Earlier, I posted that I had filmed quite a bit of comparison footage that I was not able to process, because of an “LV_REC” error. Thanks to “a.d.” on the Magic Lantern RAW processing forum, I was able to figure out how to use a hex editor to copy the file footer code from a functional RAW file, and paste it onto a malfunctioning file. It didn’t work 100% of the time (and it was incredibly time-consuming), but I did salvage enough footage to post a decent comparison video.

My first impression, once I put the H264 and RAW footage back-to-back, was that the H264 looks very good! Sure, the RAW files have a tremendous amount of detail, but the colors and the overall punch of the ungraded H264 files are often much more appealing to me than the minimally-processed RAW files. The difference, of course, is that the nature of RAW allows one to grade the footage to look however one wants, while maintaining data integrity and clarity, so it’s difficult to make an apples-to-apples comparison.

I can authoritatively state, however, that the workflow, as it stands now, for RAW footage is not for the faint of heart (or the short on time). First, I had to copy the RAW files from the card to my Mac’s desktop (which seemed to be the only place the RAW2DNG utility would acknowledge the existence of the files). Then, RAW2DNG would take the single RAW file (except for the ones that didn’t work, because the Magic Lantern module is still a work in progress), make a folder for it, and and create an individual DNG image for each frame of the video. Then, I had to open those DNG files in Photoshop (which pops up the Canon Adobe Raw editing interface), take the horrible-looking RAW file, make it look reasonably decent, and batch process all the DNG files for each clip into TIF files (as opposed to JPG, to maintain quality). Then, I imported all the TIF folders into Premiere, put them – one at a time – on a sequence, and exported each one as a ProRes file.

Boy, was that time-consuming! Not to mention the fact that, with the RAW file, the DNG folder, the TIF folder, and the ProRes file, I now have FOUR versions of each clip taking up room on my harddrive. And these are not small files.

My initial conclusions are as follows:

1) Don’t fall into the trap of suddenly thinking the Canon’s H264 files are worthless. They still look really good, even compared to RAW.

2) Until some enterprising developers develop a more streamlined solution to the RAW-to-ProRes transcoding process, or until Adobe allows for direct importing of RAW files into Premiere, the workflow is most likely not worth the effort, for most users.

With that said, I went ahead and shot a simple commercial in RAW (more specifically, in RAW and H264, since I didn’t have confidence in the RAW files), which I’ll be editing this week. That process will give me some insight into the advantages and disadvantages of shooting and working with DSLR RAW on an actual project. Stay tuned for that!