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Question about working with RAW footage and Visual FX
I was speaking with my Color Grader and we were trying to figure out the best workflow for our particular project. I imagine this is a pretty common setup so I thought maybe you guys would have some insight.
We shot the project on a 5D with Magic Lantern raw. For the edit, the footage was transcoded to ProRes Proxy and is edited in Adobe Premiere. There are visual VFX shots in the piece, and those are being done in After Effects.
There was no Original color grade done, so the footage as it is now is straight out of the camera, with the gamma curve that the transcoding software applies. The visual FX were done using the ProRes Proxies as the Plates, but now need to be replaced with the RAW plates.
This is where there is a decision to make — Does it make more sense to conform the timeline with the Raw, and leave the visual FX shots without the FX and grade everything, and then use the graded plates for the Visual FX… obviously having to tweak a lot of things in the composite to match the new grade. OR, should the visual FX be done with the RAW, out of the camera as it is, and then rendered to something like a ProRes 4444 or DPX or some other High Gamut format, and graded alongside the Raw footage?
Obviously I know both workflows can work, and both have their pros and cons. I was just curious if anyone else has done a similar workflow or has any insight.
Thanks!
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3 Replies
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I think worrying about the 444 part is kind of nebulous, since this is still only an 8-bit camera. There are way too many cases like this where people grab a camera with a high pixel count and don’t consider the sacrifices made in color accuracy.
You could always send the shot before and after the scene in question to the VFX artist, so they would know how it was supposed to look in context. You could also allow the colorist to color-correct both the foreground and background plates separately, then have the VFX artist combine the two images together.
If you’re going to use After Effects, be sure to use it in 16-bit mode. The alternative, 8-bit, stomps on the images pretty hard. Even with 8-bit sources, the keying starts getting pretty dodgy.
But overall, I think it would be reasonable to do the entire project in ProRes 444 Log HD, and then just use a simple viewing LUT (which the colorist can create) to allow the VFX artist to see one version of the expected result. I would also have the VFX people shoot out some “wedges” (test composites) in advance so that the colorist can say whether or not it’ll work with the entire project.
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If he shot Magic Lantern RAW on a 5D3, he should have 14-bit dng’s to work with. The camera is 8-bit when shooting internally under the Canon firmware. ML bypasses all that and gives you the image straight off the sensor. So working in something like a DPX file is completely reasonable (or even a ProRes 4444 XQ codec).
As you note, Dustin, either workflow works. It’s what you and your team is most comfortable with.
Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
@CutColorPost -
Ryan is correct ML is firmware makes the camera 14bit. 8bit is Canon’s handicapped firmware shooting out the HDMI to an external recorder or internally as h.264.
Warren Eig
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