RAW video in Vegas Pro 12

[Norman Black]

AFAIK the only “RAW video” out there is from the RED camera and Sony supports this.

The Magic Lantern stuff is a hack which creates a rather unusual workflow. By this I mean you do not get a video file out of ML.

[Shane Etter]

yes, I know.
it outputs a “video” file in the .raw format, but Vegas cannot import it. the raw file is a flat file output from the sensor without compression.
in order to get it importable, you have to go thru the batch steps I listed, then import them frame-at-a-time en masse (into your NLE) and then it will be a video.

im just wondering if there are others trying to work with .raw

[Dave Haynie]

Not yet… maybe, once they have that version for the 6D or 60D 🙂 Oh… wait… this is happening so fast! It’s showing up for the 6D and the 60D now. Maybe I’ll play… it does sound cool.

And the 50D!!! The 50D didn’t even have a video mode! Now they’re getting 1592 x 1062 video, effectively. Sure, it’s individual raw snaps, but still.

I’ve done very similar things, though… for animation, morphing, and time-lapse. Basically, you’re loading up a huge pile of PNG or TIFF or JPEG or whatever photos, importing them into Vegas as a frame each or so in your project.

Of course, it would be possible and great if Vegas would take the DNG files directly. Converting them to JPEG is not the answer; that’s basically going to given you a video file that’s more or less the same idea as the “All-I” mode on the 6D and the 5DmkIII. “All-I” means AVC-Intra in video geek speak; it’s AVC’s I-Frames only, each independently compressed, essentially an evolved version of Motion JPEG. Yes, this should be an improvement over Just Plain AVC (the IP frame version in the older Canons or the IPB version in the newer models).

Most of the tools I’ve used for this can render out in BMP, PNG, or TIFF format, all of which can directly import to Vegas. Additionally, at least BMP with proper sequences can import into VirtualDub as video, then easily rendering out (with your supplied frame rate) as uncompressed AVI, which is just as ginormous as all those photo files, but easier to handle. When I do bring the zillion photo files directly into Vegas, first thing I do is render out to an uncompressed video file (working with animation anyway, that’s a must, since I nearly always want to preserve the alpha channel and yet still load this into another project).

Of course, if you’re planning to render to intermediate files like DNxHD or Cineform, there may be little difference going through JPEG, particularly very high quality JPEG.

So yeah, Lightroom will batch convert from DNG to TIFF and others. Not sure it’s the fastest thing, but you at least have a chance to make adjustments there before sending down to an 8 or 10-bit life as a video file. More practically, though, I’d like a one-stop conversion, but I guess the Magic Lantern people are primarily concerned about getting their RAW dump files into any format regular folks can use.

-Dave

[Norman Black]

The .raw file ML creates is something ML just created. It is not an actual agreed upon file format by anything out there. Hence the need for the ML tool to get workable file(s) out.

Certainly Sony and others could support a ML .raw file, in similar way to the way RED camera raw files are supported. Unlikely unless the ML tweak gains major momentum.

I really see someone developing a pre-processor tool that lets you enter your raw conversion settings and outputs some common intermediate video format for NLEs to edit.

[Shane Etter]

right, Dave, things are moving fast!

theres the ‘raw2dng’ executable which extracts the DNG files– not so bad, but I couldn’t get Vegas to import those at all. strangely, it sees the *.raw files (but wont import), but not *.dng (not even recognized)

[Dave Haynie]

It’s not a video file, it’s a motion sequence of still image files that resolve to a video file when that sequence is used on playback. Not a significant distinction, other than the fact it may be a bit unwieldy to deal with 1,440 files per minute of video.

But this isn’t all that unusual. I’ve dealt with a number of animation/rendering programs that output in individual still photos in sequence. It’s pretty common to render stills from an animation/rendering program like Blender, for example, just to that if there’s a crash, no need to lose days of rendering progress.

This is also what I’m already doing (and yeah, I guess, it’s technically just as RAW…) when I create a time-lapse video with one of my Canons (something I switched to after hitting the wall on the built-in intervalmeter on my Panasonic camcorder — it just stops after 24 hours); you can pretty much decide if you want RAW or JPEG, and HD, 2.5K, 4K, 5.5K, in video terms.

What you’re recording in both cases is motion video. What you’re saving are individual files in sequence, not a video file. And not an important difference, either, once you do the extra work to get your stills into some reasonable video file format.

Adobe already has a format called CinemaDNG, which isn’t actually only DNG, but basically can encapsulate DNG in an MXF file to deliver exactly what you’d want (well, as soon as Vegas supports it) — a true RAW video format based on standards.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I didn’t think Sony had support for .DNG just yet, though that would be a sensible way to go. I usually keep stuff around in Canon format anyway, not doing much with .DNG itself, though that might be a wise move at some point… the RAW tools do occasionally drop a camera model from their list of supported Cameras (my old Canon Pro90IS, from way back in the early days of digital cameras, was such a model that was dropped from some of the common RAW libraries).

-Dave

[Shane Etter]

yup, much agreed.

now how to proceed. is there an official channel for asking for this from Sony Vegas authors. In other words, is there an official “feature request” we/I can use?

is that what we should do?

[Stephen Mann]

https://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/support/productsuggestion.asp

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com

[Dave Haynie]

I did put in the suggestion.

Vegas supposedly uses the Microsoft RAW camera support system now. This works something like audio or video… they add CODECs to the system and it automagically lets new cameras into the party. But Microsoft isn’t always that diligent about it, and I do wonder if they’ll “pull an Adobe” and start making this tied to Windows 8 or whatever’s current.

This is a support means I find acceptable far as that goes… Sony’s not directly in the camera/photo business. But DNG is a kind of a special case. For one, it’s not camera specific, but the anthesis of that — one format that’s supposed to cover any camera’s RAW sensor model (well, most). Secondly, once you have DNG support, since they already have MXF support, it doesn’t seem a big jump to support CinemaDNG, which is basically just DNG frames in an MXF wrapper — an open format for RAW video.

-Dave