Ginger HDR: Direct RAW import into Premiere Pro and After Effects

[John Hable]

Hey Guys,

For those of you looking for a Premiere Pro/After Effects workflow I might be able to help you out.  In the latest version of my software (Ginger HDR) you can import the RAW files directly into AE/PPro.  Just install the plugin, import the footage, and everything should work.

Full tutorial is here:

Post and link to download:
http://19lights.com/wp/2013/06/08/magic-lantern-raw-video/

Please let me know if you run into any problems.

Happy shooting!

[Markus]

Awesome! Exactly what i was hoping for. Love native workflows! Is there any kind of quality loss to this process compared to ACR-import?

[g3gg0]

unfortunately i dont have any license for these tools

[1%]

It didn't work... had to remove the plugin to get normal ACR working. Unless they've updated it or I'm using it wrong was fail for raw.

[John Hable]

Awesome! Exactly what i was hoping for. Love native workflows! Is there any kind of quality loss to this process compared to ACR-import?

Hi Markus,

In theory, there is no loss of data.  The difference is that you are using my custom debayer and processing instead of Adobe Camera RAW's.  Most people consider ACR's debayer to be pretty good.  In my opinion, my debayer is pretty good too, but I might be a little bit biased.  (-:

Also, ACR does lots of other things without telling you.  In addition to debayering, it's also adding contrast, clamping your blacks, clamping your whites, sharpening, and reducing chroma noise.  If you want to see ACR without the extras and see a true comparison then you have to set these values:

From Basic:
Blacks: 0
Brightness: 0
Contrast: 0

From Detail:
Sharpening - Amount: 0
Noise Reduction - Color: 0

Btw, even if you decide that Ginger HDR is not for you and you would rather stick with ACR, I'd highly recommend that you always set blacks/brightness/contrast to zero.  Otherwise you're just throwing away good dynamic range.

[John Hable]

It didn't work... had to remove the plugin to get normal ACR working. Unless they've updated it or I'm using it wrong was fail for raw.

That seems pretty strange.  Did you make sure to put the plugins into the AE plugins directory?  If you put it into MediaCore it can cause problems.  If that wasn't case, please PM me with the exact error that you ran into and I'll take a look.

[artiswar]

So we can expect a LOG look similar to what DaVinci offers natively? Sign me up.

[Danne]

Hi! Nice work. I,m trying out you,re demo and after following instructions the files indeed show up and lets me import them to premiere cs5 but It gets stuck on the import and won,t get imported?
I also tried importing a 50fps raw-clip which actually worked, although stretched as from the camera recording. Summary. Regular clips won,t import on my macbook pro on premiere pro cs5 but 50fps clip would? Any suggestions?

[John Hable]

Hi! Nice work. I,m trying out you,re demo and after following instructions the files indeed show up and lets me import them to premiere cs5 but It gets stuck on the import and won,t get imported?
I also tried importing a 50fps raw-clip which actually worked, although stretched as from the camera recording. Summary. Regular clips won,t import on my macbook pro on premiere pro cs5 but 50fps clip would? Any suggestions?

Hi Danne,

Is it possible to make the .RAW available somewhere?  Please send me an email directly: jhable at 19lights dot com.  I'm guessing that there is something in the metadata that is confusing the plugin.  If I can get a .RAW file it shouldn't be too hard to figure out.  Also, what camera and firmware version?

[Markus]

I will check this out

Hi Markus,

In theory, there is no loss of data.  The difference is that you are using my custom debayer and processing instead of Adobe Camera RAW's.  Most people consider ACR's debayer to be pretty good.  In my opinion, my debayer is pretty good too, but I might be a little bit biased.  (-:

Also, ACR does lots of other things without telling you.  In addition to debayering, it's also adding contrast, clamping your blacks, clamping your whites, sharpening, and reducing chroma noise.  If you want to see ACR without the extras and see a true comparison then you have to set these values:

From Basic:
Blacks: 0
Brightness: 0
Contrast: 0

From Detail:
Sharpening - Amount: 0
Noise Reduction - Color: 0

Btw, even if you decide that Ginger HDR is not for you and you would rather stick with ACR, I'd highly recommend that you always set blacks/brightness/contrast to zero.  Otherwise you're just throwing away good dynamic range.

Sounds good, will check it out tomorrow =). And great that I can turn all baked in settings off! The only thing that seems to be missing is a manual white-balance setting where I can type in kelvin numbers and a tint slider like in ACR. To pick a color will work for some clips but will be a frustrating way to work in the long run. All the rest of color correction and sharpening I prefer to do in one set of tools outside this solution. To have a two stage color correction workflow as with ACR is not a good way to do it. You have to start compensating for your secondary correction in dumb ways. But white balance and ceiling of course is great to be able to set before. And I guess the baked in functions might be useful to have as a temporary correction for editing. 

[noisyboy]

unfortunately i dont have any license for these tools

Lol 

Hey man! Yeah - I also had to remove Ginger when the raw silent pics breakthrough first came about as A) I was getting a weird pixilation with the raws I imported to AE and B) I couldn't get ACR to come up when I would import a DNG sequence to AE. As soon as I removed Ginger both issues were fixed. I can't remember exactly which folder it was installed to so maybe as you say there was an issue there. I shall have to check as I would rather like to have it installed again.

I'll let you know how I get on tomorrow

Cheers!

EDIT: It's only fair that I mention that this was on an OLD version of Ginger HDR which clearly has been improved since.

UPDATE: This is no longer an issue. Runs totally fine and ACR still works fine.

[noisyboy]

In fact I just remembered another reason I uninstalled it... $149! Damn dude 

[John Hable]

Lol 

Hey man! Yeah - I also had to remove Ginger when the raw silent pics breakthrough first came about as A) I was getting a weird pixilation with the raws I imported to AE and B) I couldn't get ACR to come up when I would import a DNG sequence to AE. As soon as I removed Ginger both issues were fixed. I can't remember exactly which folder it was installed to so maybe as you say there was an issue there. I shall have to check as I would rather like to have it installed again.

I'll let you know how I get on tomorrow

Cheers!

EDIT: It's only fair that I mention that this was on an OLD version of Ginger HDR which clearly has been improved since.

Np.  Were you on CS6, and did you put it into the MediaCore, as opposed to directly in the plugins folder?  I haven't heard about the ACR window not coming up issue before but maybe it's just that no one told me about it.  (-:  Before CS6, there were AE importer plugins and Premiere importer plugins, and they were separate.  Then in CS6 they decided to let AE use Premiere importer plugins.  Additionally, you can (I believe) adjust the priority of the PRM plugins, but they will always trump the AE plugins.  But if you put the plugins in the AE plugins folder then it will ignore the PRM importer, and ACR will work normally.

In other words, it's kindof a mess.  My guess is that the Ginger HDR PRM importer was taking the files away from the ACR importer inside AE, and that's the problem.  It's on my todo list to sort this all out but I have a rather long todo list, so I just tell everyone to make sure you keep the plugins out of MediaCore and that's good enough for now.

Btw, if you tried Ginger HDR in the past, and you want to give the trial another go, just email me at jhable at 19lights dot com.  Run WhatIsMyMacAddress, send me the output, and I'll clear your trial for you.

[noisyboy]

Great - will do! Cheers man

[noisyboy]

Okay - you got me... I'm impressed 

No need to extract DNG's as you can just drag the RAW files straight into AE or Prem with this (that alone is probably worth it for a lot of people). They playback DAMN fast (near real-time). And also it's good to not have to conform the frame rate of each video file as you do with a DNG sequence! Very well executed man.

I think if you were to make a more beginner oriented user friendly interface then you'd be onto a serious winner. It's very good if you are technically clued up on coloring as you can get real deep but I imagine to someone who is used to Magic Bullet (which a lot of ML user will be), they might not no where to begin. Other than that - this needs to be shouted about as it is pretty damn big man. I mean HUGE. And also it's an enormous time saver.

Only feedback I have thus far is I see magenta artifacts around areas that have sharp highlight clipping roll-off (look around the rims of the glasses):



Off to bed now but I'll check back tomorrow! Cheers John and well done

[John Hable]

Hey Noisyboy, is it possible to make the .RAW available, or to run raw2dng and put one of the DNG frames online?  It looks like the magenta issue might be related to moire.  I'm always tweaking the debayer so it would help to have a RAW/DNG to take a look at.

[Hazer]

John-  I'm just seeing this now, but your work on this is fantastic.  Do you do any Mac development?  FxPlug for FCP X/Motion integration would be super.  I've hacked up an effective yet ugly combination of bash, sed, and php to get .RAW files into Prores in automated fashion, but it's clunky and time consuming.  I'd dump it in a second for drag-and-drop right into the timeline.

[John Hable]

John-  I'm just seeing this now, but your work on this is fantastic.  Do you do any Mac development?  FxPlug for FCP X/Motion integration would be super.  I've hacked up an effective yet ugly combination of bash, sed, and php to get .RAW files into Prores in automated fashion, but it's clunky and time consuming.  I'd dump it in a second for drag-and-drop right into the timeline.

Hi Hazer.  Thanks!

To answer your question, FxPlug support is on the todo list.  The problem is that I just have too much to do and not enough time.  And I tend to get distracted by things like, you know, RAW support for canon cameras coming out of nowhere.  (-:  I'd like to support  FxPlug, as well as OpenFX, but I don't want to make any promises because there are a lot of things to do first.

[noisyboy]

Hey Noisyboy, is it possible to make the .RAW available, or to run raw2dng and put one of the DNG frames online?  It looks like the magenta issue might be related to moire.  I'm always tweaking the debayer so it would help to have a RAW/DNG to take a look at.

Hey dude! Yeah I'll sort it later for you. I think you are probably right though... This is an area that suffers from moire/aliasing issues but seems more subdued in ACR. I'll share the originals when I get home anyway. Thanks again man. Seriously loving this 

[crazyrunner33]

Hey Noisyboy, is it possible to make the .RAW available, or to run raw2dng and put one of the DNG frames online?  It looks like the magenta issue might be related to moire.  I'm always tweaking the debayer so it would help to have a RAW/DNG to take a look at.

John, great work!  Here's a DNG that had some magenta in the highlights on my end, hope this helps.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B9NGeifIx8I5dW5CM01pTEo2WDg/edit?usp=sharing

[IliasG]

John, great work!  Here's a DNG that had some magenta in the highlights on my end, hope this helps.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B9NGeifIx8I5dW5CM01pTEo2WDg/edit?usp=sharing

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-u2WxNW7jNKU/UbWz6QSNiXI/AAAAAAAABTM/PglFQRrXlmQ/w907-h510-no/2052+RAW.jpg

Smells like wrong (higher than the correct one) White Level. So after WB the R & B channels become higher than the green and the result is magenta highlights.

John, do you read White Level from exif ??. It's set there at 15000 (although this 15000 is  a bit conservative .. raw histogram shows clearly that the white clipping is at 16382).
A usual error here is the interpretation of this value. It refers to the full 14bit range so after subtracting the "Black Level" it changes to 15000-2047 = 12953 (or if we use the correct WL = 16382 - 2047 = 14335).

[Mido]

Hi John,
Ginger HDR works perfectly with daylight shots. But with artificial light is problem. I can't set WB correctly. Here is the link on .RAW files (3-4 frames each, wall and keyboard are white) http://d.pr/f/T2gn/3vK7jPoe. So if you can correct this in your debayer it would be perfect tool (getting negative values of blue in 32bpc mode) I have realtime playback of RAW files (straight from camera) in Premiere CS6 on 1/2 res on MBP 17 w. 16GB RAM.
Love your plugins for HDR, nice tool for correcting RAW files. Especially Fix Thin Lines, Highlight Contrast and Highlight Recovery
All best

[John Hable]

John, great work!  Here's a DNG that had some magenta in the highlights on my end, hope this helps.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B9NGeifIx8I5dW5CM01pTEo2WDg/edit?usp=sharing

In terms of the magenta highlights in clouds, the plugin is in fact using the proper clipping point.  I've seen this before on many cameras.  Essentially, it seems to step from being too aggressive with using the whole range of highlight headroom.  To get rid of the problem, all you have to do is apply a levels operation (or the ceiling in the White Balance) effect and it goes away.

[John Hable]

Hey dude! Yeah I'll sort it later for you. I think you are probably right though... This is an area that suffers from moire/aliasing issues but seems more subdued in ACR. I'll share the originals when I get home anyway. Thanks again man. Seriously loving this 

Noisyboy, can you still make a DNG available?  I'm changing around the debayer and I'd like to get a closer look at your moire/aliasing issues.

[John Hable]

Hi John,
Ginger HDR works perfectly with daylight shots. But with artificial light is problem. I can't set WB correctly. Here is the link on .RAW files (3-4 frames each, wall and keyboard are white) http://d.pr/f/T2gn/3vK7jPoe. So if you can correct this in your debayer it would be perfect tool (getting negative values of blue in 32bpc mode) I have realtime playback of RAW files (straight from camera) in Premiere CS6 on 1/2 res on MBP 17 w. 16GB RAM.
Love your plugins for HDR, nice tool for correcting RAW files. Especially Fix Thin Lines, Highlight Contrast and Highlight Recovery
All best

Hi Mido,

Thanks!  The white point is an issue that I've noticed as well.  The plugin doesn't have any controls for color temperature or tint in the importer.  This hasn't been an issue for other cameras (like ikonoskop and BMC) because I just use the white balance in the DNG.

But I've seen the same problem you're talking about.  It seems to be that with really low color temperatures (like tungsten lights around 2400k) that there is almost no blue left in the image except for noise.  By dropping the ceiling you just end up with blue noise.

There is a partial solution.  There is another effect called Color Temperature.  Set the temperature to a really low value, and then apply the white balance to fix it the rest of the way.  It seems to work better.

The ideal solution would be to have WB information in the RAW file, or at least a control in the importer.  But for now the color temperature effect plus WB effect is the best I can do.