Messages

Hi!

Can´t you set an output directory or am I just too stupid to find the option?

I love BATCHelor. But as MLV can record audio now and fixed all initial bugs most people probably switched from raw to mlv.

I´m not blaming ML .. just saying that this is something weird and it MIGHT´ve been the forced operation of a button on startup. Sure, might´ve been the Komputerbay card which wasn´t in a good shape, even with being new. It´s just .. I´m using CF cards for .. don´t know .. 10 years now and never had an issue where the card could not be formatted anymore after it came out of the camera. All recovery programs you normally find with a search engine won´t read the card at all, will try to "reset" it somehow with more brutal format methods. Hope they exist.

[but definitely give the camera these five seconds do do the task without interrupting.]

Hi!

Just recorded 12mins of clips on a 64GB Komputerbay card and when it got full, the recording stopped - as always not properly - so the camera had to be turned off (built from 23. feb 2013).
After turning on I did not wait for the cards to be warmed up, but pressed PLAY instantly. This resulted in a destroyed card, can´t be read by the camera or a computer anymore, every device wants to format it.
So either it was just bad luck or interrupting the warming up process. Can´t say for sure - but definitely give the camera these five seconds do do the task without interrupting.

Card won´t format on a computer or in camera anymore, seems to be somehow damaged now. Will try some sort of low level format, so no chance for data recovery.

cheers,
Steffen

Don´t export the file for the internet directly from After Effects.  In case the bitrate is wrong you need to do all the rendering again, harddisk space is cheap, so don´t be afraid of a 4 GB file.

You do not need to export a lossless file (uncompressed), though. Mild compression is easy and saves you a lot of space. On Mac the choice would be ProRes, on a Pc the free AVID DNxHD codec. 16bit is right, no need to go higher. Color working space set to none is fine as well when working with the DNGs.

Once you rendered your file (Quicktime ProRes 220 on a mac or QUicktime DNxHD 185 - only this one supports 16bit), make sure you set the output to trillions of colors) you can load it in Adobe Media Encoder to transcode it to a internet friendly format. Start off with a H-264 file that fits your size best. Often you do not need to provide a real 1080p file, most VIMEO videos in HD play only in 720p. Then play around with the bitrate. Do you want more? Incrase the bitrate.
Two pass encoding and the checkbos "Maximum render quality on" on the lower part of the AME window should give you best results.

If you want to know more about rendering DNG sequences in After Effects, check out this article (just skip the LOG functions entirely):

http://hackermovies.com/hackermovies-magic-lantern-raw-workflow-guide

Happy encoding!

Steffen

Hi, Tony!

Hope you´re having a great time off. Just a question in the meantime .. in older versions of the program it did not want you to set a prefix or camera number etc. - it just took the original name of the file (if you wanted to) and added the framecount to the DNG file name.

In the latest version I think we´re forced to put some prefix to it .. and it messes around with the base filename. For example - a M29-1704.MLV  becomes a PREFIX_M29_171704.MLV where the double "17" is the biggest problem as it has a big impact on the readability of the filename. Could you check the naming routines?  Thanks!!

Can we help testing? Will this be in the next nightly build or do we have to download the fixed files individually from your bitbucket link and copy them onto our ML card?

thanks for looking into this!!

Anyone experienced this issues? Can I do something to make this work better?

Hi, Joaomoutinho,

the app´s speed is just fine. There is no real magic done to it, there is no real processor power etc. (debayering happens at a later stage), the only action which is done is "extracting" the DNG files out of the MLV (or the raw on other apps) file. No conversion or anything.  So the only thing that really counts is - drive speed!

If you had the MLVs on an internal RAID or SSD drive and would write to that drive as well - take a look. It´s fast as lightning. But normally you can´t store so much stuff internally, so it all comes from the CF cards itself or external harddrives. If you read the MLVs from an attached USB 3.0 drive (or E-SATA/Firewire800) and DON`T store the DNGs on the same drive it should be really fast. If the stuff´s read via USB 2.0 - then yes .. it takes a lot of time.

Steffen

Hi, Tony!

I know about the two codecs .. but do ANY of those two codecs show the possibility in AE to show "trillions of colors" for you? Because standard is "millions of colors" - and this is only 8bit. Even if you have the 10bit version of that codec, as long as "millions of colors" is the only possible selection, it will store 8bit content in this 10bit codec which reduces it to 8but. DNxHD can be switched to 16bit through its quicktime wrapper.

And make sure you set your preferred card slot to CF card in the ML menu setup. Otherwise it might try to write everything onto SD which might not be fast enough.

Tony, you said above that you´re using the Canopus Codec instead of DNxHd in After Effects. Question - can you export in 16bit in it? Because by standard you cannot export more than 8bit ("millions of colors") into that codec, the wrapper (QT or AVI) does not matter. There was an article once online where they described what text setting for AE´s file formats to change to allow "16bit / trillions of colors" exporting, but I never found out how.

So in case you´re "just" exporting millions of colors, be aware that you´re not getting the full information (no matter if you´re using a log curve or not) from the DNG file as it converts down to 8bit.

cheers,
Steffen

Very possible. When I purchased my KB cards back in september all the 128 GB cards were way too slow for continuous raw in 16:9 - especially with sound (which did not exist back then). Only the 64 GB cards were fast enough.
And we never read a post or heard anything that the bigger cards got faster, only the premium cards like Lexar were properly working for raw in 128 GB sizes.

Steffen

Ah, I did not know the first file in the folder prevents image sequence importing. Nice!

But .. drag and drop does not work for me with complete folders, After Effects imports nothing.
However, the includede SMART IMPORT script could do this for you. More about DNG sequence importing in AFX can be found here, in the ML raw workflow article (slightly outdated since cinelog is available now, eventually replacing VisionLOG, but still good for the afx part):

http://hackermovies.com/hackermovies-magic-lantern-raw-workflow-guide

Why would you need the complicated H6 sync way then? (it's only reference audio though)

The sync is made for non-reference audio. Just imagine .. the H6 is feed via lav mics that are attached to the actors. So it captures several channels at once - and the camera triggers the on/off to that! So you don´t have to sync the reference audio to the proper audio later in post. That´s huge! The alternative would be the included reference audio from the camera mic and Pluraleyes or something similar.

But as long as the MLVs are not as reliable as raws .. hm .. hope they can fix it.

Yes, three MLVs without audio. I don´t even know yet how to enable audio when recording MLVs.

If the audio files have the same filenames and always have the same offset .. it shouldn´t be too hard to write a Premiere Project file where all the DNG sequences (or their converted offline files) and the audio is automatically matched. Such a file is just a compressed XML file, human readable. But someone with the Premiere Pro SDK would be needed here.

I am personally looking into triggering a zoom H6 with a sound module. So the filenames don´t match, but if the MLV wav file would be automatically aligned with the video, tools like "PluralEyes" could save a lot of time.

But back to the core problem .. do you think it´s possible to skip the whole audio part if no WAV file is found? Or is the recorded audio contained in the MLV itself?

At the moment I am pretty happy with raw since MLVs on my 5DMk3 sometimes have strange behaviour (recording stops etc.) which never happens with raw_rec. But MLVs are the future for sure, with their structure and the metadata they can contain. For raw files the closest to your program is BATCHelor, but with the possibilities MLV offers you your app can take this to a whole new level. So definitely stay on the MLV side and put efforts and time to make that perfect, rather than including raw as a file format.

Thanks again for your great visual basic skills!

Yeah, version 1.1 fixed it!! -- almost.

Seems like the audio thing was the issue, I recorded everything without audio (still used to it after always shooting raw files).
What happened now - I took those three files from the first test. The first AND third DNG sequence was written .. but in the second folder only the XMP file could be found. If I put that (second) MLV file separately in an folder it gets converted without problems. Hm. Any idea?

Great improvement on the naming structure, thanks for the update!

It´s windows 7, an both machines. I just always turn off all the aero visual stuff ..
Coming directly from the card should not be the issue . yesterday the MLVs came from an external harddrive and it did not make a difference.

Hi, it´s me again. New machine (this time in the office), freshly recorded MLVs. 11 files, only 1 output. Am I stupid? Can´t even handle a small software ..

Attached is a screenshot. Any idea?

Tony, thanks for investigating.

Just tried it again, it always extracts the first file, any of those three. But as soon as a second file comes into the directory it always keeps extracting the first one in the list (alphabetically).

1. Did not choose to use the lossless or lossy option - the DNG converter is installed (BATCHelor uses it), but every checkbox for its use remained unchecked here.
2. The MLV files´s names are
M18-1528.MLV
M18-1529.MLV
M18-1531.MLV
3. Disk space is fine, plenty left.
4. No files in the program directory were altered or renamed.
5. DNG and MLV paths are both the same external harddrive. But the MLV path has 30 characters. Too long? Guess not, otherwise it wouldn´t find even the first file.
Copying the program files to another directory did not help as well.
6. I used the renaming options on all previous attempts, now I am running one without any renaming. Argh, same result. Even without renaming - only one file extracted.

I´ll record new MLVs tomorrow and try another machine

Thanks!

Steffen

Tony, thanks for writing this!! Great! Now I´m starting to test mlvs .. finally.

One question, though. I added three MLVs to the "files to convert" window, on the progress bar after clicking CONVERT it says 1/3 .. but then it only converts the first file, does not create folders for the other two .. and says "Successful."  Did you encounter something like that before? Or am I missing anything? It looks like that even in the commandline there´s no error etc. popping up.

thanks!

Steffen

I think you are referring to the "ML greyscale" mode, right? Force ML to use the canon mode always when in zoom mode, but then framing won´t be accurate. Very off indeed. But it works great for focusing again.

Will come with feedback soon! We´re always shooting with Alexa or Epic-X as A-camera (our work: www.alexandsteffen.com), but I have my MK3 always with me to shoot inserts if needed in ML raw.

Intercutting the camera´s output after colorcorrection is never really a problem, but your approach could make it faster and way more accurate.

Stumbled across the first small drawback .. in my DNG sequences the metadata always reads "5D MK II" which I never understood why, so I can´t apply your DCP without changing the camera model with the exiftool. Great manual you made!

Have to check out DNGs with the latest builds. Or switch to MLV. Aargh .. so far the MLV workflow with converting them to RAWs first is painful, especially for longer projects. Need something like BATCHElor (with instant DNG and cineform offlining) for MLVs urgently ..

If this works fine I´ll implement cinelog in my "Raw camera workflow article" which - so far - features VisionLOG:   http://hackermovies.com/hackermovies-magic-lantern-raw-workflow-guide

cheers,
Steffen

Andy, don´t excuse, thanks for sharing the news. Just bought it. Curious to see how it stands up "against" VisionLOG and how good the overall dynamic range is preserved .. as I´m normally always working with Alexa ProRes footage on my day job I´m eager to see what you can squeeze out of the DNGs!

thanks!

Steffen

Did you set your SD card (as you are probably using the SD card slot to boot ML as all of us do on the MK3) to have the bootflat enabled? Otherwise it can´t boot the firmware automatically. The EOScard tool does this for you. After doing that with all ML files on it it should work if you set the flag in the camera to automatically load firmwares from cards in the camera. This is described as first step in all ML installtion manuals .. after all that it should work flawlessly.

Murphy, thanks for writing this!!
Unfortunately .. here it does not work. Could it possibly produce errors on videos which don´t have the full 1080-height, since I captured in another aspect ratio?

It creates the comp, the high and low layer and an adjustment layer on top, but you still see the interlace lines after running it.

On the high exposure it applies the shift channels, an "invert alpha" and a curves effect with no change to the image.
On the low exposure image there is no effect applied at all.And the adjustment layer has just a curves effect without anything and a unsharp mask. But no sliders etc. anywhere. What could be wrong?

thanks!!

Steffen