Not too long ago, I posted about my post process for Magic Lantern RAW video, which relies heavily on Blackmagic Design's DaVinci Resolve. This is in contrast to some Ginger HDR processes that allow you to stay completely in the Adobe realm, no proxies needed. Many would still like to employ Resolve in their color correction, however, since it's a very powerful industry standard tool. One significant problem with the Magic Lantern/Resolve proposition was a type of 'pink fringing' artifacting that occurred in areas of high contrast. Now Magic Lantern-shooting Resolve users may rejoice: from the looks of things, the newly released(-ish) Davinci Resolve 10 fixes these fringing problems outright.
I've read a few explanations and speculations about what causes pink fringing -- which, it should be emphasized, hardly appears (if at all) when using Adobe Camera RAW workflows instead of Resolve. Dave Thomas, who created one of the videos cited in my own walkthrough, had this to say on YouTube:
The pink casts around the edges is a known issue caused by the black level setting on recorded files and has been changing between ML builds - last I checked it was no completely fixed yet in firmware and raw2cdng. The 5dmkII (but not mk3) moire and aliasing I agree is a problem that Adobe RAW handles somewhat better, though the Resolve Full ($1000) when used with a GPU supposedly has a sharpen mask that improves.
The color correction visible in my video (and on its own here) used a workaround explained very quickly by YouTube user Tekazurik, posted on that same Dave Thomas video:
There are tutorials online on how to remove the pink fringing, but the short version is to create a serial node and then a layer node. Set the top node's saturation down to 0 and the bottom node's Y gain to 0.01. Now you've separated the color data out. Make sure the layer mixer node's composite mode is set to add so the image looks normal. Then go to the bottom node with just the color data and set the sharpen radius up until the fringing goes away.
Some users, however, felt this workaround was too much of a compromise to be considered a viable alternative to an Adobe Camera RAW workflow. (Even though appending nodes in Resolve makes applying 'de-fringing' corrections to many clips very fast, it isn't really ideal). More recently I'd downloaded Resolve 10 Lite, mostly to play around with its new NLE features a bit. It didn't even dawn on me to try looking at some of my previously shot ML RAW material until this post in the Magic Lantern forums by user ted ramasola:
I have seen the other threads announcing the availability of resolve 10 , I decided to carefully word the title of mine to indicate it solve the pink fringing as it is a major issue that made others avoid resolve and use acr instead. Also, some users have no idea about the pink fringing at all and what caused it. Hopefully this will catch their attention.
To prove it to myself, I re-exported some clips out of Resolve 10, being careful to match the settings I employed with Resolve 9 to create my original proxy files. That means that these are grabs of the same frames of the same shots, both encoded in ProRes Proxy, with the same white balance, etc. No color correction has been applied to any of these -- only white balance (5600) and decoding color space (Rec. 709) had to be set.
Be sure to 'open in new tabs' for better comparison:
The first thing spelled out by stacking these 'before/afters' and toggling between them: the fringing was a lot more pervasive than I'd originally realized. It definitely made its presence known previously, but it only really stuck out to an offensive extent when manifesting in tiny dots and spots. Now it's striking to see how inherent the problem was to the imagery, without corrective steps taken.
I think this development is a very exciting one for Magic Lantern shooters -- as far as I can tell, things just keep getting better and better. The ability to use a powerhouse like Resolve without having to worry about fringing workarounds is just another step forward. Thanks, as always, to all the magicians at Magic Lantern (and Blackmagic Design).
How will this upgrade change the way you work with your ML RAW? If you were previously on the fence about using Resolve due to such fringing issues -- does this seal the deal for you? How have you fared with your own fringing workarounds?
Link: Download DaVinci Resolve 10 Beta -- Blackmagic Support Page
[via Magic Lantern Forums]
