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hi fresco!

i upscale in post with the 2x upscale with Resolve Studio version which i think makes a good job. Ofcourse real UHD looks much better, but i think this is decent. I shoot slowmotion the skiing part handheld with a handle on top of the camera so its no post stabilization nor gimbal glidecam thing. For the zoomed in peices I use a Canon 100 IS macro that does a ok job, but i miss a tripod sometimes or another solution.

I only use MLVApp for copying files from memory card and adjusting white level from 15000 to 16383 which is very important.

The video is unavailable here...

Thank you! didnt first notice. will fix and re upload! Now it should be availible

Latest revision first:

Shot in 14-bit mostly slowmotion around 50fps in squeeze format.
Tried to go for a look with a wide range in it.
Hope you you like it. Need to use a tripod, those  movements on 100mm and 300mm is a tiny bit annoying

Happy new year and Xmas!

I like the easy workflow with MLV App as a start to adjust white level to 16383 from standard 15000.

Please watch in UHD

Edited my post

Added a video with correct color settings from Resolve

I updated the grade and did focus on the blacklevels.

One of my favorits shots, taken from a bike with a Ronin M,
https://imgur.com/nDX4ZCS

There is so much information and to get the sky visible I made a curve that looks like that.
https://imgur.com/mRHJ2Ts

Last grade looked like that
https://imgur.com/bBqZscm

And a old grade looked like this, warm colors but too bright
https://imgur.com/FCP2nGD

Without anygrade and only "color space transform" it looks like this
https://imgur.com/dUF5Wfl

I would lower the exposure on almost every shot. It seems washed out to my taste.

Hi thank you for your comment. Yes maybe I'am looking to much on the midtones in the image and want them bright, too bright so the image fall flat. Thanks again for commenting.

Hi again.

Happy as always with the quality of 5D3 and ml raw especially. I use a simpler grade and faster workflow in Resolve so my grades go quicker. Grading old footage, it looks better offline but still happy with online UHD quality.

Beautiful! Nice image and grade!

Hi, thanks for a great application! Can i record RAW files aswell or is it MLV only with this app?

Thanks in advance!

Watched it a few times more, really like the edit! What music is it?

Good job on the handheld stabilisation. Did you go by inlines or skateboard while filming? Its really looking like a glidecam and didnt spot the post "warp stabilizer" or similar.

Great edit!

Agree above! Very well made! Will watch it again, feeling very inspired after watching! Great work 

It looks overexposed.

The branches, leaves, the beak all have burned out spots. Not sure if it was shot so or it is the 16k white level or you need to pull down highlights in resolve.

But nice calm shots though.

Yes its possible to take them back in Resolve further. I like contrasty images but will think about it next time.

You tell me which one is heavily maintained these days...

True! MLV App 1.7! I find it really fast white level and conversion to DNG. Thanks for clearifying that for me, now I spare my SSDs write lifetime by 100%

Nice birding.
Tip:
It´s possible to set custom white level straight in mlv_dump, Mlv App, Switch etc. and simply export to dng. No need to go through exiftool.

Hi thank you! Yes I might use any of those instead of the one I always use (raw2cdng), when I use the exiftool way I write to the SSD twice which is a bit unnessesary. Which of the one would you recommend for MLV to DNG with adjusted white level in the conversion? Which is most easy to use with drag and drop features with folders and so? Thanks in advance Danne!

Took a walk this morning with my 5D3 400 5.6 L and a tripod made a little edit in Resolve and used the same workflow as i use to. My last adjustment is to adjust the white level before working with them in Resolve from 15000 to 16383 with Exiftool.
It makes a very big difference, thx to https://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?topic=15801.100 baldavenger for his great thread.
The 3 times crop zoom is very welcome with the 400 5.6. Thanks for watching if you watch

I looked into the effects of extending the White Level value in the DNGs metadata. With 5D MkIII footage it is 15000, which is mapped to the value 1.0 in Resolve. The reasons for White Level being lower than the full 14bit limit (16383) are well documented - Peak Saturation, non-linearity past that point, magenta cast - but when Highlight Recovery is enabled these extra values come into play anyway.

I ran some tests with DNGs whose White Level I altered using Exiftool. There were three varieties: Normal 15000, Full 16583, and Bright 10000

In Adobe Camera Raw they appeared as expected, with Full 16383 slightly darker than Normal 15000 (due to the values being mapped lower to accommodate the additional 1383 values) and Bright 10000 much brighter in keeping with the fact that the lower value is mapped to peak white thereby raising all values accordingly.

Using the Exposure and Highlight controls it was very easy to bring back the highlight values that got clipped or heavily compressed, so in this case the White Level is really just a convenient guideline for Adobe Camera Raw to map Peak White, and no actual raw data is compromised by altering the metadata.

In Resolve it is a somewhat different matter. When the three DNGs are initially brought in the appearance is more or less the same as in ACR, but then using controls like Exposure and Gain to bring back highlight detail it is revealed that this information has been clipped, with Bright 10000 clearly showing the missing information. Only by enabling Highlight Recovery is that signal information brought back into play, but only though whichever algorithms Resolve uses to rebuild signals.

Now, even with Highlight Recovery on Full 16383 Resolve tries to build more highlight detail, even though there is no reserve signal to call upon. I prefer to use the signal splitting techniques mentioned earlier in the thread to do highlight rebuilding, but that can be combined with Highlight Recovery to increase dynamic range if done judiciously. The less of a signal Highlight Recovery has to anchor to initially, the more control you'll have overall, which is why I now recommend (for those using Resolve and willing to put in the extra work in order to achieve superior results) that you change the White Level of your DNGs to their max, which is 16383 for regular and 65535 for Dual-ISO. This process will involve the Exposure control to scale the signal such that the exposure value of a white diffusing reflector is 1.0

This is a deliberate attempt to take the DNG process away from its originally intended display referred/stills approach, and adapt it towards a more scene referred/film approach like that of Cineon and LogC.

With the sterling aid of the two Daniels (@Danne and @dfort) I've been able to convert with relative ease the White Level of both DNGs and MLVs.

Code Select Expand

$ exiftool -IFD0:WhiteLevel=16383 * -overwrite_original -r.

Is a quick and dirty way to convert every DNG in the folder (and subfolders)

Code Select Expand

echo "0000068: FF 3F" | xxd -r - Input.MLV

Converts the White Level in the header of a MLV. Very handy if you're using MLVFS in combination with Resolve.
@dfort figured out the code and the HEX values needed.

15000 = 98 3A
16383 = FF 3F
10000 = 10 27
60000 = 60 EA
65535 = FF FF
30000 = 30 75

I finally have read thru the thread once and twice, haven't understand everything yet. Thank you very much for this tip! It looks better in Resolve with the 16000 ish white level. What do you think about the 2048 black level on the 5D3? I use pre tone curve still, the image looks overall better now, thx!

allemyr: thx for the Pre Tone Curve advice, i have never used it before, and it makes the image look like it was shoot incamera standard profile. But as i can see it's not compatible with ACES

The hole point with ACES is to match different cameras to look similar when working with footage from different sources in the same project. Shure its compatible with ACES the Apply Pre Tone Curve since it doesn't exist a specific MLRAW 5D3 color settings IDT, where do you read that Apply Pre Tone Curve isn't supported with ACES and MLRAW 5D3? This Camera RAW panel is the IDT settings for CinemaDNG footage and we are working with footage from a unknown source, not from a Black Magic Pocket Camera. You can get a good looking image anyway, but any official way or made IDT isn't existing.

Here's about it from the Davinci Resolve 15 manual page 134, I highligthed som parts in yellow that I think is important.

Yes ok thanks! Yes it doesn't matter what IDT you choose there, but a input device transform is always used ofcourse.

The Camera RAW panel controls how the IDT works for this example with RAW footage. Yes this is how good as i gets, but a specific ML RAW 5D3 IDT doesn't exist I wish my video sequence looked exactly the same as a CR2 photo in any program.

Fair enough its a great looking image anyway!

Camera RAW setting, apply Pre Tone Curve does a pretty big difference

The only thing that will differ from any other ACES raw workflow is that you don't have a premade ACES input Transform to choose since it doesn't exist one for ML RAW and 5D3.  And theres where everything about the ACES workflow falls apart I'am sorry to say.

Would be very cool if someone made a 5D3 ML RAW ACES input Transform to use.

This is where you choose input:

Your question is more "how to work in a ACES enviroment with raw files, specifically from ML RAW?"

Since your workflow is a non ACES one you have to discard it all I'am sorry to say and start from scratch.

I make an example to make it more easy to follow along with my thoughts on the subject. I made a test same exposure between the photo and the recording. The exposure was ISO6400 1/30 F-stop 1.5 for both the video sequenze and the photo. The raw photo is a CR2 from my 5D3 and I used a MLV 14-bit to DNG 16-bit converter. I opened both of the files in Adobe Camera RAW and saved them and they come out different since ACR has different color and gammas for different raw files, one specific for the 5D3 raw photo and one more generic for the unknown DNG file from the video, that's why the came out different.

Photo:




Video:




Hope I made myself more clear now.

Video from Resolve with my standard interpret settings:





does it look and ready to go as the photo? No and it is very hard to get there, shure it looks better then the generic ACR profile for the video file, but none is made for the video raw file. The photo file looks like it should.

This way of thinking implies photographers have worse colour management as it is mainly based on using a colour matrix to convert camera gamut to XYZ or whatever software has internally, and from what I've seen raw files from different cameras look very similar when opened in raw converters so I think it's actually accurate.

I think camera specific profiles by the companies are mostly made to give their cameras a special look. But there will be small differences (errors) in camera colour because of the red/green/blue filters on the pixels, maybe the profiles try to correct for this, but it's not physically possible to make most cameras have truly correct colour. According to what I've read, to achieve true accuracy, the filters would need to transmit light in a way that each channel is a mixture of the XYZ functions:

I think this is a very interesting subject on ML RAW, for which ever software NLE you use to interpret ML RAW files in colorspace and gamma. Doesn't mattter if you use ACR, Resolve or MLVApp/RawTherapee?

I don't know how my example on interpreting different videofiles from Arri, Red or Blackmagic has to do with with photo editors like ACR. I just say that you get different results if you interpret a Arri RAW file with Red RAW or Blackmagic color settings . And that each camera is different. Adobe Camera RAW i bet have different profile embedded with each different camera it supports and not visible when grading there just applied the predefined gamma/color for the camera RAW file you are opening for a 5DMKII it uses that profile and for a old Canon 20D it uses another or if Canon has made and adjusteded all its cameras to match each other in terms of color.

I think this unknown colorspace and gamma for ML RAW is why there is so many different usermade workflow in terms of color for this raw files. I guess so. I might be wrong tho, but this is no critic to photoeditor apps since I think they are very similar to videoraw decoders. Its just that every raw file has its own way of interpreting raw files. And you don't have to talk about Photo vs Video editors at all, Resolve doesn't have the answer for example, not for ML RAW.

I think the colour management is an upside of raw! it should be as accurate as any cinema camera.

Hi yes I agree its a upside with raw, but I talk more specifically between ML raw and Canon RAW or ArriRAW were every profile you see has been carefully made for that sensor or when the sensor has been made for that profile.
I would say that its more the characteristics of color of the sensor that matter more then whats emedded in the raw file. Otherwise BMD, Canon C200 raw, ArriAlexa or Red would use the same color profiles and settings when shooting raw and in postprocessing?

Yes that's the big downside with ML RAW, the color management. Every camera that's recording RAW has there own color space and gamma that should be used with them shure you can buy a BlackMagic Camera record RAW with that and then interpret it as Canon or ARRIRAW but will it look as good as if you use the color space and gamma that Blackmagic origianlly developed that camera with? The second big thing is debayer, every sensor is different, different size different amount of pixel so on, so to debayer a sensor the best way you have to have a custom made debayer setting that is developed from the physicallities of the sensor. But the color space and the gamma to have that for this specific sensor is the most important part and thats something that everyone has to elaborate on there own since its not a custom made specific for ML RAW and the specific camera one use.

The data and color is there in the raw file but it has to be transformed in a good way.
I'am not working with this but I have put pretty much time in it.
The next thing I will do is doing the balance of the shot inside Canon LOG Color 3 instead of working with the one I used before. Think the noise can be lower that way.

Yes I agree with you 14-bit 1080p is really great and its so nice to experience while doing the grade and balance in Resolve when you see how much that is recorded in the 14-bit file.




Yes its RAW footage so it can be interpreted in anyway, check out the CameraRAW panel in Resolve

Doing quick test from time to time is something I like myself and is a good way to develop skills Especially when the result looks like your shot at 0:18 !
Haven't used any of my camera gear lately and when I did bring no rig only a 100IS macro and that result in a pretty shaky image.
That slider looks like a really good choice very pleasing to watch footage from it!

Nice shots! Especially the 0:18 with the lens! Quality looks awesome! Seems you have a good workflow for it! Nice subtile grading!

Hey! Nice video!

I will say though - I think every single shot in your video needs to be brought down 1 or 2 EV. The whites are so hot it's almost hard to look at - and you're essentially desaturating your shots they're so bright.

Hi, yes the first video in this thread isn't to nice grading wise.