of using Resolve's highlight recovery tool. Often times, the results include an extreme checkerboard effect of pink blocks in the recovered highlights area. The obvious solution would be to use Lightroom, but that may or may not introduce the dreaded flicker problem. What I don't know is if/how adjusting my workflow using Cinelog with Lightroom would allow me to achieve a similar desired end result. This is more than likely a case of me trying to use the wrong tool the wrong way for the wrong job. Thank you again for your help!

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Raw Video Postprocessing / Re: Cinelog - True logspace conversion for DNG and CinemaDNG footage

« on: July 25, 2016, 04:16:28 PM »

Is there a definitive list of controls in Lightroom that are usable or not usable when using the Cinelog DCP? I am hoping to grade my dng sequences in Lightroom and export them as tiffs for timeline editing in Resolve. Although it is a MUCH simpler workflow to grade/edit the dng sequence in Resolve, there seems to be too many artifacts introduced to the image when using the highlight recovery feature. The flickering issue when using Lightroom doesn't always show up, but I would much prefer a workflow that removed it as a concern, which is why I am hoping the Cinelog DCP will solve that problem.

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Share Your Videos / Slow Spring

« on: June 14, 2016, 06:08:53 PM »

I haven't used the 50fps feature before, so I threw together some of the slow motion clips I'd captured with the 5d3 over the last couple months. A few clips at the end were with the 3x3 crop mode. I wish I had the time and skill to give the raw footage a better grade, but it's also nice just to use MLVFS to throw the clips on a timeline in Davinci Resolve and adjust a few sliders in the raw menu.

I need to be more mindful of blown highlights, but has anyone found an easy/quick fix for the pink highlights that occur on occasion? Thank you again to the awesome Magic Lantern team!