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

[noisyboy]

Hey John! Sorry I've been out of the game. Been a mad week or so and things just pick up all of a sudden and whoosh - I'm off again

I'll try and send one now dude.

[noisyboy]

http://ge.tt/api/1/files/9j1YVAj/0/blob?download

cheers

[EOSHD]

John, great work.

At 1/2 res on the timeline I get fluid playback on my Mac Pro with CUDA accelerated Mercury engine, GTX 560 Ti in Premiere CS6.

At 1/2 res the magenta highlights disappear but they are there on the full res debayer.

There's something else wrong too as I can't get the same latitude as I can on the DNGs.

The shot above was overexposed and I was able to bring it down fine in ACR. When I do the same in Ginger with the Manual Exposure setting, or any of the colour grading controls under Filmic Curve I get clipped highlights as if a lot of the dynamic range just isn't accessible.

I also think the UI needs an overhaul for this to become a really popular tool. I think it should show the full metadata, and have graphical dials and sliders for kelvin, ISO, exposure, tint, shadows, highlight recovery just like Adobe. I can't get a 'feel' for my image as I change it by having to type the digits in, and the sliders are way too sensitive and not responsive enough in the rate at which they change the image in the monitor.

One other point - although I get a clip preview in the project manager thumbnail gallery, nothing happens when I double click the raw file to bring it up in the source clip monitor. It works fine on the timeline but not in the source clip viewer.

This is all on Premiere CS6 under OSX Mountain Lion.

Cheers!

[John Hable]

http://ge.tt/api/1/files/9j1YVAj/0/blob?download

cheers

Thanks for the file.  It really helped with testing.

[John Hable]

John, great work.

At 1/2 res on the timeline I get fluid playback on my Mac Pro with CUDA accelerated Mercury engine, GTX 560 Ti in Premiere CS6.

At 1/2 res the magenta highlights disappear but they are there on the full res debayer.

There's something else wrong too as I can't get the same latitude as I can on the DNGs.

The shot above was overexposed and I was able to bring it down fine in ACR. When I do the same in Ginger with the Manual Exposure setting, or any of the colour grading controls under Filmic Curve I get clipped highlights as if a lot of the dynamic range just isn't accessible.

I also think the UI needs an overhaul for this to become a really popular tool. I think it should show the full metadata, and have graphical dials and sliders for kelvin, ISO, exposure, tint, shadows, highlight recovery just like Adobe. I can't get a 'feel' for my image as I change it by having to type the digits in, and the sliders are way too sensitive and not responsive enough in the rate at which they change the image in the monitor.

One other point - although I get a clip preview in the project manager thumbnail gallery, nothing happens when I double click the raw file to bring it up in the source clip monitor. It works fine on the timeline but not in the source clip viewer.

This is all on Premiere CS6 under OSX Mountain Lion.

Cheers!

Hi,

First off, there's a new version on site:
http://19lights.com/wp/downloads/

It's labeled June 12.  In the past I've had slight problems with false color artifacts but it's never been a big issue.  But it's a major problem on Magic Lantern RAW video because the data is point sampled.  So I had to do some reworking of the debayer code.  Please try it out.

This might sound strange, but the Tonemapping effect was never actually designed to be a RAW processor.  The Tonemapping effect came first and Ginger HDR was first used for processing HDR timelapse footage.  As time has passed we are getting more and more dynamic range out of sensors, so I've been moving into RAW processing.  The Tonemapping effect assumes that its input is clean, HDR footage with a proper white balance.  But since it was never designed to be a "RAW Processor" it's missing a few things that you need.

The proper solution is that there should be a menu that pops up in advanced settings (like ACR).  You can't get an exact fix for white balance after loading the file because it ideally needs to happen before the color matrix.  This hasn't been an issue with the BMC/Ikonoskop because they have WB data in the file, but since there's no WB in the Magic Lantern RAW data it can be so far off that it's difficult to correct.  The only solution is to have that menu in the importer.

In terms of dynamic range, it's a longer discussion.  In the current setup you lose some dynamic range during the initial import into D65 white balance, and you lose some more dynamic range if you shift the white balance away towards something else (like cloudy or indoor light).  This would be solved by putting the WB in the importer.

Another feature that ACR has (and some other RAW processors) is better highlight recovery.  For example, if your highlights become magenta, it can extrapolate the green channel to balance it out.  The one thing I'm paranoid about is temporal coherency.  Extracting the highlights sounds great until your footage starts flickering.  So it could be done, but would have to be in a menu.

The big takeaways are:
1.  Color Temperature, Tint, and Exposure need to be in a menu for the importer and should happen before the color matrix conversion.
2.  The current Tonemapping effect is too complicated for a typical one light.  And it has several other issues as well.  I'm currently in the process of breaking it up into several smaller effects, which will make them faster and more intuitive.
3.  While these will get fixed eventually, it will take some time.

One more thing EOSHD: Can you put one of those DNG files online somewhere?  Thanks!

[squig]

The flickering in ACR is making highlight recovery and even exposure corrections impossible, is that something that could easily be fixed or would it require a major rewrite?

[Michael Zöller]

I wonder if it would be possible to actually make ml write the WB info into the RAW footer? See http://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?topic=5853.0

[dandeliondandy]

Hey,
I am/was pretty excited about this workflow and I've been playing around with it. However, a recent video I shot, which looks fine in the ACR editor, when imported into premiere looks extra grainy. When imported into AE, it looks really bad. Is this something that's on-going or is it something I could fix/change about the workflow? The DNGs were first edited through ACR and then imported into AE with the GingerWrapper.



https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-tH0mvjEp1Kbm5WSGI4Sko2Njg/edit?usp=sharing

[John Hable]

The flickering in ACR is making highlight recovery and even exposure corrections impossible, is that something that could easily be fixed or would it require a major rewrite?

I'm not sure.  You'd have to ask Adobe.  (-:  I'm not entirely sure what corrections ACR makes automatically, but I believe it does an analysis of the histogram and tries to maximize the range out of it, but can make it unstable.  In theory there are ways you could make it more stable, but ACR is a black box that external developers have no access to.

[John Hable]

I wonder if it would be possible to actually make ml write the WB info into the RAW footer? See http://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?topic=5853.0

YES!!!   Getting the color temperature and G/M shift into the metadata would be a huge help.

[John Hable]

Hey,
I am/was pretty excited about this workflow and I've been playing around with it. However, a recent video I shot, which looks fine in the ACR editor, when imported into premiere looks extra grainy. When imported into AE, it looks really bad. Is this something that's on-going or is it something I could fix/change about the workflow? The DNGs were first edited through ACR and then imported into AE with the GingerWrapper.



https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-tH0mvjEp1Kbm5WSGI4Sko2Njg/edit?usp=sharing

Can you put one of your DNGs online?  What ISO were you shooting at?

[dandeliondandy]

Sure,

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-tH0mvjEp1Ka2M1ajl1TjJ4X2M/edit?usp=sharing

I forget the ISO exactly, but it was fairly low for how grainy the image is. I've found that it looks bad in whatever image viewer I have for Windows, but renders, normally, out great in After Effects, or at least very decent. It's possible it's something to do with the processing.

This was my first attempt at a long recording. With the new ML build I got near continuous shooting on the 5DmkII at 1880x800, so this file was spanned over a few clips, and then processed using Rawanizer. Maybe somewhere down the line it had grain added, but as of now when I import the same file into AE, without the wrapper, I don't get all that noise. And since there is a bit of noise reduction added in ACR it looks much better than the normal image viewer preview.

Thanks for your help!

[EOSHD]

Here's the overexposed DNG John.

http://we.tl/31Mb24MVqb

Cheers

[JulianH]

Looking very good! Haven't tried it myself yet, but definitely very interesting. I wonder though, what would be a good grading workflow? You could edit in Premiere and export to Prores 444 and go into Resolve maybe, but is there a possibility to export as .raw again, or dng or even better cinema dng...?

[iaremrsir]

Since we probably won't see sliders for a good chunk of time, how hard would it be implement a log output for the time being? I think that'd be good for dropping the , .gnr, .raw, .dng files in media encoder and exporting to prores or dnx. This gives an alternative to CineForm. You have a fast, decent looking debayer.

[breaker]

I would love to try it, but I have used my 30 days of trial some month ago. Since the plugin is used for a completely different task no i was hoping for a retry

[Danne]

Since we probably won't see sliders for a good chunk of time, how hard would it be implement a log output for the time being? I think that'd be good for dropping the , .gnr, .raw, .dng files in media encoder and exporting to prores or dnx. This gives an alternative to CineForm. You have a fast, decent looking debayer.

I second that wish.
Is there a slight posibility to activate the adobe camera raw to the native raw clips or does it have to be extracted dng,s? I believe those sliders are giving the fastest and best results when doing the basic grading.

[Danne]

Since we probably won't see sliders for a good chunk of time, how hard would it be implement a log output for the time being? I think that'd be good for dropping the , .gnr, .raw, .dng files in media encoder and exporting to prores or dnx. This gives an alternative to CineForm. You have a fast, decent looking debayer.

I just turned my adobe media encoder to a RAW batch exporter. By adding the ginger plug-in folder to the adobe media encoder plug in common folder, the same way it,s done when adding it to the premiere pro folder. I can simply drag and drop all the raw files to the encoder making all the settings. Awesome!

[aaphotog]

Ginger allows me to import the raw file directly in adobe premiere

But when I've tried importing raw files into after effects, it won't import. Any ideas?
I can see the Ginger plugin in after effects, but I can't import any raw files though.

[iaremrsir]

I just turned my adobe media encoder to a RAW batch exporter. By adding the ginger plug-in folder to the adobe media encoder plug in common folder, the same way it,s done when adding it to the premiere pro folder. I can simply drag and drop all the raw files to the encoder making all the settings. Awesome!

Yeah, it uses the same plugin format as Premiere, so I'd expect it to work. If you have Prelude, would you mind checking to see if it uses the same importer plugin? That'd be awesome to connect some logging metadata with raw files!

[iaremrsir]

Ginger allows me to import the raw file directly in adobe premiere

But when I've tried importing raw files into after effects, it won't import. Any ideas?
I can see the Ginger plugin in after effects, but I can't import any raw files though.

Did you make sure that you don't have both importer plugins in the after effects plugin folder? I think that might cause some conflicts.

[aaphotog]

Did you make sure that you don't have both importer plugins in the after effects plugin folder? I think that might cause some conflicts.

what do you mean BOTH importer plugins?
I installed just how i did in premiere and im getting no issue in that

[aaphotog]

Another issue I'm having. When bring my raw files directly into premiere, Im getting the vertical black bars. The other software has fixed this issue, do you plan on making a fix for this?

I've downloaded the demo, it expires in 30 days, right?
If so, will I no longer be able to import these RAW files into premiere at all?
$100 seems a bit steep for a tool to simply import files into premiere.

[iaremrsir]

what do you mean BOTH importer plugins?
I installed just how i did in premiere and im getting no issue in that

In the GingerHDR plugin folder, there are two importer plugins: one for AE and one for PrP. Having the two in the same folder might cause AE to get confused, because, if I'm not mistaken, AE can use PrP importer plugins as well. Also, did you install the plugins to the respective program folders, or did you install it to Adobe\Plug-ins\Common\CSx\MediaCore\ ? I think the dev mentioned somewhere, that having the plugins there could cause problems.

[aaphotog]

In the GingerHDR plugin folder, there are two importer plugins: one for AE and one for PrP. Having the two in the same folder might cause AE to get confused, because, if I'm not mistaken, AE can use PrP importer plugins as well. Also, did you install the plugins to the respective program folders, or did you install it to Adobe\Plug-ins\Common\CSx\MediaCore\ ? I think the dev mentioned somewhere, that having the plugins there could cause problems.

they were all in the plug ins common folder as you've listed.
I had to move two files
GingerWrapper-PRM-mac64
and another one that looked like the one I just listed but had AE in it as well. When I did that it worked!
When I left those two files in both folders I got a warning stating that they were on my system twice.
How do I move them both to the AE folder, but still leave them so that Premiere may use them?