Magic Lantern Raw Video workflow

Has anybody tried to get that into blender for compositing…been thinking about installing it on my T3i to try the raw video …using the normal canon video format is proving to be difficult in some instances for color grading.

I have a canon 60d and using magic lantern I did some hdmi video. Turned out only in blender I could make 2 streams out of one and recombine it. It wasn realy shocking end results but just ok.
I wonder what you mean by raw on my model it just records as far as I know they had not invented a new codec. But perhaps you have a cameta that normally does not record video?
Anyway I wouldnt worry about the install it ads great functionality to your cam. Folow web install instructions and it works super

raw video is uncompressed video, more detail per frame is captured compared what u get from h264 format that records by default.

I have a couple of those cameras and I agree that the h.264 compression sucks.
But I don’t think you’ll be able to bring the .raw files without first transcoding them or making some kind of proxies into a format that blender understands, like 16bit tifs, or DPX (I doublt blender takes CinemaDNGs)
And get ready to deal with large files.
BTW, what’s the frame size and for how long can you record when using raw on that camera this point?

davinci resolve supports dng and can also export exr, been exploring that recently, there can issues with the export sometimes though, also read the t3i has it’s own issues right out of the blocks, u are limited too 960*544@24fps and people report pink frames due to read/write and buffering limitations of the camera, so am well aware that it may be a futile exercise…that is why I asked, even though my question was limited, I was hoping for general impressions of people that may have tried it…

beyond that a camera upgrade might be in order…Panasonic GH4 maybe, when its out and if it lives up to the hype

The DNGs are not supported by Blender all you get access to is the jpg reference image. I have converted to DNG then to PNG 32bit then to Blender in the past. The colour is great but the resolution sucks. And yeah pink frames with noise sucks too.

Canon 550D

doesn’t seem fit for “serious” work on anything but the 5D3, which has the hardware support to really push it, plus the crop factor is crazy high …framing the shots I want would be tough going, anyway thanks for the feedback.

The one thing you might want to try, in order to have a better codec, is to record the output of the HDMI port on a external recorder like a Ninja, Pix240, Blacmagick Hyperdeck shuttle,etc. If I’m not mistaeken, with the Magic Lantern software you should be able to get a clean signal off the HDMI. It is still not full raster though (1620x1080).
Now this conversation is going way off topic for this forum I believe…

Hmm, the frame rate from the HDMI maybe a bit odd though?

The HDMI output is 1080i60, if you need 24fps you just need to deinterlace it and do the inverse telecine pull-down.
The Ninja2 recorder is capable of detecting the pull down and do the deinterlacing on the fly.

A simple 3 line batch script and dcraw will convert your Magic Lantern raw files to 16bit linear tiffs or possibly exr’s via Imagemagick and put the DNG’s and image seq output into named folders for you, super simple. The only downsides are that you have to bake white balance into your tiff or exr output and that you use more h/d space storing intermediate files, DNG’s and tiffs/exrs.

Davinci Resolve 10 handles Magic Lantern DNG’s badly currently, debayer is poor. But in Resolve 11 releasing in June, improved raw support and better debayering will improve all this. And that includes Davinci Resolve Lite, which is free.

If you’re just wanting to do video editing, stabilizing, grading including tracked adjustments and slow motion with optical flow then frankly Resolve Lite is a far better choice than Blender, unless you’re on Linux, then there is no Resolve Lite.

For the 3 line batch script, as syntax varies are you using Windows or Linux?

Best sizes you’ll get for raw at 24 fps from a T3i is about 960x544 continuous, 1152x482 (Max 20secs) or 1200x496 (Max 13secs) short bursts but the ML menu gives lots of variations on those and suggests what you’re likely to capture in frames.

You’ll need a 95MB/s decent make SD card, even though the camera is the limiting problem in data rates, it restricts output to 20MB/s through the SD controller, you’ll still need a fast SD card (95MB/s) for sustained writes and better reliability.

If you went for a T4i/ 650D or a T5i/700D you’d get 40MB/s through the controller in that camera and that gives 1280x720 continuous. If you changed your T3i for a 2nd user 7D you’d get something like 1700 wide to the CF card in that camera. But faster cards are required for the 7D and costs go up massively.

Problem with the 700D and 650D before it is it introduces phase detection autofocus which leaves colored dots on the raw output, Magic Lantern have created a chroma smoother to ‘remove’ that and it works fine, with a little loss of clarity. And there appears more issues with pink corrupted frames shooting raw on T4i/T5i.

Again with Resolve you get decent upsampling in resolution from the raw files to say 1280x720 or 1920x1080 not sure how good Blender is at that.

about the batch script thing didn’t know that Davinci 10 still is not handling dng/s well, I’m on windows so it will be cool to get more info there and I am still actively considering magic lantern raw so this info is useful to me, at present an upgrade on cameras isn’t possible, my next equipment purchase will be the rokinon 35mm cine lens and I’m still saving for that…my 50mm 1.8 simply isn’t working out…for the project I have planned now.

as a side note I will be using Davinci to color grade, but I need to get the the cg elements composited in blender first.

did some research and I may have worked out a suitable workflow…will see how things go

slight edit…

Please report back so we all learn from your experience.

I’m not sure how this will impact on Blender in the future, but I see that the RAW movie format from Magic Lantern, MLV, is being integrated into ffmpeg.
http://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?topic=11566.0

Of course there are still issues with the way Blender scales color spaces in the VSE I guess, Yellow understands this better than I however. I am hopeful that some intermediate steps (transcodes) can be circumvented.

yeah I will…as soon as I can in the meantime useful links

the comments in this

kinda lead to this

controls

beware though, was reported that it will out dng plus tiff, the poster couldn’t find a way around that

possible other useful info and tools

http://movies.online-arts.de/content,30,raw-batcher.htm
http://rawtherapee.com/

but you should get data into blender and/or Davinci resolve…if u opt to expand your toolset beyond blender with another good free tool.

there was a lot of links I dug, through may have missed stuff will update if necessary

have not forgotten about this, but I have some important exams coming up so this is on hold till may 20th at least , I also needed to import a faster rated SD card…where I come from “simple” things like high speed SDHC cards are not stocked or are prohibitively expensive …with some added inconvenience I will get Lexar Professional 600x 32GB SDHC for roughly the same money I would pay for a SanDisk 32 GB Class 4 SDHC…where I come from technology is more fashion than function, so “little” details like data rates go out the window easily:(.

I use RAWMagic (free download from the Apple Appstore). It converts the .raw files from the Canon 5D MII running Magic Latern into DNG files. The problem is that Blender doesn’t recognise DNG. I then use After Effects to covert the DNGs into OpenEXR. The .EXR files can then be imported into blender. My understanding is tha tthe .EXR files are still the same quality as the DHG, no compression.

Obviously you need AfterEffects which is someways defeats the purpose of using Blender for compositing.

It would be good if Blender added support for DNGs.

Blender does support dng but not cinema dng , so not all dngs are created equally.

I’m confused by this. I just imported a DNG file to test, and all I get is the embedded jpeg preview image, which is very low res. Is there anything else to importing DNGs that i’m missing?
I don’t see DNGs listed on the supported formats here http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Data_System/Files/Formats.