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

[John Hable]

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!

Hi dandeliondandy.  I checked out your files and noticed a few things.

First off, the shot is actually pretty underexposed.  Like, 3-4 stops.  To get to the brightness in the image you have, it must be significantly brightened which brings out the noise.  So the first thing I'd say is try to have a longer exposure/ wider aperture.  Also, shooting at the ISO that gives you the best image is better than shooting at a lower ISO and bringing it up.  I.e. shooting at ISO 800 will give you cleaner results than shooting at ISO 100 and raising it 3 stops in post.

Also, we all know ACR does noise reduction (at least I hope everyone knows that).  But it also clamps out your blacks, whereas Ginger HDR gives you as much data as possible.  Even when "blacks" is set to zero it still seems to clamp out some data.  If you import with Ginger HDR and then do a levels it will give you similar blacks to loading in ACR with no noise reduction.

[John Hable]

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...?

Hi Julian.  You can't really go back and forth from graded footage to RAW/Cinema DNG.  If you want to grade in Resolve then you are stuck with doing a one time conversion of everything.

[John Hable]

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.

It's possible, but it's actually about the same amount of work as putting sliders together.  The time consuming part is putting together a window that gives you options to change.  Some people would want linear data, some would want log, some would want an S-curve, etc.

[John Hable]

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

Hi breaker.  No problem.  Email me directly (jhable at 19lights dot com) and I'll help you out.

[John Hable]

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.

Hi Danne.  Unfortunately, that's not possible.  The ACR window is tightly integrated with their raw file loader and there is no way for external developers to integrate with it.

[John Hable]

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?

Hi aaphotog:

First the short answer.   Don't put them into MediaCore.  It's counter-intuitive, but that's the trick.

In Premiere Pro, you want to put the plugins under:
Applications/Adobe Premiere Pro CS6.0/Contents/Plug-ins/Common/

In After Effects, you want to put them under:
Applications/Adobe After Effects CS6.0/Plug-ins/Effects/

Now the long answer.  In CS5.5 and earlier, After Effects and Premiere plugins were completely separate.  GingerWrapper-AE uses the AE interface and GingerWrapper-PRM uses the Premiere interface.  And life was good.

Then in CS6.0 Adobe decided to let After Effects load Premiere-style plugins if they are in MediaCore.  So if you put the files into the AE directory listed below, then AE will use AE plugin, it will ignore the PRM plugin, and everything will work.  But if you put them into MediaCore then AE will try load both the AE and the PRM plugin, and get confused.

[Danne]

Hi Danne.  Unfortunately, that's not possible.  The ACR window is tightly integrated with their raw file loader and there is no way for external developers to integrate with it.

That,s what I suspected. Thanks for answering. I,m no color-grader originally, I,m a still photographer mainly but I do a lot of filming as well. When I try grading in premiere or after effects, not only is it a bit messy but the changes and end result I get do not match the ones I get with the acr-module. I do not know what adobe got cooking in that "black box" but it works pretty well .
I have to say your raw-file is looking very good and there,s all the information I need, probably my skills are a bit off when it comes to grading. I need my clips to retain higlights and black as from the acr module. Is it possible to obtain this outside acr? Question. Is your plugin letting out the raw stream from the camera, is it 14 or 16 bit (*edit, not 16bit, found out myself)? Also interested how the white balance is chosen for the clip. Is it the same for every clip in raw and I have to change it myself afterwards?
Thanks a lot
//D

[John Hable]

Ooops.  Double post.

[JackDaniel412]

Work fine and fast, but white balance and highlight rolloff it can be improved...

Great job!

[Danne]

Hi! Since the rawstream doesn,t include any hot/dead pixelremoval like when processed as dng,s I wonder what to tolerate here. Especially when in 5x mode and on high iso I have som dead pixel showing up. Anybody experiencing something similar?

[dandeliondandy]

John,
Thanks, but the shot I'm talking about wasn't taken for proper exposure of the interior since I was only playing around with bringing out the highlights of the sky and brought up the darker areas to test where they stood, only.  I was really just seeing how long the 5DmkII could record on my CF card on the newest build. (over two minutes on a 60mb/s card until the card was full!! Very impressive.)

My concern with the image, which is by no means clean and well exposed, is that it looked much worse when processed through Ginger, than ACR, when rendered out in after effects. As you can see by the two examples I posted, the first being from Ginger, there's a large difference in amount of grain or noise and I simply wanted to figure out why. I'd love to be able to use native dng support in both AE and PPro, but there's no way I could do that currently with the way it added noise to my files. I don't believe Ginger's clean version of the raw file is it, either, as the files looked better in a image preview than when they were imported through the wrapper. And the same files, when opened with only ACR's base processing, looked about the same as the preview. Ginger added noise and color distortion.

I'm hoping it's simply a setting I haven't set properly.

Thanks!

[dlrpgmsvc]

ginger crashes every time twixtor is applied to the clip

[amsh89es335]

Love this plugin, and all the color correction effects work on it in premiere besides the RGB Color Corrector, it just goes black and doesn't do anything. Also what are some workflows to color correct if I am editing in premiere with the RAW files directly imported using the Ginger HDR plugin.   

[John Hable]

John,
Thanks, but the shot I'm talking about wasn't taken for proper exposure of the interior since I was only playing around with bringing out the highlights of the sky and brought up the darker areas to test where they stood, only.  I was really just seeing how long the 5DmkII could record on my CF card on the newest build. (over two minutes on a 60mb/s card until the card was full!! Very impressive.)

My concern with the image, which is by no means clean and well exposed, is that it looked much worse when processed through Ginger, than ACR, when rendered out in after effects. As you can see by the two examples I posted, the first being from Ginger, there's a large difference in amount of grain or noise and I simply wanted to figure out why. I'd love to be able to use native dng support in both AE and PPro, but there's no way I could do that currently with the way it added noise to my files. I don't believe Ginger's clean version of the raw file is it, either, as the files looked better in a image preview than when they were imported through the wrapper. And the same files, when opened with only ACR's base processing, looked about the same as the preview. Ginger added noise and color distortion.

I'm hoping it's simply a setting I haven't set properly.

Thanks!

Hi.  Sorry for the late reply I was trying to figure out the right way to explain this and then got distracted.  Anyways, ACR is not showing you the data that is actually in the file.  Rather, it does lots of correction.  Some of that is good, some of that is bad.

To see what the true image looks like, in the basic window you have to set black, contrast, and brightness to zero.  I'm on Process 2010 by the way.  Then under noise reduction you have to set all those to zero as well.  If you do those, then you will get a true version of what your image looks like.  That's what this image is:

http://www.19lights.com/downloads/scratch/M000269_v1.jpg

Then you can increase the exposure to 4.0 and it looks like this.

http://www.19lights.com/downloads/scratch/M000269_v2.jpg

There are several ways that ACR removes noise.  One of them is noise reduction.  Another one is by increasing the blacks and contrast setting.  ACR is throwing away in the bottom end of your histogram, which makes the image look less noisy.  But if you were doing a shot that had detail down there then ACR would lose it.  You could achieve a similar effect by doing a levels operation after importing with Ginger HDR.

Any time you shoot you will have some noise.  Ginger HDR is not adding grain to your image.  Rather, it's not removing the grain that is already there.  If your image is properly exposed then this tends to be a non-issue.  But if you have to bump the exposure it will amplify the noise, especially in the blacks.

[John Hable]

Hi! Since the rawstream doesn,t include any hot/dead pixelremoval like when processed as dng,s I wonder what to tolerate here. Especially when in 5x mode and on high iso I have som dead pixel showing up. Anybody experiencing something similar?

Hi Danne.  I'm looking into dead pixel removal but don't quite have a solution yet.

[John Hable]

ginger crashes every time twixtor is applied to the clip

That seems a little strange.  I'll try it out.  Can you contact me directly at jhable at 19lights dot com and let me know what OS and version of Premiere/AE you are on?

[Danne]

Hi Danne.  I'm looking into dead pixel removal but don't quite have a solution yet.

NICE!

[iaremrsir]

Hi Danne.  I'm looking into dead pixel removal but don't quite have a solution yet.

You could use dark frame subtraction. That should fix FPN and hot pixels.

[Danne]

You could use dark frame subtraction. That should fix FPN and hot pixels.

do you have a workflow suggestion to this method using premiere pro or after effects?

[Audionut]

In my limited testing, the pattern noise in video mode is not fixed, http://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?topic=5609.msg55352#msg55352

This will make it all but impossible to remove.

[aaphotog]

In my limited testing, the pattern noise in video mode is not fixed, http://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?topic=5609.msg55352#msg55352

This will make it all but impossible to remove.

are you talking about the vertical black bars? Im getting those too using ginger. I stopped using it. when my trial expires, don't think I'll spend 100 bucks on it without that fix

[Audionut]

http://theory.uchicago.edu/~ejm/pix/20d/tests/noise/#patternnoise

[Danne]

In my limited testing, the pattern noise in video mode is not fixed, http://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?topic=5609.msg55352#msg55352

This will make it all but impossible to remove.

Thanks for input. I have a few stuck pixels that pops up in higher isos and dark areas. I managed to build a preset in premiere to remove them working with duplicating layers and a garbage matte. I,ll post a tutorial later on...

[Fauxto]

Works like a charm for me. Congrats!

EDIT: I can edit fine with it in Premiere, but with After Effects I'm seeing that the DNG's hold a bit more highlight info. If I lower the exposure with camera raw in the DNG's I get more detail in seeemingly blown up highlights than with the exposure tool in combination with highlight recovery in the tonemapping (basic) effect with the RAW file.

Here's a pic:



Is that so? Can it be avoided?

Other than that I really miss the lens correction tools for deformation, vignetting and aberration of ACR.

The Ginger HDR tool remains very useful for avoiding editing with proxies with premiere, but I don't know if I would color correct from them.

[Danne]

Made a short tutorial regarding regarding stuck/dead pixels. For those moments you don,t wanna work in acr