Blackmagic Forum

I'm trying to set up a timelapse workflow with raw images. I have 2 problems:
- if I'm converting the original images to DNG in the Adobe CS6 raw converter (Adobe Raw 9), they just show up with a thin band of noise at the top of the image. If I'm using Adobe raw 12, then seems the images are OK (except color as per below). I could not find any info on supported Adobe raw version for DNG. Is version 9 (CS6 generation) not supported or is there some other issue?

- When converting with Adobe Raw 12, I can import the image, but there is a huge diff in color. If I export the picture as JPEG and import to Resolve, there is no color problem. See attached screen grab (still is DNG, main window is same image from JPEG). Apparently need to do something with the Adobe RAW images (lut, something else?) to get the proper color?

Håkan Mitts wrote:If I export the picture as JPEG and import to Resolve, there is no color problem.

I recommend that.

In fact, I actually recommend filming time lapse in JPEG, rather than RAW.

RAW is great for moving pictures, or one off stills. It's a PITA for timelapse.

My experience, anyway.

For high DR scenes I would love to get the extra DR from shooting raw as at least my Olympus does not shoot timelapses in any log format, hence a hope to find a nice workflow that includes out-of-camera raw files.

I think to make that easier, you'd need a camera that records it's timelapse to a single file. Making RAW adjustments to every...single...image is just not fun.

If memory serves, the Pocket 4K can record timelapse to a single BRAW file.

// RAW TIMELAPSE COLOR GRADING : color settings for grading RAW (DNG) photos in Davinci ? //

Hi everyone,

Was about to create a new thread but came accros that one which is about the exact same issue.

I recently discovered that it's possible to import DNG photos directly into Resolve, which sounds great for a simple workflow to edit and grade timelapses (as opposed to going through Lightroom and/or LRTimelapse first).

That workflow is appealing to me, but I am facing one major issue, when I import the DNG photos (treated as one single timelapse video by Resolve) colors on import aren't looking near as good as they are when I just open them in Lightroom.

Resolve being so good at grading raw video footage, I imagine it would be just as suited for grading raw photos / timelapse right? Is it possible to get to the same "starting point" as in Lightroom by setting things up correctly in one of the following sections maybe?
- color management / science in the timeline settings
- and/or Raw options (under Camera Raw in the color tab)
- and/or color space transform

... I tried to play with different parameters but I don't seem to find the right settings. Anyone using this workflow who could provide some tips?

Does anyone know what color space and gamma those DNG files should be set to as inputs? (for info, the current pictures I'm working with were shot on GH5 and A7siii)

Thanks in advance!

johnsmith06 wrote:I tried to play with different parameters

I think it's better to know what you're doing than to guess.

Have you completed any of the training manuals for Resolve? (Scroll down below the videos.)

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/produc ... e/training

johnsmith06 wrote:Does anyone know what color space and gamma those DNG files should be set to as inputs? (for info, the current pictures I'm working with were shot on GH5 and A7siii)

AFAIK, both cameras don't shoot DNG.

Uli Plank wrote:

johnsmith06 wrote:Does anyone know what color space and gamma those DNG files should be set to as inputs? (for info, the current pictures I'm working with were shot on GH5 and A7siii)

AFAIK, both cameras don't shoot DNG.

good point, forgot to mention : I used adobe DNG converter to convert the proprietary raw formats into raw DNG files. Lightroom handles those just as well as native RAW files.

Jim Simon wrote:

johnsmith06 wrote:I tried to play with different parameters

I think it's better to know what you're doing than to guess.

Have you completed any of the training manuals for Resolve? (Scroll down below the videos.)

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/produc ... e/training

I have completed several different trainings on resolve and grading, none of them explained a recommended workflow for handling raw still images.

I have written to Blackmagic asking the question, let's see if there is an official "correct" way of doing this

What's the Input Color Space for your DNG clip in Resolve? If it's mislabeled, you'll get color shift.

RAW camera data doesn't live in a colorspace, it's just data. I think it's possible that Adobe RAW could add a colorspace tag when converting it to DNG, but it doesn't need to. (Or it could add the wrong tag, perhaps defaulting to AdobeRGB or something like that.)

(As an example, I just took an AppleRAW photo with my iPhone, and in the resulting DNG, the EXIF colorspace tag says "Uncalibrated". I don't understand the differences between video and still RAW files, but I imagine that Resolve has a lot of in-built information on Blackmagic RAW, Red, ARRI, and other cameras that shoot RAW Video, but probably not so much on RAW stills.)

Interestingly, on a Mac with an AppleRAW DNG, I can see it in Preview and in Affinity Photo, but Resolve 17b6 says it's Offline.

I agree that input color space should be set correctly, the question is, what should it be set to?

I tried mutliple settings with various results, but nothing clos to what I get in Lightroom.

See example attached : the image in lightroom is unprocessed, the one in davinci has saturation increased by 25% in camera raw setting and it's still flat looking.

In this example, input color space is set to REC709.

Have you tried AdobeRGB for the colorspace? I would assume that's what Adobe products default to if they don't know any better. My guess would be that you need a wider gamut than Rec709 (which is essentially sRGB).

If it looks good in Lightroom, are there no RAW details or other palettes that give you information on what's happening? Does Raw have any settings for the conversion/input/output?

What were the original names of your ORF (Olympus Raw) files? If they began with "_" they were sRGB, if they began with "P" they are AdobeRGB, according to Wikipedia.

I agree with you, the input color space sounds like the main setting to be looking into, however there is no such thing as Adobe RVB input color space available in DVR16.

I have tried wide color spaces such as DCI-P3 with not much luck either, and have tried with Panasonic V-Gamut/V-log (since the camera is a GH5) but no luck either I suppose that is for Vlog video footage only, not RAW still pictures.

I have looked in Lightroom settings but can't figure out how the color spaces are configured over there... will revert back if I find something.

I had some time and poked around a lot and I think the answers you've gotten and what you found yourself is the answer: convert in bulk to JPEG/TIFF/EXR or whatever you can using whatever tool will let you get things out of AdobeRGB and into something that video tools can use: sRGB, P3, Rec2020, etc.

You're caught up on the fence between photo and video and as far as I can tell, there's no way to use AdobeRGB in the video world with the possible exception of in Premiere. (I imagine Adobe supports their own photo space, even in their video product.)

I noticed, by the way, in your shot where you increased saturation by 25% that you ended up with more green than Photoshop, but less red. I imagine any simple tricks will mess things up like that. (And I think you'll need to be in a larger timeline colorspace than AdobeRGB to pull it off anyhow. Maybe +25% Sat and then Tint towards red?)

I couldn't find any LUTs that do the conversion. I did find a long and extremely (walking through code) technical discussion in these forums about using DCTL code to convert. It's not even clear that the code ever actually worked.

johnsmith06 wrote:none of them explained a recommended workflow for handling raw still images.

That's because you generally don't 'handle' raw stills in an NLE.

If you're converting the originals, don't convert to another RAW format. Use PNG or JPEG instead. Handle the color space in the program doing the conversions so that it comes into Resolve correctly.

Jim Simon wrote:

johnsmith06 wrote:none of them explained a recommended workflow for handling raw still images.

That's because you generally don't 'handle' raw stills in an NLE.

If you're converting the originals, don't convert to another RAW format. Use PNG or JPEG instead. Handle the color space in the program doing the conversions so that it comes into Resolve correctly.

No point shooting in raw if you don't take advantage of this format while grading.
Sub-optimal workflow recomamdation I'm afraid.

wfolta wrote:I had some time and poked around a lot and I think the answers you've gotten and what you found yourself is the answer: convert in bulk to JPEG/TIFF/EXR or whatever you can using whatever tool will let you get things out of AdobeRGB and into something that video tools can use: sRGB, P3, Rec2020, etc.

You're caught up on the fence between photo and video and as far as I can tell, there's no way to use AdobeRGB in the video world with the possible exception of in Premiere. (I imagine Adobe supports their own photo space, even in their video product.)

I noticed, by the way, in your shot where you increased saturation by 25% that you ended up with more green than Photoshop, but less red. I imagine any simple tricks will mess things up like that. (And I think you'll need to be in a larger timeline colorspace than AdobeRGB to pull it off anyhow. Maybe +25% Sat and then Tint towards red?)

I couldn't find any LUTs that do the conversion. I did find a long and extremely (walking through code) technical discussion in these forums about using DCTL code to convert. It's not even clear that the code ever actually worked.

Thanks for the insights.

Grading raw stills via lightroom and lr timelapse then exporting to jpg is the common workflow around , and that works, just cumbersome.

Looking for a 100% resolve workflow instead if that is possible. Hopefully the support team will provide a positive answer to this! Fingers crossed

I think that Lightroom and other photo editing programs read the camera metadata and picture profiles from stills cameras and apply the adjustments according to what was set in camera when shooting. That's why you see the raw image in Lightroom looking "like it should". A "picture profile" is a Nikon term, I think, the same thing may be called something else in other brands. It contains all kinds of settings from sharpness to curves. Resolve probably doesn't recognize the picture profiles from stills cameras and shows you the actual raw unprocessed data. I don't use Lightroom, but it may use some sort of database for the adjustments. That could mean, again, that if you export the raw files, Resolve cannot read the data and shows the unprocessed data instead.

Out of curiosity, I tried importing some Nikon raw files (.NEF) straight into Resolve (no DNG conversion) and the white balance was way off. Fixing that in the raw tab gave a good starting point for grading, though. The full raw data is there.

I agree with some of the other posters in that if you bring a timelapse into resolve, there's no point in converting to 8-bit jpg or png before. Just learn to grade from scratch in Resolve or do the whole thing in Lightroom and combine the stills to video with something simple, like ffmpeg.

ttakala wrote:I think that Lightroom and other photo editing programs read the camera metadata and picture profiles from stills cameras and apply the adjustments according to what was set in camera when shooting. That's why you see the raw image in Lightroom looking "like it should". A "picture profile" is a Nikon term, I think, the same thing may be called something else in other brands. It contains all kinds of settings from sharpness to curves. Resolve probably doesn't recognize the picture profiles from stills cameras and shows you the actual raw unprocessed data. I don't use Lightroom, but it may use some sort of database for the adjustments. That could mean, again, that if you export the raw files, Resolve cannot read the data and shows the unprocessed data instead.

Out of curiosity, I tried importing some Nikon raw files (.NEF) straight into Resolve (no DNG conversion) and the white balance was way off. Fixing that in the raw tab gave a good starting point for grading, though. The full raw data is there.

I agree with some of the other posters in that if you bring a timelapse into resolve, there's no point in converting to 8-bit jpg or png before. Just learn to grade from scratch in Resolve or do the whole thing in Lightroom and combine the stills to video with something simple, like ffmpeg.

thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Having to tweak a raw file from scratch to try and have it look neutral / accurate, as it does in Lightroom initially when you open the file, isn't an optimum workflow to me.

Resolve does have ways to decode data from video files from GH5 for instance, using davinci color management : specify Panasonic in the input color space section, and then it can automatically convert to REC709 or sRVB or whatever color space you need/want, and have the image look as it should so you can start color correction and grading afterwards.

Although so far it doesn't look like the same is possible for RAW (DNG) still pictures, maybe we all missed something there... I hope Blackmagic will be able to answer this question positively.... or at least plan for this feature in future versions of the software : there is a real use case for all filmmakers doing timelapses!

you could try RawtoACES (https://github.com/ampas/rawtoaces). Of course then you would be in an ACES workflow which might not be what you want. But you would retain the entire data of your original raw file.
There is always some interpretation of the raw data going on, usually based on the metadata in the raw file. The result may vary, depending on which camera raw you use. For all well known and not brand new cameras it should be spot on.

Adding a thought: this method also has the advantage over DNG or RAW in Resolve that you can use the ACES files in other software as well. If you should need some compositing first, for example in Nuke, which can't handle DNG or RAW, no problem, Nuke will love the ACES files.

johnsmith06 wrote:Resolve does have ways to decode data from video files from GH5 for instance, using davinci color management : specify Panasonic in the input color space section, and then it can automatically convert to REC709 or sRVB or whatever color space you need/want, and have the image look as it should so you can start color correction and grading afterwards.

Although so far it doesn't look like the same is possible for RAW (DNG) still pictures, maybe we all missed something there... I hope Blackmagic will be able to answer this question positively.... or at least plan for this feature in future versions of the software : there is a real use case for all filmmakers doing timelapses!

GH4/5 has been a very popular hybrid camera for video, so it makes sense that BM has added some level of support for those.

BM cameras have good timelapse features, but they are limited in long shutter speeds. I would also like to hear from someone at Blackmagic for a suggestion for a stills camera timelapse workflow. I'm just speculating here, educated guessing at the most.

Dante Stiller wrote:you could try RawtoACES (https://github.com/ampas/rawtoaces). Of course then you would be in an ACES workflow which might not be what you want. But you would retain the entire data of your original raw file.
There is always some interpretation of the raw data going on, usually based on the metadata in the raw file. The result may vary, depending on which camera raw you use. For all well known and not brand new cameras it should be spot on.

Adding a thought: this method also has the advantage over DNG or RAW in Resolve that you can use the ACES files in other software as well. If you should need some compositing first, for example in Nuke, which can't handle DNG or RAW, no problem, Nuke will love the ACES files.

thank you very much for presenting this option, sounds really interesting, although so technical that it's beyond my IT capabilities to install all the different components required and even just give it a try

ttakala wrote:

johnsmith06 wrote:Resolve does have ways to decode data from video files from GH5 for instance, using davinci color management : specify Panasonic in the input color space section, and then it can automatically convert to REC709 or sRVB or whatever color space you need/want, and have the image look as it should so you can start color correction and grading afterwards.

Although so far it doesn't look like the same is possible for RAW (DNG) still pictures, maybe we all missed something there... I hope Blackmagic will be able to answer this question positively.... or at least plan for this feature in future versions of the software : there is a real use case for all filmmakers doing timelapses!

GH4/5 has been a very popular hybrid camera for video, so it makes sense that BM has added some level of support for those.

BM cameras have good timelapse features, but they are limited in long shutter speeds. I would also like to hear from someone at Blackmagic for a suggestion for a stills camera timelapse workflow. I'm just speculating here, educated guessing at the most.

I have written to them directly in adition to posting here and on Facebook groups, will keep you posted once I hear back !

johnsmith06 wrote:No point shooting in raw if you don't take advantage of this format while grading.

That's partly why I don't recommend shooting timelapse in RAW.

Jim Simon wrote:

johnsmith06 wrote:No point shooting in raw if you don't take advantage of this format while grading.

That's partly why I don't recommend shooting timelapse in RAW.

I guess if you are happy with your jpg only workflow, no worries, to each their own

As far as I'm concerned, timelapse shot in RAW can be fully taken advantage of if color graded within Lightroom for instance, it's day and night vs. jpg, like with any other photo editing actually.

I hope it can too be done 100% within Resolve, now or in future versions, that's the whole point of this discussion thread Jim

johnsmith06 wrote:timelapse shot in RAW can be fully taken advantage of if color graded within Lightroom for instance

That would be the best way, if you're set on shooting RAW.

I decode from RAW to Blackmagic gamut/gamma, then add a CST from Blackmagic to 709. It seems to be the best way for DNG files.

Noel Sterrett wrote:I decode from RAW to Blackmagic gamut/gamma, then add a CST from Blackmagic to 709. It seems to be the best way for DNG files.

interesting!
would you mind sharing some screenshots of the settings you use?
(Especially not too sure I understand what you mean with "decode from RAW to Blackmagic gamut/gamma"... where do you set that up in resolve?)

In Camera Raw:

Color Space: Blackmagic Design
Gamma: Blackmagic Design Film

Add an FX Color Space Transform before the clip:

Input Color Space: Blackmagic Design Film Gen1
Input Gama: Blackmagic Design Film
Output Color Space: Timeline
Output Gamma: Timeline

Apply Forward OOTF: not checked
Apply Reverse OOTF: not checked

Set the Timeline to:
Timeline Color Space: Blackmagic Design Wide Gamut Gen4 - Linear

Add an FX Color Space Transform after the clip (or to the Timeline for all clips):

Input Color Space: Timeline
Input Gama: Timeline
Output Color Space: 709
Output Gamma: 709

Apply Forward OOTF: not checked
Apply Reverse OOTF: not checked

You can just copy this RAW/node structure to other clips as a starting point.

While it is a bit involved, I have found it produces the best colors from Sigma fp DNG's. They are quite simply stunning.

thanks Noel for the detailed explanation, I'll try what you suggest and feedback (I'm using using GH5 raw still pictures converted to DNG using Adobe DNG converter)

I am currently trying to get an official explanation on correct settings directly with the Blackmagic support team, quite a process... they do not seem to understand the question or do not have a recommandation to provide, the latest email is as followed, but after trying, it does not give an acceptable starting point compared to Lightroom (see attached screenshot).

"As you have transcoded these clips to DNG, the way in which these are decoded inside Resolve is configured under Settings > Camera RAW > CinemaDNG.
Going forwards, I would recommend changing this from it's default "Camera Metadata" to either CinemaDNG default or Project and applying the Pre-tone curve option.

This should give you more control over the way in which the clip is decoded before the Color Management is applied."

Noel Sterrett wrote:In Camera Raw:

Color Space: Blackmagic Design
Gamma: Blackmagic Design Film

Add an FX Color Space Transform before the clip:

Input Color Space: Blackmagic Design Film Gen1
Input Gama: Blackmagic Design Film
Output Color Space: Timeline
Output Gamma: Timeline

Apply Forward OOTF: not checked
Apply Reverse OOTF: not checked

Set the Timeline to:
Timeline Color Space: Blackmagic Design Wide Gamut Gen4 - Linear

Add an FX Color Space Transform after the clip (or to the Timeline for all clips):

Input Color Space: Timeline
Input Gama: Timeline
Output Color Space: 709
Output Gamma: 709

Apply Forward OOTF: not checked
Apply Reverse OOTF: not checked

You can just copy this RAW/node structure to other clips as a starting point.

While it is a bit involved, I have found it produces the best colors from Sigma fp DNG's. They are quite simply stunning.

Thanks for all the comments above. Now have had time to get back to this and did some testing on V15 (stuck on 15 due to hw restrictions).

Overall, the quality of the timelapse that I can achieve by using DNGs instead of JPEGs is just so much better! But still some strange behaviour that I'm wondering about.

So on V15, CinemaDNG default creates a totally greyis image so needed to use "Clip" with raw converter settings.

For input/timeline color space I'm seeing a bit surprising results. I have color management on and use a 709 timeline. For the V15 raw conversion, I did not find a way to set output color space? Setting the clip input color space seems to have no impact on the DNG material, regardless of setting, the output in the color edit window is the same? Also, if I change timeline color space, same effect, no impact on the colors in the color grading window. So on V15, seems the DNG raw converted output is interpreted "as is"? The other clip (based on JPEG) behaves as expected and changes with changing timeline and or input color space?

Also it seems at least on V15, I cannot keyframe the raw conversion, at least it does not show up in the nodes? Is there any other way to keyframe raw input than creating multiple tracks each with a separate raw conversion setting and then fading between those?

RAW settings can't be keyframed, even in 17. But since DR is converting all input into a very wide 32-bit float space, you can do what you like with all the other tools, including keyframing.