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White Balance when working with RAW

White Balance when working with RAW

Anders, you are exactly correct in what you suggest as the workflow. The EVF or LCD drive signals are white balanced to permit on set viewing, and that value is attached as metadata to the REDCODE RAW data stream.

In REDCINE, the white balance value can be used as your starting point for whte balancing the footage. The great thing about RAW though, is that your white balance in a shot isn't quite right, or if it is varying shot to shot, just change it.
 
Stuart English said:
The great thing about RAW though, is that your white balance in a shot isn't quite right, or if it is varying shot to shot, just change it.

I get that part of the concept, but I'm curious as to how far you can push it:

Haakon said:
are you able to shift it as much as you like in any direction without any kind of image degredation at all?
 
Current plan is named presets + user number for WB colour temperature setting. As for range and precision, that's TBD.

You can't shift totally in post without degredation, but you can shift an awful lot without any nasties. Best way to see for yourself is to shoot RAW DSLR stills and process it Lightroom or Aperture.
 
Graeme,

Thanks. I'm a PC guy so no Aperture for me, but I'm checking out Lightroom as we speak. I've got a great dSLR, so I'll do some playing around this weekend and see if I can educate myself a little more on the RAW front.
 
*Smacks forehead* Oh yeah I had completely forgotten RAW doesn't apply the white balance until you "develop". Stupid Stupid Stupid.

I know you're probably still trying to work this out, but once we've chosen our preferred whitebalance how do we import this into an application such as Shake, Nuke or Fusion? Will we be able to import it just as any other codec or will we have to process the footage in REDCINE to an uncompressed Cineon style file format? It would be nice to be able to just apply all of the RedCine modifications to the RAW data using a custom LUT created by REDCINE which is equivalent to the processing without acutally modifying the data necessarily yet.

I like the idea of the low bandwidth compressed RAW, but don't want to lose a lot of quality if I transcode to a useful comprssed format.
 
Considering how long it takes to update the white balance on a single RAW photo in Aperture on my laptop, you guys must do some serious performance-tweaking to get the RAW-stream to play in realtime. Especially considering that all dSLR's I've used to date shoot less than the 11 Mpixels you get out of this bad boy.

Or will the "online" RAW editing (hopefully in FCPro) only be possible on a Octo-Core Mac Pro? The timing for when those will probably be out seems to coincide nicely with the RED shipping date...
 
Well, Aperture 1.5 seems a lot faster :-)

Of course, you only need to white balance all 12mp if you can see them all on your monitor at once :-) or when you render an effect. Not much way around that, but we'll write the code and optimize it to go as fast as it can, for which we have some tricks up our sleaves.

Graeme
 
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