Today, we're going to talk about a plugin for Premiere Pro
that will allow you to edit Blackmagic RAW footage
right in Premiere with full control of the raw metadata,
and I'll even throw in some grading tips while we're at it.
Let's get Undone!
[offbeat music]
♪ Gerald Undone ♪
♪ He's crazy ♪
What's happening, everybody?
I'm Gerald Undone and I like big LUTs, and I cannot lie.
So, as someone who recently acquired
the Blackmagic Pocket 4K--
which I'm shooting this video on right now, by the way.
Let me know how you think it compares to the GH5
that I used to shoot on-- Anyway, I was excited
to play around with the new Blackmagic RAW,
but I'm still not very fast with DaVinci Resolve yet,
so I wanted to see if there was a way
that I could edit it in Premiere Pro.
And so I discovered the software from Autokroma
called BRAW studio,
which claimed to do that very thing.
Now, I'm not affiliated with Autokroma
or this plugin in any way, but I will put a link
in the description, in case you want to buy it.
It goes for about $30, and I'm not going to make
any money on those sales, but I was just really impressed
with the plugin and I wanted to share with you.
It pretty much gets everything right, except for one tiny
little oddity that we'll talk about in a minute.
And one last disclaimer before we get into it,
this is not supposed to be a competition video
about Premiere vs. Resolve,
I think both programs are great and obviously
this footage was originally intended for Resolve,
and I like that program, I'm just not very fast at it yet,
but I do think that there are some circumstances in which
editing this in Premiere would be useful
and that's the main reason why I'm recommending this.
For example, if you wanted to send somebody
your Blackmagic RAW footage and they don't use Resolve,
but they're like really fast at Premiere, this would be great.
Or, if you receive Blackmagic RAW footage
from somebody else and you've never used Resolve,
you've only used Premiere.
Or, if you just have a complete project built out in Premiere
and you just wanted to use a small clip from Blackmagic Raw,
these are all great uses that you could use this plugin for.
Alright, so let me show you how it works.
I have it set up in a way here where I have my scopes
on the left hand side, my timeline down here,
obviously I can see the footage,
and then I have the Lumetri panel on top
and the effect controls on the bottom,
and this is convenient and I'll show you why.
So, when I select a clip here, and I click on it, normally
how you do with Premiere is you would see over here
you have your effects on this side including the Lumetri,
which I'm going to hide for now,
but if you click on Master now, so that's Master
for the entire shot, not just the clip that
you might have extracted with your in and out points,
when you click on that, you're going to see
BRAW Studio Source settings, because that's affecting
the entire source file, not just the clip.
And here is where the settings and license button is,
that's, we're going to click that and put in your license
that you get online to register it,
but anyway you have a few different options here.
For Decode, using-- if you set it to BRAW Default,
that's going to use the default settings
for the raw, completely ignoring
whatever settings you put into the camera.
And then if you choose camera metadata,
that's going to choose what ISO and white balance, et cetera,
that you set when you took the shot,
but because this is raw, you can actually choose "Clip",
and then change the ISO and the white balance,
non-destructively, in post.
So, with this shot here, we can see that it's set to ISO 3200.
This is the only part that I've noticed any bugs with this,
uh, interface so far and that's when you actually
click on the ISO and you go to change it,
it's not going to do it now because we're already on 3200,
so say I chose 2000, it changed fine.
But if the ISO is higher than 3200, like,
say 6400 in this case, and say I clicked on it,
I wanted to change it to 4000,
look what happens it just jumps to 3200.
It's weird and it only does it the first time now.
If I chose 3200 and now chose 4000, it's fine,
but that first time changing the ISO, if you don't change it
to the native one, it kind of bugs out
and you have to do that for every clip.
So, for example, if I jump to a new clip like this one
which is set to 6400 and I change it to 1600,
see how it went to 3200?
But now, I can change it to 1600, so the first time
that you edit a clip, the ISO seems to be buggy
and then it works on the second try.
So, just something to be aware of,
so that you make sure that your ISO,
you didn't think that you clicked it and looked away,
and that it wasn't actually set to something else.
And if the software developers are watching this, maybe if
you can see what's causing that, see if you can fix it.
Anyway, so the great part about this, though basically,
with the raw is the fact that we can change our ISO in post,
and we can also change our white balance.
And so, for this clip here for instance,
see it says White Balance Controls,
you can do As Shot, or you can do any of the,
you know, presets, but you can also choose Custom
and then dial in your colour temperature and your tint.
And again, this is all completely non-destructive,
and there's also the Highlight Recovery option,
which you would find in DaVinci Resolve,
is also available here in the Premiere Pro plugin,
and it works really well.
I'm going to show you some practical examples
in just two seconds here, and then lastly your Gamma,
you can choose Film Video or Extended Video,
which are the options available on the Blackmagic,
and then they also have some other conversions here.
And you can go in further with a custom gamma and you could
change the Gamma Controls if you wanted to affect
your saturation contrast midpoint of how the gamma
would be recorded without using one of the presets.
Now, I want to do an example using a clip
that has a significant range to show here,
and I'm going to use this one, which is funny.
This was in the previous video that I posted yesterday
showing this stuff, and there's a lot of comments about
the highlights being blown out, and you guys, a couple of you
were going crazy with the highlights thinking that
there was something wrong with the camera.
There's not, it was an artistic choice because when I bring
the highlights in to show the sky, it was a lot darker
than it was on the day, so I made it nice and bright
and I'm going to show you though, that,
that all that information is there in the camera.
You can do whatever you want even in post.
Now, in order to better demonstrate this,
I'm actually going to add a LUT,
so that we can see what we're talking about
in this flat, raw image and to do this,
I'm going to use the Leeming LUT,
because I highly recommend using this one.
I've obviously recommended them in the past for, you know,
Sony and GH5 and that kind of thing,
but I got the Blackmagic one and it works great as well
so again, still recommended.
I'm just going to turn that on and, you can see,
it's like one-stop-shop.
You just put that LUT on and you've already
got a usable image, so good job, Paul.
And then, there's nothing really done
to affect this image other than that,
but this will give us enough to see what the other effects
are doing when we change the raw stuff.
It's quick and easy to change back
because now when I click on the Master tab again
with the way that I have this workspace set up,
it's going to immediately show the Source Monitor
again up here, and not the Lumetri panel,
because we don't really want to be changing
both things at the same time, but we'd rather be able to see
our Before and After, and then still have that
big centre screen here, where we can see, like,
the finished image basically.
So, now let's say that we wanted to fine tune our exposure.
We've got the scopes on the side and we've got our image
here in the middle, and this is the one that everyone
was freaking out about because the highlights were so high.
So, let's say we wanted to turn them down.
So, we can go all the way down to 1250,
and as you can see pretty much all the information
that was in this guy, except for the sun,
which is obviously blown out,
no matter what we did, we can bring that all back.
And the reason why you can't set the ISO,
in case you didn't know how the, uh,
Blackmagic works, below 1250 is because
there's two amplifiers, basically.
Two sets of ISO and different gain brackets,
one goes from 100 up to 1000, one goes from 1250 up to 6400,
and so you can change in post anything
within that one converter,
but you can't switch to another converter in post.
So, if you just think to yourself, "Am I going
to want to use the low gain or the high gain?"
And then, know that you'll have freedom within those
two things to change them, but you can't cross over.
So, the lowest we can go in this case is 1250.
There's also that other option here I was talking about
which is called Highlight Recovery.
I think this is better demonstrated
at a little bit higher ISO, but if we check it off here,
you can see... look at that! Look what I just did!
It brought all of that colour and sun
and richness and everything back.
If we uncheck that, it has that, kind of,
hazy improper exposure kind of thing,
but just look how great that Highlight Recovery option is.
It's so good, and then we can actually increase the exposure
again if we wanted a brighter, like I did, on the day.
We go up to 2500 and we're still preserving
those details as we can see over here on the scopes,
it's only that brightest sun that's actually clipping.
We could probably even move it up to 3200
and we're still under the 100% marker there, probably
all the way up to about 4000 is when, you know, it reaches,
probably, the upper limit, anything beyond that,
you're going to add more to the clipping.
So, you actually have all the detail there
and it's just a brighter environment,
where if you did this on another camera
that wasn't, you know, doing the raw in post,
obviously, there's going to be a lot harder limits on that.
You're not going to have that Highlight Recovery thing.
There's also this exposure control here,
and I have a note about that exposure control
versus the exposure control in Lumetri.
This one is much better and I'm going to show you this
by doing a clip that I did of myself earlier,
which you can also use as a comparison of the GH5,
in this exact setup versus the Blackmagic.
OK, so here's that clip of me that I was talking about.
This was shot on the Blackmagic,
and if we look at the master here,
you can see that I had it set to 1000 ISO
but I wanted to brighten it up a little bit more,
and obviously I can't increase the ISO past 1000,
because I can't switch over to that other converter,
that other amplifier in post.
So, you have the option of either increasing
the exposure here or increasing it in Lumetri.
So, this is what it looks like when we increase it
in the exposure part of the Blackmagic Raw plugin.
Now conversely, let me show you what it looks like
if we increase it using Lumetri.
So, I'm going to reset that back to zero
and then I'll jump over to Lumetri, and set this to,
I guess, 1.4 would be the equivalent.
Now, if I just jump back and forth in the history here,
you should be able to see the differences.
So, this is the Blackmagic RAW exposure,
Lumetri exposure.
Blackmagic RAW exposure,
Lumetri exposure.
In my opinion, it has that same hazy, levelly,
weird problem where some of the skin's,
kind of, flat and some of-- it's almost like
it doesn't feel like light, it feels like you're just,
sort of, jacking up the highlights in a weird way,
where the Blackmagic RAW exposure actually looks like
more light was shone on the subject.
And so, it's a much nicer effect and it's great that
that's included and I would highly recommend
doing your exposure there,
not even bother with it with Lumetri.
Now using these examples of me, I'm going to talk a little bit
about the white balance and how that's convenient as well.
So, let's say that you shot using the way they would
have to do with a lot of other cameras where you set
your white balance, and then maybe you weren't
quite happy with it in post, when you looked at it.
Well, maybe you would normally go into Lumetri here,
like I have for this example, maybe you cool it off
a little bit, or add a little bit of the magenta,
uh, tint to take away from the green,
that's common that you would do that with a GH5.
And so you get an image that you thought
you were happy with in the end.
Well, with the white balance customization,
you don't even have to do that.
So, if I jump over to this shot, which by the way,
is shot at a different T-stop,
so it's definitely softer and I'm not even focused
on myself, but ignore that.
Let's just talk about the colour.
You can see that the colour is actually pretty close,
but if we look at the clip over here, there's no white balance
adjustments made and that's because if I click on Master,
we're going to see the raw and you can see I've done
the adjustments down here by shifting
the colour temperature down to 4700 and the tint up to 22.
And, the best part about that is once you sort of fine tune
in post, or what you like, because obviously,
you can really take your time with it
when you finish your grade and set the white balance
to make it match everything and just really, really
enjoy what you have, then you can just record
those numbers in your, in your brain, 4700 and 22,
and then you can go into the camera and punch them
in under custom white balance
and so now you've basically did the white balance reverse.
Rather than doing it in the camera,
you did it in post and put it into your camera.
It's really, really cool and you can still change it again
afterwards the next time that you record if you decide
you don't like that, you still have non-destructive ability
to change as much as you want, but it's neat how you can
tweak it in post and then put it back into the camera
because both of these are using the same
Blackmagic RAW metadata language.
Also, another quick advantage while I have these two shots up
is the benefit of the 12-bit raw, because often people ask,
"Will you really see difference with the extra bit depth?"
You can definitely see it here in these shots,
if you look at the GH5 footage,
look at the banding in the background around the lights,
and now let's jump over to the Blackmagic RAW,
no banding at all, despite the exposure actually
being increased higher and probably being pushed
a little bit further, there's, the banding is completely gone.
So, that would be one benefit.
Now, there may not be a lot of it in this shot
and maybe it's not that big of a deal,
but depending on the circumstances that can actually
add up to be quite a significant improvement.
OK, now let's work on a different clip
and I'll give you, sort of, a whole outline
of my process of dealing with the raw and then
mixing it in with Lumetri and Premiere Pro.
Now, the first thing I like to do is apply a LUT to it,
because I shoot these things with a preview LUT
on the Blackmagic, so I know what I'm, you know,
trying to accomplish, and it's a lot easier
to figure out how you want to set things
when you already have your LUT on the screen.
So, we're going to jump over here to the test shots
on the Lumetri Colour Panel here,
and I'm just going to turn that LUT back on that
I was using from Leeming LUT Pro.
And again, it does a lot of the work for us which is great.
Now, I'm going to click on Master
and that's going to bring up the RAW stuff here
and I'm going to use this to tune the parts of the image
that are non-destructive, that I want to do first
before I even go into the Lumetri to apply
any kind of grade, and so I'm going to brighten
this one up because I find that it looks a little bit dull,
so we're at 1600 now, so let's jump up to, say, 3200.
We have a little bit of stuff that's clipped up
here, but it looks like it was clipped when we shot it.
Let's drop all the way back down to 1250, and yeah,
we have a solid white bar on the scope,
so this is out of range from the get go.
So, we can still brighten up the rest of the image,
and we're not really about losing anything else.
We'll check off the Highlight Recovery box, and look!
It brought back that stuff up there
that we had a problem with.
The Highlight Recovery thing is outstanding.
Now, we're going to jump down here
to the White Balance section, and if there was anything
that we didn't like, like say maybe it was, like,
ah that's, I'll give you an example, because you can
always just change it to taste afterwards too.
So, let's say that you shot it extremely warm,
like 8000 Kelvin, and then you looked at this now
with the LUT on and you were like,
"Uh wow, that's, that's way warmer than I want",
now, obviously, you can make some adjustments in post,
and they're non-destructive, so that's great,
so I just did that randomly at, like, 5300, sure.
Maybe we want it a little bit warmer 'cause maybe
you want to give it a warmer, kind of, sun vibe.
So, we'll do 5200 and we'll leave it like that,
and now you can evaluate whether you find it too green
or too magenta and maybe you think that the sky is a bit
too green and maybe you think that this log is too magenta,
so you decide that you're going to bring it down to 20.
You're like, "Oh no, that's too green."
-[key clacking] -You know, at 25, there, okay!
We're happy with the white balance and now we've actually
done a large portion of our colour correction
right here before we even move into the Lumetri panel.
Now, all we have to do is click on the shot again,
the individual shot, not the master,
and then we click on Lumetri, and now we're affecting
just that clip with the Lumetri Colour Panel.
So, if I adjust the white balance here,
as we can see, it's working now.
And, like I said, I wouldn't do exposure here,
just move right past that if you wanted to go back
and do an exposure adjustment,
do it back in the raw panel. But maybe you like
more contrast so you wanted to increase the contrast
quite a bit and maybe you wanted to bump the shadows
a little bit, so there, you can do that,
and Saturation Control, sometimes I-- I think that
the shots come out a little bit too saturated,
so maybe drop that down to 93, and it's that easy.
Basically, like, obviously, you can do whatever you want now,
you can apply a grade, you could, you know,
put a vignette or a fade film, put some sort of grain on it,
whatever else you want to do at this point is up to you.
But, you can see it's actually incredibly easy,
this combination of Blackmagic RAW mixed with the Leeming LUT,
mixed with very simple Lumetri Controls,
and the end result usually comes out pretty close
to what you would get from DaVinci Resolve, which I can
show you for a little bit of a comparison here.
So, I'm going to pop open Resolve now,
just see-- in case you're worried that you're losing
out if you do it in Premiere instead of Resolve.
OK, so that shot of the log was 44, so I'm just
going to drag that here into Resolve and great,
we'll just go from this little segment here.
Now, if I click on that and I open up the colour panel,
we have the same Camera Raw settings down here,
and it's the exact same thing.
We can use Clip, so 3200,
and then the colour temperature was 5200...
and 25, and then we applied the Leeming LUT,
so we'll just click on LUTs and I have it in my Favourites
here, so double click on that.
So, that Leeming LUT is applied and next up,
we lower the saturation a little bit,
so I don't know, let's bump this down to, say, 45
and maybe a little bit more, let's go 42,
and then we just add in some contrast,
which, I don't really like the contrast tools in here,
so maybe I'll just do a little bit of a curve.
I'll just bring this, this bottom one in,
and we can put a couple quick little points on the...
...the s-curve here
and we also use the Highlight Recovery in the raw,
I'm just removing this, we'll check that off.
OK, so I just did something quick like that.
Let's jump over to Premiere and take a look,
and I think you can see it's actually pretty
close already, with just that little bit of work.
Now, obviously the shot isn't at that exact same point,
I think, but anyway you can see
the shots are really, really similar.
Obviously, Resolve works great for this,
that's what it was intended to do,
but you're not really losing anything
by doing it in Premiere, and I'm really, really happy
with how this plugin works, except for that one
little bug where you have to choose the ISO twice sometimes.
But, it's neat how you can tweak it in post and then
put it-- [slow-mo] --back
[normal] because this is all using the same metadata.
It's all using the same Blackmagic RAW metadanga--
metadanga-- because both of these are using
the same metadat-- Interfaces are using
the same metadat-- Yeah, these are using the same
metaday-- made it-- metadanga-- metadanguh!
I can't say that!
But I hope you found this one helpful or at least
entertaining and if you did, make sure you leave it
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feel free to hit the dislike button twice.
Alright... I'm done!