What are people using to extract raw stills?

S

Steel

Active member
This happens more on passion/fun projects than on paid gigs, but I sometimes shoot 8K60 raw on the R5C to extract stills later for further editing.
I usually get the video image to roughly where I want it (WB, LUT) within FCPX, and then export the frame as a TIFF and tweak it in Lightroom.

But is there any way to extract a raw frame? Back in the day with the OG C500 you could grab an individual .rmf file (or could you?? I wasn't doing much frame grabbing back then). I know that REDs allow for an actual raw image still to be saved, but because of the way that Canon has implemented CRL, I don't think this is possible.
I can't even find a way to export stills within Cinema Raw Development... Digital Photo Professional has a raw movie tool, but the program doesn't support the R5C...

Is there any way to get closer to the original raw sensor data? I'd love to be able to extract raw stills and then edit them as photos, much more comfortably, within Lightroom.

Thanks~
 
CRL isn't as "RAW" as other formats, especially stills formats, but I would think you'd have to use Canon's CRD to truly manipulate the data and then export ProRes or something and grab a TIFF out of that (which I also do in FCP like you mentioned).

Not the best method, but these days the quality is so high and the generation loss is so low that not many are going to notice a difference in the final result (but of course some captures won't be possible without proper higher shutter speeds, which usually aren't used in traditional video-making).
 
Steel said:
This happens more on passion/fun projects than on paid gigs, but I sometimes shoot 8K60 raw on the R5C to extract stills later for further editing.
I usually get the video image to roughly where I want it (WB, LUT) within FCPX, and then export the frame as a TIFF and tweak it in Lightroom.

But is there any way to extract a raw frame? Back in the day with the OG C500 you could grab an individual .rmf file (or could you?? I wasn't doing much frame grabbing back then). I know that REDs allow for an actual raw image still to be saved, but because of the way that Canon has implemented CRL, I don't think this is possible.
I can't even find a way to export stills within Cinema Raw Development... Digital Photo Professional has a raw movie tool, but the program doesn't support the R5C...

Is there any way to get closer to the original raw sensor data? I'd love to be able to extract raw stills and then edit them as photos, much more comfortably, within Lightroom.

Thanks~
Click to expand...

I don't believe you can grab a raw video frame and export it as a single frame/file that maintains the raw data in just that one frame. I also own an R5C and if this IS possible I'd love to be proven wrong.

Of course if you've captured 8k raw video and then wanted to color grade it in your NLE and export it as a single frame then that's probably possible. I don't know of any NLE that won't let you grab a single frame from your timeline for download. So that workflow kind of gets you the raw data still.

But the video codec and the raw stills format are two totally different things.
 
DustinSchmidt said:
I don't believe you can grab a raw video frame and export it as a single frame/file that maintains the raw data in just that one frame. I also own an R5C and if this IS possible I'd love to be proven wrong.

Of course if you've captured 8k raw video and then wanted to color grade it in your NLE and export it as a single frame then that's probably possible. I don't know of any NLE that won't let you grab a single frame from your timeline for download. So that workflow kind of gets you the raw data still.

But the video codec and the raw stills format are two totally different things.
Click to expand...

My first thought was also Cinema Raw Development, but I guess it also depends on how the CRL format is implemented. Since it is compressed, it is probably not a sequence of complete frames (All-Intra) that you can extract a RAW data for?
 
Thanks for the input, all. Pretty much what I was expecting~

NorBro, you mention manipulating the data is CRD, then exporting to ProRes, then grabbing a still...Just curious if there's any reason to recommend that versus going through Resolve? It makes sense that Canon software would have the best access to the actual raw pixel values, but it seems like Resolve has this, too? And maybe even FCPX?? (although FCPX gives you really nothing for Canon raw - you get a few values you can change if you're shooting ProRes raw, but still nothing like Resolve).

norway - yeah, it's not a sequence of complete frames. At least they're not saved in any way that's accessible to the end user.

For now, I'll give CRD a go, since I've got to transcode all the files to ProRes for editing anyway (although it sure ain't the fastest way to do it). I suppose as long as nothing is crushed or clipped after the original raw adjustments are made then everything is there anyway.

Finally, just to double check, no one has come across a way of grabbing frames directly from CRD, eh? Back when the 1DC came out Canon was really touting the benefits of being able to grab frames from 4K, so to not have any kind of frame grab feature in their main raw software seems like a pretty big miss to me.
 
The only reason I could think of which you pretty much followed up with is that one would assume Canon's engineering has the best access to the data (you'd hope, right, ha).

And not that it's necessarily complicated for other software developers to have as well, but because they may or may not be receiving the best support from the/a camera company.

I say that because of my particular experience with a RED Komodo. Prior to that camera, FCP was known to have great support for REDCODE RAW with others like the Scarlet/Epic/etc. but for some reason half of the RAW settings didn't work in Inspector for whatever this new HQ, MQ, LQ was (this was like 1.5 years ago).

This really frustrated me and I reached out to RED and the rep (surprisingly, at least to me) said they knew about it and were pretty much waiting on Apple to fix some stuff. Not sure how it is today but that experience continued to validate my thoughts on general industry miscommunication and incompetence.

So, yeah, that's my only thought on that but if the CRL settings work great in Resolve and the footage looks great (that is all that matters) then you could use that too, and it would probably be way faster than CRD, which was brutally slow when I used to use it.

[And what FCP support is there for RAW settings for CRL? Last I checked a few months ago there was NONE...you could only import the footage.]
 
Steel said:
Thanks for the input, all. Pretty much what I was expecting~

NorBro, you mention manipulating the data is CRD, then exporting to ProRes, then grabbing a still...Just curious if there's any reason to recommend that versus going through Resolve? It makes sense that Canon software would have the best access to the actual raw pixel values, but it seems like Resolve has this, too? And maybe even FCPX?? (although FCPX gives you really nothing for Canon raw - you get a few values you can change if you're shooting ProRes raw, but still nothing like Resolve).

norway - yeah, it's not a sequence of complete frames. At least they're not saved in any way that's accessible to the end user.

For now, I'll give CRD a go, since I've got to transcode all the files to ProRes for editing anyway (although it sure ain't the fastest way to do it). I suppose as long as nothing is crushed or clipped after the original raw adjustments are made then everything is there anyway.

Finally, just to double check, no one has come across a way of grabbing frames directly from CRD, eh? Back when the 1DC came out Canon was really touting the benefits of being able to grab frames from 4K, so to not have any kind of frame grab feature in their main raw software seems like a pretty big miss to me.
Click to expand...

Hi Steel - I just opened up CRD, and the user interface feels like going back to Windows 3.1. I looked everywhere, but couldn't find an "export still" button.

I'd say your best option is probably to Grab stills in the Color Page of Resolve. If you work with Canon Raw Light in Resolve you get excellent results pretty much out of the box (maybe tweaking the primaries slightly).
 
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