Magic Lantern RAW (tests)

For our group project, our aim is to really push the boundaries in a few areas of Film Making. 1 of them is to shoot at the best possible quality we can to try and bring across that cinematic experience. We worked out that there will be limited budget for this project, meaning we would not be able to afford the  costs of hiring equipment. A few weeks back, I wrote a post for PPP about purchasing a fast Compact Flash card for my Canon 5d mark ii so it would be able to run Magic Lantern RAW. Magic Lantern itself has the capabilities of adding a couple of thousand pounds onto your camera, adding functions that only the biggest and best cinema cameras have. One of them being RAW. RAW is an uncompressed file format allowing lots of room to play around in post production and gives a much higher quality compared to a compressed format such as H264. Because of my recent purchase and firmware update on my 5d, we are able to shoot our films in RAW.

Below I have done a couple of tests which really show just what RAW can do. Make sure you watch in HD.

This first test is not the best, but you can still see a clear difference between the H264 format. We can now see the highlights on the Television instead of it being completely blacked out by the compression. Overall quality of the image is better and being able to play around the the colour balance a lot more is very useful, especially in these conditions.

    

This second test is a much better example of what RAW can actually do. For both shots I made sure that Phil was in clear focus to make it fair. Again if we look to the right of the first shot, the TV is completely black, even though there is a grove running through the bottom frame of the TV. The RAW shot clearly shows depth and brings the highlights to life. This is a very minor thing but all little minor changes add up to a high quality shot. The twigs behind Phil are more crisp, even thought the aperture has stayed the same and if we pay close attention to Phil's' eyes on the transition, we can now see the reflections in his eyes. Amazing stuff.

The second shot is to demonstrate how blown out parts of the image can be revived and can be part of the shot. In the H264 clip, out of the window is nothing but white, with a few tiny glimpses of what is out there. The floor under the table is blown out and the highlights on the table and objects blend into the background. If we then look at the RAW shot, we have been able to bring the highlights down so things outside are a lot more visible. Also we can now see the detail and texture in the carpet and highlights are no longer part of the background. Again, overall sharpness blows the H264 clip away.

I messed around with colour in both videos but due to me being colour blind, the colour correction is not spot on. Luca mentioned that everything is a little too green, which I didn't notice so we decided the colour grading will be a group things and not just for myself.

I will be posting more tests with RAW very soon, hopefully getting to outdoor locations to really push Magic Lantern RAW to its full potential