So I have been shooting footage with my iPhone using the Black Magic Camera app recording to ProRES Raw on an external hard drive. Footage of my son, in the back yard and at the Ren Fair, shot at 23.976., in Open Gate 4:3 4224×3024.
The first thing I noticed is that the clips all showed slightly different frame rates from 23.976 to 24.1 thanks to variable frame rate on the iPhone (interestingly they all show up as 23.976 in DaVinci Resolve). And once I set the color management for the clips to ProRes RAW I was able to use color mode.
I put permanent scopes up, because that is how I do work when color correcting and was surprised to see that this caused the pop up scope to be extremely low resolution to the point of being unusable, and think it show what is doing on your existing scopes instead of whatever is happening here.
The actual controls work pretty well, though I question the controls that they have selected as the main controls. Now I balance a shot with the color wheels normally, shadow mid and high. Here you use the contrast to kind of set the high, then you have to go in to do it with the darks on exposure to control the darks. I would love to be able to make high mid and low exposure broken out into controls (I have room on my 32” monitors) instead of having them as sub controls under exposure., especially since this is how Lumetri and DaVinci work and would make for an easier shot balance.
And removing color casts in shots, I personally find it much easier and faster to have a color wheel and be able to just dial it in, instead of picking a color and trying it individually. Yes it is doable, but for me a color wheel is faster even if it is not the same up down or left right control as the other controls. I feel like they actually made this slower to keep the same control scheme.
Copying and pasting the grade is super easy here, and works exactly how it should work., and is very fast and more intuitive than DaVinci’s middle click to copy a grade.
The fact that the default is not to always shows scopes though to me means you are not working at truly matching shots, but more doing it to your eye which can lie. Also I had an overexposed shot and was surprised at how easily this lets you push it even more out of limits. Sure it didn’t look as bad as it would have in Lumetri pushing it out of range, but it was still totally pegged out of range, I could never deliver this shot in a commercial.
Overall I was able to quickly make shot kind of match to my eye, but getting them to really match would certainly take a lot more time, and I was going to, but turn i was going to warp stabilize the shots to make my handheld a little more steady (sure I she a camera cage and handles from Neewer, but it needs steadying).
And this is where my plans to use Premiere to play with color and edit down this footage fell apart, because on a fresh install of the whole Adobe suite, warp stabilizer kept failing. It failed on the full size clips, it failed on the clips scaled in an 1920×1080 sequence, and even as nested clips in that sequence, which should solve the scaling issues (though I would rather have them fix having to do this than do a new color correction scheme). And yes I know it works better in after effects, but I need to do this to every clip and it then loses the RAW aspect to render it out.
Honestly I am going to also throws these in DaVinci Resolve and color correct and stabilize. And I think it will go faster in DaVinci, and I think the grade will look better, and I know it will be better to the standards I need to deliver to, vs being matched by eye.
Sure Davinci is harder to learn, but it is literally the pro standard for color correction, and I am still not convinced that this “easier” method is really all that great to replace Lumetri. I kind of wish they had come up with a way to have the standard, but do it easier and quicker so you were still using the same methods with color wheels and levels as every other program instead of it’s method that doesn’t teach you at all how pros do it.
I threw the first overexposed shot into DaVinci and just using the raw settings was able to make the iPhone shot look so much better, much less overexposed even though iPhone’s ProRES RAW is only a partial raw. Not happy with DaVinci’s stabilization either, so will try in both After Effects and Fusion and see what looks best.
I will play with Premiere’s color mode you wanna really put it in the box some more, but so far I am not convinced this is the right way to go. I think this is the non-pro method that goes with removing Pro from Premier’s name.