Shooting ML Raw Anamorphic Advice

[Chris Elkerton]

Thanks for all the advice everyone, much appreciated.

 

I have had chance to do some experimentation and I am loving the results I am getting! The image looks fantastic!

My work flow at the minute is looking like this:

 

• Shoot 1600 x 1200px (Getting around 40 seconds with no overlays, 7 sec with overlays!?!)
• Convert to DNG using RAWMagic lite
• Import to After Effects CC as a DNG sequence
• Interpret footage: (23.976 fps) (Pixel aspect ratio 2:1 Anamorphic)
• Drop onto the 'Create New Comp' button (to maintain settings) name this comp 'Footage'
• Create new comp (little tip) enter the width and hight as 266 x 100, which = 2.66:1. (Or whatever ratio you want) Then lock the aspect ratio. Enter the width of the format you want to work in, in this case 1920. This will work out the hight for you ;) 1920 x 722px. Name this 2.66.
• Drop the comp named footage from before into the 2.66 comp and scale the size to 60.5%
• Then adjust the scale to suite your focal length. eg. at 2 meters I was using 60% width 65% hight to adjust for the change in squeeze at shorter focal lengths.
• If you want the black bars (and lets face it you might) create a comp at 1920 x 1080 and drop the 2.66 comp into it.
• If you want to grade you footage go back to the comp named Footage and select the DNG sequence. To to Edit>Edit Origonal to boot Camera Raw.
• Render to what ever format you like :)

[Tito Ferradans]

between steps 3 and 4, change the project setting to 32bpc, instead of 8 (which is default in AE). It will change the way AE applies any further color correction (like Levels, Curves, or whatever). Ctrl + Alt + Shift + K, or go in the "File" menu, or just click on the 8bpc on the bottom of the Project tab. :)

[Chris Elkerton]

Oh yeh, forgot about that, good point! You can also apply the colour profile set by your camera.

[Orcadia]

FWIW

Had a lot of  success with program "cliphouse"

it has  speeded up our ML workflow.

Its most important feature is to preview  your clips very quickly (not instantly but pretty quick) giving you on set playback.

we have a laptop with connected card reader, we dont offload card just use it to connect files to program for playback.

Also we found it can process/export your video file in the aspect ratios you decide.

[Cosimo murgolo]

you probably know about this, check it out for  the ones who don't

 

http://www.vision-color.com/visionlog/

[Cosimo murgolo]

Oh yeh, forgot about that, good point! You can also apply the colour profile set by your camera.

http://www.vision-color.com/visionlog/

 

vision log is a flat profile which you can add in acr or lightroom.

 

Excuse my double post!!!

[Chris Elkerton]

you probably know about this, check it out for the ones who don't

http://www.vision-color.com/visionlog/

Looks very interesting, will definitely give this a look.
Thanks for sharing :)

[Chris Elkerton]

FWIW
Had a lot of success with program "cliphouse"
it has speeded up our ML workflow.
Its most important feature is to preview your clips very quickly (not instantly but pretty quick) giving you on set playback.
we have a laptop with connected card reader, we dont offload card just use it to connect files to program for playback.
Also we found it can process/export your video file in the aspect ratios you decide.

Thanks Proctor, the main disadvantage of Raw is the lack of speedy play back. Will certainly take a look at this as I have quite a bit of footage to trall through! :)

[Chris Elkerton]

Thanks again everyone for all the advice.

Yesterday was my first full day shooting and I have to say the Komputerbay cards performed brilliantly! The same can't be said for the Lexar, which crapped out at 4 seconds!! Needless to say it will be going back.

[Cosimo murgolo]

Thanks again everyone for all the advice.

Yesterday was my first full day shooting and I have to say the Komputerbay cards performed brilliantly! The same can't be said for the Lexar, which crapped out at 4 seconds!! Needless to say it will be going back.

 

 

 

Thanks for all the advice everyone, much appreciated.

 

I have had chance to do some experimentation and I am loving the results I am getting! The image looks fantastic!

My work flow at the minute is looking like this:

 

• Shoot 1600 x 1200px (Getting around 40 seconds with no overlays, 7 sec with overlays!?!)
• Convert to DNG using RAWMagic lite
• Import to After Effects CC as a DNG sequence
• Interpret footage: (23.976 fps) (Pixel aspect ratio 2:1 Anamorphic)
• Drop onto the 'Create New Comp' button (to maintain settings) name this comp 'Footage'
• Create new comp (little tip) enter the width and hight as 266 x 100, which = 2.66:1. (Or whatever ratio you want) Then lock the aspect ratio. Enter the width of the format you want to work in, in this case 1920. This will work out the hight for you ;) 1920 x 722px. Name this 2.66.
• Drop the comp named footage from before into the 2.66 comp and scale the size to 60.5%
• Then adjust the scale to suite your focal length. eg. at 2 meters I was using 60% width 65% hight to adjust for the change in squeeze at shorter focal lengths.
• If you want the black bars (and lets face it you might) create a comp at 1920 x 1080 and drop the 2.66 comp into it.
• If you want to grade you footage go back to the comp named Footage and select the DNG sequence. To to Edit>Edit Origonal to boot Camera Raw.
• Render to what ever format you like :)

 

Sorry to bother you again, just for me to know, if you don't mind, may I ask you what kind of lexar were you using? cos mine handles very well 1600x1200 4:3 continuous recording.

lexar 1066x 64 gb and I also tried it in slow motion 48fps 1920x 508 stretched  to 1920x818

Thanks in advance

[dhessel]

He is using the 5D MKII which isn't continuous at 1600 x 1200, looks to me like you are using a 5D MKIII.

[Cosimo murgolo]

He is using the 5D MKII which isn't continuous at 1600 x 1200, looks to me like you are using a 5D MKIII.

Yeah, sorry, I must have missed that bit, thanks for letting me know that.

[j-oc]

 

Thanks for all the advice everyone, much appreciated.

 

I have had chance to do some experimentation and I am loving the results I am getting! The image looks fantastic!

My work flow at the minute is looking like this:

 

• Shoot 1600 x 1200px (Getting around 40 seconds with no overlays, 7 sec with overlays!?!)
• Convert to DNG using RAWMagic lite
• Import to After Effects CC as a DNG sequence
• Interpret footage: (23.976 fps) (Pixel aspect ratio 2:1 Anamorphic)
• Drop onto the 'Create New Comp' button (to maintain settings) name this comp 'Footage'
• Create new comp (little tip) enter the width and hight as 266 x 100, which = 2.66:1. (Or whatever ratio you want) Then lock the aspect ratio. Enter the width of the format you want to work in, in this case 1920. This will work out the hight for you ;) 1920 x 722px. Name this 2.66.
• Drop the comp named footage from before into the 2.66 comp and scale the size to 60.5%
• Then adjust the scale to suite your focal length. eg. at 2 meters I was using 60% width 65% hight to adjust for the change in squeeze at shorter focal lengths.
• If you want the black bars (and lets face it you might) create a comp at 1920 x 1080 and drop the 2.66 comp into it.
• If you want to grade you footage go back to the comp named Footage and select the DNG sequence. To to Edit>Edit Origonal to boot Camera Raw.
• Render to what ever format you like :)

 

 

Chris / Tito - this thread rocks. I'm going to be doing a project similar to this in a couple of months and wanted to pick your brains on this workflow.

 

I'm going to shoot ML Raw on a 5d3 in 1600x1200 with a 2X anamorphic. Normally shooting Raw on spherical lenses I would go from Raw > DNG > open ACR in after effects, grade and then export in DXnHD > edit in Premiere.

 

Thinking about this yesterday I realised that this would be problematic for my anamorphic shoot because I can only export in 1920x1080 in DXnHD. Not a problem if I was delivering in 1080 but I would like the option of editing in 3200 x 1200 for upscaling for theatre projection. 

 

I'm using Windows, which rules out Prores and don't yet have a machine capable of running Resolve. Any thoughts on alternative codecs/workflows that will enable me to edit in a larger resolution rather than squashing all this detail to 1920x1080 with bars?

[dhessel]

You could maybe try cineform but that is not free, other than that I do not know. Worst case you can do DNxHD using the following work flow, you can keep 90% of the resolution.

 

1.) In AE set your comp size to 1440 x 1080 with pixel aspect of HDV 1080/DVCPRO HD 720 (1.33).

2.) Set the pixel aspect of your footage to 1.33 then scale your footage to 90% :(.

3.) Export out to DNxHD at 1920 x 1080 using media encoder.

4.) Import in premiere and set the pixel aspect ratio to DVCPRO HD 1080 (1.5) and set the sequence settings to 1920 x 1080 with a 1.5 pixel aspect ratio.

 

This will give you a final resolution of 2880 x 1080, its not 3200 x 1200 but it is better than 1920 x 720 and should be very efficient to work with and edit since it is just HD footage with a non square pixel aspect. For step number 1-2 you could just set the comp size to 1920 x 1080 and scale x by 120% and y by 90% instead, I prefer to use pixel aspect ratios when working with anamorphics since that is essentially what an anamorphic lens is changing. It keeps the number of real pixels lower and in turn requires less memory. The 1.33 aspect in AE combined with the 1.5 in premiere will give you a 2x stretch in the end. Just make sure that AE and Premiere are set up to display the pixel aspect ratio correction and everything will look as expected. 

 

If you go the DNxHD route you can use the extra resolution to slightly reframe your shots before exporting to DNxHD and not scale as much or at all, or you can shoot at a lower resolution in ML like 1472 and save some memory. 

 

On somewhat of a side note I always try and keep my footage the same resolution until the final output and use pixel aspect ratios to deal with the anamorphic stretch. So if you can find a codec that will export 1600 x 1200 keep the footage that size and just assign a 2.0 pixel aspect to it when working with it rather than scaling it to 3200 x 1200, it will reduce the number of pixels you are working with by half compared to scaling. I always keep my masters this way and then export out square pixel / black bar versions as needed when I go to the final format like HD.

 

If you find a good alternative codec please post, I am sure many would like to know as well. Good luck.

 

Maybe keep an eye on this for the future, it appears it will be open source based on cineform.

https://kws.smpte.org/kws/public/projects/project/details?project_id=15

[j-oc]

Thanks - that was an extremely smart post. I'll try this out when I get around to some tests in a couple of weeks.

 

Had any experience with Grass Valley HQ(x)?

http://www.grassvalley.com/products/hqx_codec

 

Would outputing a TIFF sequence be a viable alternative?

[dhessel]

You can go out to tiff, but I would personally do 10bit dpx or 16bit exrs. You will however suffer a larger playback performance hit if you do. I have personally found dpx to be the best for playback and editing but they are large file size and I have experience color/gamma shifts going back and forth between different/non adobe software packages. 

 

I will check out grass valley, thanks.

[Chris Elkerton]

You can go out to tiff, but I would personally do 10bit dpx or 16bit exrs. You will however suffer a larger playback performance hit if you do. I have personally found dpx to be the best for playback and editing but they are large file size and I have experience color/gamma shifts going back and forth between different/non adobe software packages.

I will check out grass valley, thanks.

Perhaps the playback issie could be fixed by using proxy files for the edit, then swapping to 'full fat' versions for the render. I've done this in AE a few times, not sure about PPRO.

[dhessel]

Yes that could work, I try to avoid proxies if I can. I am not sure about the latest version but as far as I know premiere doesn't have a good way of switching between online and offline editing. In the past I have rendered out high quality 'fat' versions to a blackmagic codec and then edit friendly proxies to another format, each to there own master folder. I made sure to keep the name and flie type identical as well as file structure in each master folder the same for both versions. Premiere would read files from the proxy folder for edit, when I wanted to render the final I would rename the folders so the 'fat' version root folder was the same as the old name for the proxy folder. Then when you open premiere it will automatically read the 'fat' versions. A total hack but it worked well enough for small projects.

[j-oc]

Updating this thread - the project I was going to shoot on anamorphic has been pushed for a few months and I've been using the extra prep time to sort out the workflow and settled on one I like, to wit:

 

Export the DNGs from AE in Grass Valley HQX using standard quality and also in 10-bit DPX. Use the HQX as proxies to edit in Premiere and then replace with the DPX files when it's time to render out.

 

What really rocks about this is that the HQX files are 10-bit, so even with standard quality files you can grade quite aggressively before the image breaks down. Thus you can grade these files directly and get a pretty clear idea about what is going to work in your final version once you've switched in the DPX. Alternatively, if you have a faster machine you can skip the DPX entirely and just boost the quality on the HQX export to maximum and just edit, grade and render these directly. This doesn't give you absolutely the best possible grading latitude (its 4:2:2), but is plently good enough for most stuff. 

The standard qual HQX files don't playback quite as sweetly as the DXnHD 36 proxies I use when shooting spherical, but generally speaking, this workflow is winner.