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Excellent work.  You can't really go wrong with a beautiful country like Morocco, but you still did a great job nonetheless.

MLRawViewer is still my go to app for previewing and conversions.  It's a beautiful piece of software, and has enhanced the workflow process of ML Raw immensely.  I remember way back before we had Resolve 11 and MLRawViewer.  Dark times indeed.

Hats off to you sir for your brilliant work.  You thoroughly deserve all the plaudits and accolades rightfully coming your way.

Lovely work.  How did you grade it?

This looks like a very handy tool for assisting with correcting footage and colour grading, and it's free

http://www.m2port.com/index.html












Too bad it's only for PC.  I tried a number of workarounds but as of yet no joy.  I'd love to get it working though as I believe it would be of great help to my work.

Thank you dyfid for that extensive and extremely informative response.  I learned more useful information in that entry pertaining to my most pressing requirements than I have in the last month of online research.  On many things you have put my mind at rest, and I have to believe that most people on this forum would find your clarifications invaluable.

On the subject of ACES, why exactly do you believe it is of no use to ML Canon raw?

I'm coming round to dyfid's way of thinking on this.  My initial concern was the apparent limitations of the Rec709 colour space, and like most I'm reluctant to compromise any image quality therefore the expanded gamut BMD Film appeared to be a better choice, without necessarily knowing exactly what any of that in fact means.

However, considering the initial access to RAW data and 32bit floating point (so no clipping) then perhaps that's unnecessary?  3D LUTS are destructive so surely they should be avoided unless entirely necessary?  I know Peter Doyle refuses to use them so that's worth considering.  I'd love a definitive explanation on all this as I have a project coming up and I've yet to decide my final workflow approach.  I'd really like to know the best and cleanest way to emulate film stocks.

Also, what do people make of the ACES workflow, and is it worth the hassle for the benefits, if indeed there are any?

As I understood, it's the same work with 14 bits, as 12 bits. Because 14bits RAW have two bits with out information.
I'm not sure of this, but, it's a lot of size in our hard disk. I never tried apply this.

Wrong.  It's the full 14 bits.  Don't be throwing away that info!

Lovely stuff.  Could you describe your workflow in Davinci 11, as in your settings and general approach?

Cheers bud.

This is also a great example of how powerful the Highlight Recovery option is.  Together with the Highlights slider in the Raw controls, and the soft clip adjustment in the Curves section, it is possible to perform some serious rescue to Raw footage if necessary.

[baldavenge]

Looks good, baldavenger, but I need to know how did you get this.
With ACR it was a matter of simply using a one click at the grey patch. The same thing* with Resolve results in the image I posted earlier. If there is something that would put the image in a more "neutral" look as I can get with ACR, without too much effort, I'd appreciate.

*almost, as one needs to place the points in the target

In the preferences I chose the following settings:



In the color tab I stayed in the BMD Film color space and gamma.  The image appeared flat, as you would expect from a log gamma.  The first adjustment in the first node was auto color (alt or option A).  This expands the image tonality so that it now looks more natural and less flat.  In the second node I performed the color match.  This does not fix any color cast though, so that is performed in the third node.  Isolate a neutral area with a power window (middle grey in the color chart), press shift H so that the area is isolated on screen and in the scopes, then use the vector scope to neutral the grey.  Use the temp and tint sliders in the Raw controls for this.  When this is done, remove the power window and the image will be color balanced and any cast removed.  Proceed to use the Raw controls as you would in ACR to finesse the image.

Here are the settings I used:

I had a crack.

Nothing too taxing.  Similar flexibility to that of ACR in my opinion.

I had a crack at your DNG in Resolve 11.  After a few tweaks I came up with this:




Very similar approach to one taken with ACR.

Here are the project settings:




And here are the Color Tab Camera Raw settings:



I did Auto Color (Alt or Option A) on the first node to take the image out of its initial log appearance due to using the BMD Film color space and gamma.

Quite a bit of flexibility.  I'm sure others could do an even better job.  I'm looking into using LAB color space in a separate node to blur the color channels to remove noise, but not 100% sure about that yet.

Try it in Resolve 11.

Choose CinemaDNG. BMD Film color space and gamma. Check Highlight Recovery. Try auto color, then use the highlight and shadow controls in the Raw panel.

If still struggling try changing the Color Science from Davinci YRGB to Davinci ACES.

Can you upload the DNG so some of us can have a go and see if we can improve on it, then publish the method?

It depends.  The Midtone Detail option is great, and unlike working in ACR (using the clarity slider) you can see the effect properly and conveniently quickly.

The temptation is always to rack up the sharpening, but it is better to err on the side of moderation.

This really is a game changer.  The added RAW controls and the Color Match options (using ColorChecker Cards) mean I can finally normalise a clip with confidence and proceed to grade creatively.  No more lingering doubts or loss of information due to time consuming conversion processes.

I'm probably going to do my editing in Resolve now as well, and only send footage out to After Effects or Nuke for VFX shots.

A great development for Magic Lantern users.

Fingers crossed.  Hopefully there'll be some sort of acknowledgement of the existence of ML Raw.  The colorchecker balance option should be a great help too.

Thank you!   

This is valuable information and many thanks for going to the trouble of researching and documenting these results.

Agreed.  Hopefully Resolve 11 will solve this conundrum.  Otherwise it is required to convert ML Raw to Prores with the VisionLog profile, and even then there still lingers an uncertainty for me.  I fear detrimental loss of data and image damage.

I too am interested in hearing about recommended approaches.  Minimal loss of data along the pipeline is key.

Many thanks!

When does Davinci Resolve 11 finally come out?  Surely that's going to be a major game changer for working with raw?

Thank you for your service.

DJ Milf in da house!