timbutt2 wrote:What Michael is thinking is probably the same thing I'm thinking. Beyond that "Blackmagic Design Custom" where RAW Control Settings are adjusted to give a custom grade to the RAW, the LUT would be an actual look.
"Blackmagic Design Custom" means that these parameters are active:
{
"tone_curve_contrast": 1.080000,
"tone_curve_saturation": 1.800000,
"tone_curve_midpoint": 0.270000,
"tone_curve_highlights": 0.999000,
"tone_curve_shadows": 1.001000,
"tone_curve_video_black_level": 1,
}
When you have eg. Blackmagic Design Video/Film then this is sort of preset (which was created by BM) for all these parameters. When you set "viewing_gamma" to eg. "Blackmagic Design Video" these won't have any effect on the look. Other controls exposure/temp/iso/tin still will have an effect.
In order to use those custom curves settings you need to set "viewing_gamma" to "Blackmagic Design Custom".
This means sidecar file is sort of 1st level RAW adjustment. In order to have custom (2nd level) look we would need a way of specifying a LUT. This would cost some computation (like it does in Cineform RAW). Compared to this Cineform RAW is way more advanced and allows for much richer active metadata (like mentioned custom LUTs or even re-framing). This is why I said BM RAW is still not on pair with Cineform RAW which was developed 15 years ago
For those who are so amazed by BM RAW check what Cineform RAW was able to do years ago!
Start at around 3min30. I really advise to watch it (forget about all these grading which is done there) to the end, so you will get an idea what can bee done today ( and it's not about doing final grading using this active metadata):
maybe BM can copy it if there is no patent on it. Importan part is that it didn't need any spacial viewer either- all was happening in decoder and any change to metadata was visible in any app which had Cineform file open. You could even have many views embedded with LUTs store in remote location like Dropbox etc and quickly pass a view to someone who had file open. You can even turn on overlays with TC etc. I'm still amazed it never got properly used, yet people keep sending LUTs in emails, using special player to apply LUT etc. So legacy
We are in 2018- time to change this 20 yers old approach to metadata, specially when now it can be applied in realtime in most cases (maybe on GPU) without any special player or app.