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Magic Lantern Raw Video in Vegas?
I’ve been looking at downloading Magic Lantern for my Canon T3i and experiment with Raw Video. Anyone here using Raw for Sony Vegas Pro?
I’ve got a few trips planned that would offer some great photo ops and was thinking it might be worthwhile to shoot some Raw video and edit in Vegas. Can I ingest from the cards or do I need to build proxy files?Any experiences or tips would be much appreciated.
Thanks!
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6 Replies
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There is no standard for RAW video like mpeg-2 or AVC for normal video. Every camera is different. Vegas supports RED camera raw and that is all at this point. Magic lantern RAW ouptut is unique to magic lantern. They do have utilities to convert to CinemaDNG but Vegas does not support CinemaDNG.
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Are you sure Magic Lantern lets you shoot RAW on a t3i? I thought that was only for the 5D. I have Magic Lantern on my t3i and never noticed a RAW shooting option.
My understanding is that, no, Vegas can’t just take RAW video since it’s treated as a series of pictures with the unmarried elements (such as white balance and exposure) that have to be converted into something first that Vegas can use.
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From everything I’ve recently read and seen, Raw video on T3i (660D) is possible. Somewhat limited but possible.
https://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?topic=5494.0
Video Sample / Side-by-Side Comps== H2.64 vs Raw
https://vimeo.com/70091775Video sample: T3i ML-FCP
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Yeah, they did a big push in the 5Ds, that was where they figured out the raw video coding, but it’s been spreading. Even to the 50D, which is interesting in that the 50D didn’t have a conventional video mode of any sort. Here’s a chart:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AgQ2MOkAZTFHdFFIcFp1d0R5TzVPTVJXOEVyUndteGc#gid=5My 60D has similar processor and memory system to the T3i; they’re both limited to a 21MB/s SD card. My 6D has UHS support, though not terribly fast, it’s got a good buffer and 40MB/s. But it also seems to the be last model to the party.
I used Magic Lantern awhile back, but it did work well on large exFAT cards, so I kind of left it behind. Probably worth another look.
The only video standard for raw video is CinemaDNG, which as someone mentioned, Vegas doesn’t support. That’s in a way the only possible raw standard, since after all, raw itself isn’t a standard, it’s just what your camera sensor dumps out, different for every camera. Adobe’s DNG is able to encapsulate most sensor geometries, so it’s really the only standard for this non-standard format. And so making that into a flipbook is a good way to make that work for video.
So there are tools to convert a Canon raw capture to a single CinemaDNG file (it’s actually an MXF file; CinemaDNG also exists as just a directory full of indvidual DNG files, with some standard for metadata applicable to the whole sequence). But you can’t get that into Vegas. So ok, there actually are a few other raw “standard” formats, though even less standard than Adobe’s. Cineform supports a raw version, and yes, I checked, it’s a real raw format, based on a 12-bit Bayer-filtered image. Cineform (well, now actually part of GoPro) has a discussion of there here, over a tool they provideo to convert from CinmeaDNG to Cineform. I don’t know what version(s) of Cineform support raw on Vegas, if any… Cineform got so hostile to Vegas with Vegas 11, I stopped using it.
Not sure if this applies to MXF CinemaDNG, or just the discrete frame in a directory version.
It should be possible to convert raw directly to an uncompressed AVI, using already available DNG libraries, but no one seems to have done that yet. One of the issues is that you can’t just convert DNG to most other formats, you need to have a means of color grading it first, since you’re more than likely going from 12 or 14-bit raw to 8 or 10-bit video. So it’s not as trivial as a basic conversion program.
I’m kind of interested in playing with this myself (does it show), but I haven’t found an ideal means of interface with Vegas just yet.
-Dave
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Great reply Dave! Thanks for the comprehensive info!!
I’m in the early stages of getting more acquainted with the Canon Raw Video options… it’s not perfect and it does seem to take a bit of pre-thought regarding workflows. But the price-performance of taking a pro-sumer camera like the T3i and using Magic Lantern to create Raw Video in the quality levels I’ve seen is pretty effing amazing!!
But…even before I got interested in the Raw video option, I was looking at Adobe Cloud as more and more clients I interface with have expressed Adobe Premiere, etc… As much as I like Sony Vegas Pro, I feel I can’t ignore the market push any longer. And since Premiere does feature a somewhat seemless way to use Raw Video… just makes the pull even easier on my decision to look that way.I’ve come to the conclusion that Sony still has the BetaMax DNA lingering in their corporate psyche … thinking customers will conform to their software and quirks. One of the things that got me using Sony Vegas Pro (starting with SVP6) was the ease of codec import… you’d think with such a huge customer base using T3i, etc….they’d have something in place to exploit that.
This segues me into another observation which has been debated here before as to why SVP hasn’t been embraced in the corporate/creative world as much as other products. I think it’s because Sony hasn’t really dedicated enough effort towards that goal really. Vegas was an “acquired product” from a 3rd party and has been pretty much left to being improved on a limited basis when compared with other products.
I don’t think I’ll abandon SVP anytime soon but I have to say that the integrated paths by Adobe are hard to ignore. Some can argue about subscription services but I’m at the point where I am looking at price-performances and workflows. Vegas has been good but not great and I’m seeing a need more and more to strongly consider other options.
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[Chas Smith] “And since Premiere does feature a somewhat seemless way to use Raw Video… just makes the pull even easier on my decision to look that way. “
Did they put CinemaDNG back into Premiere CC? Because they did drop support in CS6. And Adobe had really only been supporting it because they invented it. There are only three cameras that use this format, and two of the three were not shipping when Vegas 12 was released. And the Canon hacks came only in 2013.
[Chas Smith] “One of the things that got me using Sony Vegas Pro (starting with SVP6) was the ease of codec import… you’d think with such a huge customer base using T3i, etc….they’d have something in place to exploit that. “
Of course Vegas supports the huge Canon camera base: T3i, T4i, T5i, 60D, 5D, 6D, 7D. But it’s a different story to support the 0.0001% of users playing around with a still-a-work-in-progress unsupported hack 🙂
That said, I did put in a request to Sony for CinemaDNG support. They do already support uncompressed and at least Red R3D raw (not sure about Cineform raw), so it’s not as if Sony’s blind to these things.
Far as “the Betamax disease”, every company making software pretty much expects you to come around to their way of thinking. But don’t forget, when Vegas 2 first shipped, most NLEs required proprietary video; almost no one worked on native video, much less a mix of different formats. Sony still leads on this.
Adobe supported CinemaDNG because it was their project, not out of any great habit of supporting every video format. They dropped it because, basically, no one was using it… maybe ironically just at the time folks started to use it. It’s definitely true that under Sony, I think they’re much less likely to support initiatives like CinemaDNG, things for the whole industry, versus worrying about supporting Sony in particular. But that’s actually a 2way thing… other companies are much less likely to accept an industry standard from Sony, versus an independent like Adobe or some open membership industry committee like MPEG.
-Dave
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