Wedding (RAW)

Scott Freestyle

Well-known member
RAW helped me big time with this wedding. The room that the couple got married was very dark... So I had to shoot wide open and at 3200 ISO... As much as these camera's can shoot at these ISO's,... the image breaks pretty badly, there is certainly a huge loss in detail... thankfully ML_Raw helped a great deal by having all the extra detail in the raw file and the ability to sharpen...

My friend the groom was nervous.. until he saw the bar at the reception and his inhibitions then evaporated :D

 
Wow awesome work man! I don't normally comment on weddings, but this was excellent. Nice job!
 
Thank you for the nice comments guys....

Yeah, I shot RAW all day. I'm using 17th March.. 1.23 FW.. the newest firmware. It has very few problems... I put in my ML_ settings "in camera" then I make a copy on the desktop and put it on a couple of SD cards... if I get any problems, I swap it out for a new SD and Im immediately ready again!!. I haven't had to do that too man times, but it has saved me. I will never use h264 again.. I'm running around with a full frame alexa..., thats why NAB holds no interest for me this year...The 5D3 with RAW is a beast.. and once you ge used to the workflow, its pretty fast to process.
 
how many cards do you need for a wedding? Raw is quite the GB monster.

I was wondering this too. If I am shooting JUST for a highlight edit I could see RAW working, but to capture the entire day I usually shoot 2 hours of footage just on one camera (usually we have two cameras). Nice work by the way!
 
Very excellent Scott! Thanks for the info so far. A few more questions:

Did you process with ACR or Resolve?
NR with ACR or Neat Video?
How much storage did you need? Did you delete the raw files and keep DNGs?
What tool to convert to DNGs (or cDNG)?
Were you transferring footage to a laptop etc. while shooting?

After many tests and shoots, I haven't found a higher quality workflow than ACR+AE to DNxHD/ProRes. I keep the cDNG's around so I can go back into ACR+AE and make adjustments later if needed (e.g. shadows/highlights, noise reduction, etc.). chmee's raw2cDNG tool is fast but does not include vertical stripe removal (mainly an issue with low-light shots). I think he's working on adding it in a future release.
 
Hey guys.. thanks again.

Ok firstly, I use Windows 7... I have 7 64GB Komputerbay Cards and I shot from 1 o'clock in the afternoon to 10:30 into the evening.


I processed with ACR and used the ACR NR. The room where the couple got married was very dark. I was shooting at f2.8 @3200 ISO.. there were a few places that needed a little extra NR on the rendered file and so I used Neat Video for that... but very little.

I have x2 5d3's and I used around 6 cards... shooting ML @ 1920 x 872

When I got home I dropped one card on to the PC and converted it using MLV converter 1.9 (which is the awesome by the way).. I could then continue dropping the MLV files on to my external harddrive while working on creating presets in ACR with the files that had been converted. Then its simply rinse and repeat...

I generally delete the MLV files and keep the DNG's just in case I think there could be improvements made.... but once the files have all been rendered out and the job is completed, I delete the DNG's, although I still haven't deleted these particular files yet, because I'm actually processing some RAW stills that the bride has requested.. (how great is it that we can process the RAW stills from video.)

Its not the ideal way of doing things..and there are certainly faster ways .. Andre Meyer (Beauty in Nature) has a great workflow using proxies with resolve... but I actually enjoy working with ACR.. I put on Joe Rogan's podcast and get to work!! :D

I hope that has helped answer some your questions guys!!!

If you have a 5D3 and you install ML_RAW.. as far as I am concerned, you have one of the best camera's money can buy. Its full frame, small, takes tiny batteries, has affordable storage (in comparison to other RAW capture).. can capture sound with MLV.. and is 99.9 percent of the time very stable and intuitive to work with.
 
No... there is no need to do that, I have enough cards to see me through the day, I have another coming in the post so I'll have 8 giving me 512GB...
 
You may very well be right. If you shoot at 1920 x 818, you will get a lot more time per card....and stability is improved... thats why the largest res I go is 1920 x 960... If I need another aspect ratio, I would select a lower res and scale up, you still have tons more detail and it looks awesome upscaled... so no problems!!
 
Your getting confused with slo mo...

You can shoot at 1920 x 1080/960/872/818 all at 23.976.... When you shoot slo mo it requires the extra rendered frames, you have to select 50/60 (PAL/NTSC), but in doing that the resolution is "automagically" changed to 1920 x 508 (or whatever specified ratio.) This then has to be "stretched" to be corrected. Its a way of getting around the amount of data that would be required to shoot those extra frames for slo mo..
 
amazing shots. I could never get clean images in a wedding venue or reception like that with my gh3... Not even close with my 25mm 1.4 lens. Great job
 
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