January 20, 2009

Canon 5D .mov files crushed +fix

Prolost has been looking at Canon 5D QuickTime .mov h.264 files in the last few posts and has some Crushing News: the crushed blacks associated with the 5D movies is a failure of the AVC decoders in NLEs.

The fix using Apple Color to access the full dynamic range was discussed elsewhere, including by Cineform, which has codecs of many flavors. Other sometimes expensive solutions have surfaced and include codec alternatives to the one in QT: Rhozet Carbon Coder and CoreAVC, although they may pose other problems. Supposedly, utilities like MPEGStreamClip and SUPER can be used but you'd still have to trick the app into not using QT to decode. Movie samples can be found in previous posts like DSLR HD movie samples.

This sort of news seems important because we'll be getting these files to work with and because photographers will now be doing video. That's fine as long as they use Photoshop for video as Russell Brown instructs them to, but more challenging in competition once they clue into After Effects and NLEs.

Update: Prolost reports Quicktime 7.6 Fixes 5D Movies, though the gamma shift and other problems may be lurking; see Prolost post comments as usual. Planet5d is following 5D news...

No comments: