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that's great to know, thanks!

lately there's a lot more magic happening with magic lantern.  it's awesome!

maybe one day soon we should do some sort of film together, as a community effort.

just an idea that popped into my head...

It may be possible to do with your idea once nodes are an option...  it would probably require some very precise work in a few stages (nodes) to keep it controlled while increasing the overall gain.

I agree that it may be that resolve is required to do such things, but I thought it would be worth asking anyways.

I really mean it when I say that I now prefer mlvapp (except for these difficult situations)

LOL that's an awesome answer!

OK, I am may asking for too much, but since everyone's all here... 

The shot I am currently grading couldn't be done in mlvapp (yet?) because the bright red LED is shining right at the camera, and when grading, it just gets too strong and blows out.

In resolve, I was able to avoid the problem by using a "power zone" (selection mask) to isolate it, first by colour, and also by a circle selection tool to make sure nothing else is touched.  I did this on the first node, and then graded with the second node, without changing the led...

Would this be too much to ask?

see image, selecting the colour of the led for the mask



 

it's awesome to see all you heavyweights in discussion...

While grading in resolve with linear gamma, I just ran into a clip that simply could not get the shadows lifted enough, so I loaded it into mlvapp and it worked perfectly and easily gave the right results.

So I went back to resolve to try to find out what's different...

I had to switch the colourspace from linear to rec709 to get it in the same ballpark, while keeping linear gamma.

Is this what's happening in mlvapp?  When you select "linear", is it really linear, including colourspace?

PS: whatever you're doing, it works, and I love it!

How about inserting a black frame for every detected corrupted frame?
General question. Is a corrupted frame in one MLV file aborting the whole batch process in MLV app? If not I could live without the export of corrupted files although cool if it would work with black frames.

On a side note. I tried multi rendering on dual iso files since those are really slow to process. Flickering occured so had to run processing with only one copy of Mlv App to get comsistent results. Strange. They shouldn´t interfere with each other?

This needs to be addressed sooner than later!  I'm just getting into dual iso and that's where we NEED to improve rendering speed.  I suppose we can work around it with VMs, but that's getting a little extreme, no?

Maybe it's time to set up a good old fashioned render farm.  If mlvapp won't take advantage of multi cores, a farm could be made with a bunch of "obsolete" machines, but then some kind of job control will definitely be needed!

I just had a thought:  can mlvapp run in a sandbox?  that might solve Danne's discovery.  also, Danne, were you using different drives for the different instances?  That might be a stretch, but again, I'm just thinking out loud...  I'd test it but i'm in the middle of a job so I can't check until tomorrow.  I will definitely try then...

this is why i keep asking for receipt slots.

it's really helpful to be able to quickly compare different versions of a grade on a tricky shot.  it's the feature that i like best in resolve.  alt + 1-8 to store, ctrl + 1-8 to recall.  i use it constantly.

i know that it is very difficult to implement, but i wonder if it would be any easier to have a "second version" for the currently loaded clip.  not a receipt, per se, just another version of the settings for each clip.  in resolve this is ctrl y

muscle memory

ok then, how about this?

a function to automagically generate x number of partial sessions from the one currently loaded to facilitate doing multiple instances manually.

it can be tedious to do this by hand, especially with a long shot list.

it is not a hassle if you are only doing 2 incarnations, in fact it is nice and easy.  just load the same session and choose the first or second half of the list.  but what if you are doing 8? 16? 32? (thread ripper users)

just thinking out loud.

even doing 2 by hand cuts the time in half, but that threadripper user would be sad to be using 2 out of 32

sorry, i guess i didn't clearly state that i was thinking about a job control utility, as in a separate applet that would call x number of mlvapps to do a batch render.

someone wrote something like this for blender long ago...

excellent update!
the enhancements and additions to the demosaicing are very nice.

someone mentioned running multiple instances to speed up rendering jobs.  would it be possible to add some kind of (automated?) job control to do this, perhaps with a simple option to choose how many to spawn, unless it is possible to autodetect the number of threads available on all platforms?

the results i'm getting with the linear setup are so good that i now prefer mlvapp to resolve!

need...faster...rendering...

I suppose you could work around it by copying the mlv and renaming it so you can load it again?

Nice job matching the look.

As you said, it's pretty close...

The shadows definitely lack the same richness, and there's more noise.  The noise shows a lot more in motion than with a single frame, of course.

There's definitely an advantage with linear, at least I think so!

I see...

Whatever the cause may be, it's still best to do these things by hand with curves, at least for me.

Here is an example:
I didn't spend any time trying to match the exact results, I simply pulled the highlights down with the slider for the "slider" image, and then played with curves for a few seconds (literally) for the "curves" image.

Again, I was not trying to match the look, just show the effect...

It's very noticeable, in fact it is a big problem.

It's what causes the halos around bright objects in dark scenes when you pull down highlights with a slider.

Same thing with pulling up shadows, etc.

Very ugly, and very obvious.

Yes, it makes sense; that's what I was guessing for the reason for the better results.

Curves always provide a better result because there isn't any "stairstepping" of the data.

I agree completely that it means the curve has to fit the data, seeing that I created the provided curve specifically to match the scene, and more importantly, the reduced gain iso "109" I was using.  It may not match stock iso.

But it would be easy to create a curve for (each?) stock iso.

The idea for me is to have a suitable curve as the starting point, and then provide a visually straight curve for the user to make adjustments afterward for corrections.  Of course, this will be an easy option when you add nodes.  At that point, the discussion is irrelevant.  The user can load the appropriate receipt, and then adjust a "fresh" curve in a second node...

I see a lot of people mentioning "filmic" looks where they are actually just trying to say "correct".  This is a good clear way to get that look, at least for me.

As a side note, I think that "sliders" would work beautifully if they always affected all of the data, thus avoiding the stairstepping problem, even if the effect if zero on some/most of the data.  No more halos etc.  Probably easier said than done, but this is why I avoid those kinds of adjustments as much as possible on every grading platform.

Resolve is simply terrible for halos.  Really bad.  Even the basic raw control for highlights creates very ugly halos.  Make the same adjustment manually by using a curve in another node... no halo.

I liked the results I got on that shot so much that I regraded the whole video using that receipt as the starting point, and it went very smoothly and easily, in fact, by far the best grading experience for me yet.

In a couple of shots with extremely bright highlights, I dropped the top of the curve by about 10% and added  a 45 degree bump at the top right side of the curve, and it made the highlights very nice looking!

Yes, the shadows look better this way, not just less noise, but also better "defined".

I really like this, and urge everyone to try it...

Maybe you can make a special "nonlinear" mode that takes advantage of this!

OK, I grabbed that same example from the resolve screenshot and loaded it up into mlvapp, and the result is very interesting...

It seems that mlvapp is more robust than resolve!  Really!!

Getting a good look on that shot in resolve (without using linear gamma) was quite difficult, and in mlvapp, it is comparatively easy.

Nevertheless, using the included receipt for linear gamma, you can see how nice it is to work with.

First, note the settings (disregarding colour temperature, tint, and the crazy curve).  Other than dropping the dark strength to 0, everything is default.  Does it get any easier?

Now, maximize the size of the edit window so you can make precise adjustments to the curve, and grab any point and make SMALL adjustments.  It's easy and intuitive to make changes to the image, and the curve almost tells you if you are going too far...

Keep in mind that this example is using the reduced gain, and the subject matter is not typical.  This is a really dark scene with extremely strong highlights.

Using this linear setup makes it really easy to work with a really difficult shot.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1v4Jr-MT3YOrcLb3vtUp1Wz19OH9aAQ9r

i'm in the middle of something right now, but when i get a chance later today i will provide an example 1 frame mlv and receipt for mlvapp...

Here's an example i already have lying around from another video when I first tried linear gamma in resolve...

The curve is the same for mlvapp.

But...  this won't work for footage that is exposed "normally".  These videos were exposed for the gain reduction mode, so they are extremely dark and i'm lifting the shadows unbelievably high, as you can see from the curve!

It works beautifully in linear gamma.  I wasn't able to get these results in other modes, especially so easily!

Some of the scenes in the vimeo video had fairly "easy" lighting and didn't require such an extreme curve.  That's probably what you need, since you most likely exposed correctly!

I saw someone on here mention using linear gamma in resolve, so I gave it a shot, and IT ROCKS.

I loaded up a video I did last year when I was first playing with reduced gain, and for the first time, I was able to get things looking right.

This video was not shot to be nice looking.  It was a series of tests of extreme conditions to determine the limits of the camera with reduced gain.  The whole thing was shot using iso 200 dropped to approximately 109.  For example, the only light in the entire video is a single kitchen light bulb in the opening segment which was shot before sunrise.  Extremely harsh and bad lighting in a dim area with just enough cold blue light from outside to make it look really ugly.  And yet, it looks pretty good!

The shot of the paddle in the water was in full sun at noon, directly overhead.  This shot, and the melting icicle, puts to rest any false notion that you can't get good highlights with gain reduction.  You have to expose for it, and the clean shadows means you can lift them way up.

It also means you have to do serious grading to do this while looking natural.  Linear gamma did the trick.  It required a very strong inverse log curve, something you could never get away with in any other situation...

There's NO noise reduction used in any of this footage, including chroma.

After I completed this, I loaded up the same footage in mlvapp and made a similar crazy curve in linear mode, and it looks excellent!

The only thing lacking from mlvapp to prevent me from getting the same results is the lack of curves for "lum vs sat" and "sat vs sat".  Those, plus nodes, and mlvapp is ready for anything...

PS: If gain reduction was used for the "dark" iso in dual iso (e.g. 800), it would be even better with absolutely noise-free shadows.  In testing I have done for the last couple of days, I am finding that for some scenes, iso 109 still wins.  Dual iso always wins for extreme dynamic range scenes, so I will be using both from now on as needed.  It would just be nice to have even cleaner "ultra dark" details with dual iso.

vimeo forced me to convert rgb to rec709 so it's not 100% accurate colour, but it's extremely close.


https://vimeo.com/313725903

I sorted it out...

for some reason, I had to place cr2hdr.exe in the same folder as the images, even though I was running barracudaGUI from another folder, and then suddenly it worked correctly.

I'm just thankful that I was able to salvage the image, and it turned out beautifully!

thanks for the offer to help.  I appreciate it!

yes, barracuda is a frontend for cr2hdr.  no joy.

is there a way to convert it to a single frame mlv so i can just load it into mlvapp?

i'd like to try to resolve it first without uploading if possible because it's a full frame cr2 which is a big file...

hey those in the know...

i just accidentally took a photo with dual iso enabled (i didn't think it would affect photo mode when set in video mode) and it is a nature shot that cannot be retaken.

i am so far unable to correct it (using barracudaGUI) because presumably it can't handle the 1*3 binning...

can anyone help me sort this out?  I'd hate to lose the shot.

thanks in advance!

unfortunately i didn't think about it while shooting.

different exposure levels due to iso 200/100, and since i was using a manual aperture lens, it was quick and easy to just change the aperture to adjust.

sorry about that!