Resolve or ACR with 5D3 RAW

[jcs]

I've been experimenting with Resolve and ACR, trying to find the best workflow for RAW. By best, the highest quality possible in the shortest amount of time.  ACR+AE runs a few frames/sec on my 4-core MBP and about 6-fps on my 12-core Mac Pro (both cases running with AE multiframe processing on). Resolve runs near real-time on the laptop, and slightly faster on the Mac Pro (Quadro 5000 is getting long in the tooth- a newer consumer card with hacked mac ROM would be faster).

 

While I have been able to get Resolve looking closer to ACR, I have not been able to match it.

http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?320727-Results-of-testing-various-5D3-RAW-workflows

 

The first goal was to get Resolve to show an accurate image of what was shot. All the experiments with BMD Film color space and LUTs weren't able to do this (including the EOSHD and Hunters "Alexa" LUTs). I also experimented with creating 3D LUTs from scratch.

 

The 5D3 RAW footage is pretty much linear RGB. It appears it can be transformed to BT.709/Rec709 with a simple matrix (linear transform). Using the Rec 709 color space and gamma in Resolve, I can get much closer to the correct colors for the scene shot. Unless we are going from 14-bit to 10-bit (for example), it doesn't make sense to convert to a log color space since we've already got everything captured in linear. From there we can grade for style then save out the final render with a Rec 709 compliant color space (it's not clear what Resolve does with out of gamut colors- clip, etc.). Log makes sense in a camera capturing and preserving dynamic range to a file format which can't otherwise store the full range sufficiently. Log can also make sense if one wishes to use a 3D LUT that needs log as input. However, there a many different log formats, ARRI, Canon, Sony, etc. all make different versions. At the end of the day, we need to get back to something like Rec 709 for broadcast (of course internet test videos are excluded).

 

After comparing ACR, Resolve 10, and AMaZE (used by mlrawviewer: http://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?topic=9560.0, which plays MLV's in real-time and can output ProRes HQ (a little faster than ACR, but still slow (AMaZE only used for export)) debayering, they are all very close. ACR is doing something with color and microcontrast that puts it above everything else right now. It looks very accurate and also 'pops' in a way that I haven't been able to get from Resolve (granted, I'm just now really learning it).

 

I'm planning for a ~90-minute final product which means lots of footage. Even shooting Robert Rodriguez style (limited takes- edit as much as possible in-camera), there will be terabytes of footage. For now I'm thinking to use Resolve to make ProRes/DNxHD proxies quickly then go back and only process necessary clips with ACR+AE for the final cut (until or unless I can figure out how to make Resolve look as good as ACR). Or batch convert ACR+AE overnight and replace proxies as I go (deleting the massive RAW files).

 

5D3 RAW is amazing, but requires a lot of planning, work, and most significantly, drive space.

 

 

[odie]

the footage out of the 5d3 raw does look like the  footage out of  high end cameras (red epic ..alexa depending on post)…keep us updated

[maxotics]

Just tried it on a RAW file from my EOS-M.  Very nice.  The de-bayering is key, as you say.  The de-bayering in RAWanizer wasn't very good, used that RAW to ProRes util.