5D mkiii Magic Lantern RAW test, 3x Crop and Post Workflow

5D mkiii Magic Lantern RAW test, 3x Crop and Post Workflow from Christian Denslow on Vimeo.

5D mkiii,
Leica Summicron-R 50mm,
Leica Elmarit-R 60mm macro,
Tair 11-A 135mm + ML 3x Crop
1920×1080 25fps RAW on to Komputerbay 64gb CF card

So I finally got around to shooting a few test shots with Magic Lanterns RAW module on my 5D3 and I cut something together to familiarize myself with the post workflow.

There was a ridiculous amount of clean information in this footage. I’ve tried to grade to show that. There are very few areas where the footage clips especially if you’re going through the workflow stated below. Some harsh edging could have been reduced with the loss of some colour information. A slight bit of resolution may have been lost in a couple of the 3x crop shots due to Warp Stabilizer in AE as I was using a very lightweight tripod. It’s worth noting that I did get dropped frames in 3x crop shooting by the sea only. I’m still not sure why :/ but do make sure Global Draw is off in ML menu for this.

It’s still early days for the processing of EOS RAW footage but the workflow is already quite straight forward in my eyes. There are still some issues to get around in some cases depending on which workflow suits you best. Most people will be more than happy with processing their .raw files with one of the easy to use raw converters (raw2dng or RAWMagic) and grading in Resolve (note that the latest Resolve supports dng’s as well as cinema dng’s. Download here: blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve). I think that although Resolve is extremely powerful you get the full benefits of your new dynamic range with Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), although this has a big issue still at this stage. Below is an outline of my workflow for this test. Check the ML forum for information on installing, recording and processing ML RAW (magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?board=49.0).

> raw2dng
> Edit with the ProRes HQ proxies that raw2dng create (tip: you can change this to 4444 by dragging the raw2dng app icon into the app itself) in Premiere
> Copy and paste the contents of your edited sequence into After Effects
> Relink each ProRes proxy in the Project window to the DNG’s raw2dng created. This will open ACR and you will be able to adjust the RAW parameters of your footage.

This is where a few problems lay at the moment. You will only be able to view the first frame of the dng sequence so if you hadn’t framed up your shot when you started rolling then you won’t know what you’re grading to (ACR in Photoshop will allow you to view any image in the sequence and apply changes to all, then save as a tiff sequence).

The biggest problem with this step at the moment is that ACR applies adjustments to each frame individually and some of the most powerful adjustments have no set value, which means some adjustments are made automatically frame by frame within the boundaries you’ve set. This results in flicker when all frames are played as video in shots with exposure changes. This occurs when making adjustments to the recovery sliders. These are the best tools in ACR and it’s unfortunate that we must compromise at this point 🙁

If flicker occurs go through the replace footage process again to run the problematic dng sequence through Camera Raw again and take Contrast, Highlights and Shadows sliders down as far as you can go and see if you still have flicker. You will also stand less chance of flicker using the Process 2010 in ACR rather than the 2012 but you will still get some flutter from Fill and Recovery sliders. Every shot will be different and it will take a lot of time going through this process over and over to see how far you can take each shot before it flickers. Not really practical but I think something will be sorted to fix this problem.

> Grade DNG sequences in AE
> Export here or Dynamic Link back to Premiere

Massive respect to the Magic Lantern team. The raw footage from the 5D3 is lovely to work with and I wouldn’t want to shoot without it now.

Peace