Bmpcc second attempt

[Craig Seeman]

Although this video by Tom Majerski is with the BMCC it's same color science and codecs.

He states, "The general consensus is that the two formats are both fantastic - but that the Raw mode will give you significantly more flexibility and quality - especially in extreme situations."

Again Raw gives you flexibility but if you don't have to push things the differences are very slight.
The Raw may be a bit sharper in this case because it's 2.5k whereas ProRes is HD. Dynamic Range is the same though.

Raw Cinema DNG vs ProRes HQ modes - on BMCC. Showdown on Vimeo

[Craig Seeman]

These are specific to Pocket and low light with ProRes vs Raw.
Raw vs ProRes in low light – Pocket Camera | Too Much Imagination

[Craig Seeman]

Blackmagic Camera ProRes Flavors - Which do I choose? - THE DIVISION
"ProRes 422 (HQ): Best Quality ProRes, Files are smaller, but footage looks just about as good as raw."

[Noa Put]

Thx for the links Craig but I wanted to know how you colorcorrect bmpcc prores to make it look like reality. Like below frames where one is from the bmpcc in prores and the other from the gh4. I have a hard time even getting any color into prores while in raw it's very easy.

[Jim Andrada]

Hi Noa

Wow - I'd like to help. If I could download a few frames of the ProRes I'll bring it up in Resolve tomorrow evening (my clients are here from Tokyo until mid afternoon so can't work on it until late in the day) and have a shot at a basic CC and (assuming I get something reasonable) I'll walk you through exactly how I got it.

First impression is that your PreRes image looks like a good starting point - my stuff looks like that before I grade it. In fact I want it to look like that for starters.

One of the best tutorials I've seen on Resolve is by Warren Eagles - I think he was using Resolve 10 and not sure he has anything out on version 12. It isn't free - I found it at FXPHD if I recall correctly, but it's really excellent.

Anyhow if you put it in Dropbox or something and send me a link I'll see what I can do with it.

I'm very happy with the ProRes from the BMCC and BMPCC - in fact I haven't even upgraded to the firmware that supports RAW yet.

[Noa Put]

Thx Jim, I do have resolve 12, the free version, on my pc but during install I already got the message that my pc was underpowered, probably because of my quadro k420 card which doesn't meet min specs but since edius doesn't require a fast graphics card I don't intend to invest in a expensive one just for resolve. But I can get it to open.

What I find so difficult with these bmpcc prores files is that you don't have any reference at all what the color looked like to start with, every attempt I did so far just resulted in very weird looking colors. Otoh V-log from the gh4 looks even more flat yet I can much easier get accurate color out of that one in Edius.

Below are 4 very short prores HQ422 clips straight from the card, They all where just testshots and I have identical GH4 shots as a reference. If anyone wants to have some fun and see what they can do with these, be my guest to download and play with them. Ideally I just want to colorcorrect in Edius but I"m not able to get any real and especially no accurate color out of it. Just to make myself clear, I"m not saying that Bmpcc prores files cannot be colorcorrected, I just don't know how.

https://copy.com/rcxE0gW4ThwCYNze
https://copy.com/RqnFpEMPugn60rip
https://copy.com/cetw0AfxZyeAwvHg
https://copy.com/MZhH9X9HKtDLsaRw

[Wacharapong Chiowanich]

I did a quick grading with FCPX of your first 2 Clips. Shortened to 6 sec. each to save time.

BMPCC ProRes Grading - YouTube

In both shots the sky is completely blown out on my waveform monitor (cliping at 100 IRE) so there's no color in there. For some reason, there appear to be not enough metadata in your clips to allow FCPX to automatically process the "Film" mode of the clips into the standard Rec.709 gamma profile for viewing. So I just did it manually.

First shot may look slightly warm compared to your framegrab. Is it closer to what you saw in the actual scene?

[Noa Put]

Yes, this looks close to reality, what exactly did you change it fcpx?

[Wacharapong Chiowanich]

I can't remember the exact number (degrees of adjustments) but here is roughly what I did:

- bringing down the shadows but not to exceed 0 IRE
- bringing down the midtones, by guessing to the level that looked "pleasant" to me.
- not touching the highlights since most of them already clipped at exactly 100 IRE, raising them would have clipped parts of them that were not yet clipped but near the threshold, lowering them would have made the scenes look murky or too flatly dull without gaining any more color or detail in those parts.
- raising the global color saturation to the max and raising the midtone saturation to about 2/3 the maximum. Both adjustments didn't affect the sky which had been clipped to completely white.
- not altering the color balance of the clips as I had no idea what the scenes actually looked like.

I believe you can do the same in your PC-based NLE as the above is very fundamental to level and color adjustments but the hard part is the subjective things as personal preference for color, contrast level, and sharpening level, etc. Some NLEs out there should be like FCPX in that they can recognize the raw files (BMPCC ProRes, Sony S-log 2/3 XAVC(S) etc.) uploaded into the programs and do automatic mapping of the files to the broadcast standard Rec.709 looks. from there you only have to do some minor adjustments as you like.

[Jim Andrada]

Hi Noa

For some reason I don't seem to be able to open the clips. Neither Quicktime nor Resolve like them them. Nor Edius 6 for that matter.

I'm running Win 7.

I played around a bit with the jpg image (which is probably an exercise in frustration after it's been through the jpg compression)

What kind of day was it? The feeling I get from fooling with the jpg and looking at the blown white sky is that it was a bit overcast and not very highly saturated or contrasty.

I edit the ProRes out of my BMCC/BMPCC on this system so no idea why I can't open the files. I'll try on my MacBook later tonight.

[Noa Put]

For some reason I don't seem to be able to open the clips. Neither Quicktime nor Resolve like them them. Nor Edius 6 for that matter.

Weird, I"m on win 7 pro and use edius 8 workgroup. Also, it was a overcast day, the overexposed parts you see are clouds only.

[Noa Put]

Originally Posted by Wacharapong Chiowanich

Some NLEs out there should be like FCPX in that they can recognize the raw files (BMPCC ProRes, Sony S-log 2/3 XAVC(S) etc.) uploaded into the programs and do automatic mapping of the files to the broadcast standard Rec.709 looks. from there you only have to do some minor adjustments as you like.

I think that is the part I"m missing here, I can alter highlights, shadows and midtones but that doesn't do anything with the color and using the colorcorrecor doesn't help either. Not sure how you can map the files to rec.709 in Edius because that I think should bring out the real colors to have a starting point.

[Wacharapong Chiowanich]

You get the level (gamma) to the level of your liking first and only then you can play with color saturation, not the other way around. In any case this means pumping up the saturation by a significant amount. Try different combinations of saturation of the highlight, midtone and shadow areas. The good thing about these BMPCC's ProRes files is that they are 10-bit 4:2:2. The colors, reds in particular, have more tolerance for bleeding at the edges and banding that usually occur to 8-bit 4:2:0 video files when color saturation is raised.

Having said that, I totally agree with you based on my short experience with the BMCC and later the BMPCC over a year ago, that the ProRes files from these two BM cameras were somehow more difficult to work with, grading-wise, than the 12-bit RAW files from either camera. I and my colleges then suspected the ProRes encoding engines in both cameras may not have matured or been capable enough to encode such high datarates in real time so they had to leave out certain chroma information. Just a guess, though.

[Jim Andrada]

Finally figured out what I was doing wrong and could download the clip

Here's what I came up with

https://www.dropbox.com/s/s82wdvtmo2...%2077.mov?dl=0

Whether this is "objectively" correct or not isn't the point - I grew up in New England and I remember what late Autumn days looked/felt like on overcast days so that's what I aimed for. The point of course is that you can do a lot with ProRes. Whether it's as much as you want to do is a different question. Raw would take too much memory so it isn't a real option for what I usually do.

[Rob Katz]

noa and all-

for those of us on the sidelines, i find this thread extremely helpful.

i do not own a bmpcc but have worked with one several times.

i am aware of the difficult ergos.

i am aware of the difficult workflow.

i am also thoroughly drawn to the look of well shot, thoughtfully graded blackmagic footage.

thank you all for doing the heavy lifting.

carry on!

be well.

rob
smalltalk productions/nyc