3 ms·

If you shoot video raw, do yourself a favour and use proper development tools to deal with footage. As an example, RawTherapee uses probably the most “strongly

If you shoot video raw, do yourself a favour and use proper development tools to deal with footage. As an example, RawTherapee uses probably the most “strongly typed” approach to colour (and RawPedia is a treasure trove of advice for nearly every step starting with pre-production, such as creating relevant calibration profiles and flat/dark frames).

jiggawatts 2y ago
Still image RAW editing has mostly been correct for the popular tools for about a decade now, maybe longer. The history behind this is that a 12-bit or even 14-bit still image (photo) is big but "not that big" (100 MB at most), so it was possible to process them in a wide-gamut HDR space for a long time now even on very slow hardware. For video, even 10-bit support is pushing the limits of computer power! Sure, playback has been sorted for a while now, but editing of multiple overlapping pieces of footage during a transition can be a problem. Unlike with a still photo, the editing software has to be real-time, otherwise it stutters and is unusable. Consider that Lightroom does everything in a floating point 32-bit linear space, because... why not? It takes a lot of computer power, sure, but cheap enough not to matter in practice. Video editing tools try to keep video in the original 8-bit or 10-bit encoding as much as possible for performance. There's also another reason: older cameras would output only 8-bit files with maybe 7-bits of dynamic range in it, so if you manipulated them too much things would fall apart. Just the floating point rounding error converting to a linear space and back would cause visible banding! So all editing tools tried to operate in the camera's native encoding space so that they minimise precision issues. E.g.: Many video editing tools have controls that just add a constant value to the output space! E.g.: 255,127,10 is mapped to 255-5,127-5,10-5 = 250,122,5. This is naive and "wrong" but it preserves the dynamic range as much as possible.
- strogonoff 2y ago
  Developing a raw (not an acronym) into some wide gamut space and applying whatever transitions at that point is still fine.
  - jiggawatts 2y ago
    This isn't just "fine", it's essentially the only sane thing to do. That intermediate space ought to be "linear light" so that operations like resize or blur work properly. This is the only mode in which Lightroom operates. There's basically no other way of using it. It's not only not the default in video editing tools, it's decidedly non-standard and you have to go out of your way to enable it. Then everything breaks because the tools still have too many baked-in assumptions that you're operating in the output space or some other non-linear space. In a tutorial video one professional Hollywood colorist said something like: "This color space has a gamma curve of blah-blah-blah, which means that the offset control will apply an exposure compensation." That blew my mind: edit controls that change behaviour based on the input and output formats to the point that "addition" becomes "multiplication"!!
    - strogonoff 2y ago
      Sure. So back to your previous point, when you develop the source CinemaDNG footage you do not deal with any transitions, are not cutting it, and do not need it to be real-time. It is simply a bunch of stills, which you process into a straightforward sequence of pre-graded PNGs in your desired colour space that you are free to edit together however you like at blazing fast speeds. Unless you go crazy on some very specific transitions (and who uses transitions anyway in film these days) that don’t work in final colour space, you do not need raw footage at edit time, do you? I guess I know the answer, if you work in this industry then punching in/out or stabilizing in post is a common requirement and you mentioned some tools can mess up even at resizing stage.
      - jiggawatts 2y ago
        I’m not a professional, I just “dabble”. Something I’ve noticed in fields where I am a professional is that it’s the “WTFs per hour” from intelligent beginners that best measures how broken some ecosystem is. Video editing is very high on the WTF/hr metric.
        strogonoff 2y ago

jiggawatts 2y ago

Still image RAW editing has mostly been correct for the popular tools for about a decade now, maybe longer. The history behind this is that a 12-bit or even 14-bit still image (photo) is big but "not that big" (100 MB at most), so it was possible to process them in a wide-gamut HDR space for a long time now even on very slow hardware. For video, even 10-bit support is pushing the limits of computer power! Sure, playback has been sorted for a while now, but editing of multiple overlapping pieces of footage during a transition can be a problem. Unlike with a still photo, the editing software has to be real-time, otherwise it stutters and is unusable. Consider that Lightroom does everything in a floating point 32-bit linear space, because... why not? It takes a lot of computer power, sure, but cheap enough not to matter in practice. Video editing tools try to keep video in the original 8-bit or 10-bit encoding as much as possible for performance. There's also another reason: older cameras would output only 8-bit files with maybe 7-bits of dynamic range in it, so if you manipulated them too much things would fall apart. Just the floating point rounding error converting to a linear space and back would cause visible banding! So all editing tools tried to operate in the camera's native encoding space so that they minimise precision issues. E.g.: Many video editing tools have controls that just add a constant value to the output space! E.g.: 255,127,10 is mapped to 255-5,127-5,10-5 = 250,122,5. This is naive and "wrong" but it preserves the dynamic range as much as possible.

strogonoff 2y ago
Developing a raw (not an acronym) into some wide gamut space and applying whatever transitions at that point is still fine.
- jiggawatts 2y ago
  This isn't just "fine", it's essentially the only sane thing to do. That intermediate space ought to be "linear light" so that operations like resize or blur work properly. This is the only mode in which Lightroom operates. There's basically no other way of using it. It's not only not the default in video editing tools, it's decidedly non-standard and you have to go out of your way to enable it. Then everything breaks because the tools still have too many baked-in assumptions that you're operating in the output space or some other non-linear space. In a tutorial video one professional Hollywood colorist said something like: "This color space has a gamma curve of blah-blah-blah, which means that the offset control will apply an exposure compensation." That blew my mind: edit controls that change behaviour based on the input and output formats to the point that "addition" becomes "multiplication"!!
  - strogonoff 2y ago
    Sure. So back to your previous point, when you develop the source CinemaDNG footage you do not deal with any transitions, are not cutting it, and do not need it to be real-time. It is simply a bunch of stills, which you process into a straightforward sequence of pre-graded PNGs in your desired colour space that you are free to edit together however you like at blazing fast speeds. Unless you go crazy on some very specific transitions (and who uses transitions anyway in film these days) that don’t work in final colour space, you do not need raw footage at edit time, do you? I guess I know the answer, if you work in this industry then punching in/out or stabilizing in post is a common requirement and you mentioned some tools can mess up even at resizing stage.
    - jiggawatts 2y ago
      I’m not a professional, I just “dabble”. Something I’ve noticed in fields where I am a professional is that it’s the “WTFs per hour” from intelligent beginners that best measures how broken some ecosystem is. Video editing is very high on the WTF/hr metric.
      - strogonoff 2y ago