5D Mark iii Raw Video Processing?

I know that the 5d mark iii's raw video is going to be completely superior to its non raw quality, however the editing looks ridiculously long, I've skimmed around here and there for videos and it would take people around 30 minutes just to import files and change file names before they even got to color correction and those people actually knew what they were doing too. Is there a shorter way to edit Raw video files or do you just have to go through the long process for that good of quality?

Video editing/conversion/man​ipulation is a very hardware intensive task, and only will get worse with 4K. Fast processors, tons of ram, and separate video cards/memory/processor​s are probably the norm to do video 1080 or higher?

TeamSpeed wrote in post #16892814
Video editing/conversion/man​ipulation is a very hardware intensive task, and only will get worse with 4K. Fast processors, tons of ram, and separate video cards/memory/processor​s are probably the norm to do video 1080 or higher?

I have a macbook pro retina with 8gb of ram and an ssd along with intel i7, so as far as hardware goes, I think I should be just fine

Having a beefy machine goes a long way. Video editing is processor heavy so having an i7 is good. What I do to make it smoother is to plan everything out and shoot the video in segments instead of one long, continous video. It's easier to work with ten 1GB files than one big 10GB file.

jonathanheierle wrote in post #16893055
I have a macbook pro retina with 8gb of ram and an ssd along with intel i7, so as far as hardware goes, I think I should be just fine

Um, no.

Scatterbrained wrote in post #16893103
Um, no.

Agreed.

It's better than my image editing machine, that's for sure. It might be adequate for one short HD video. It's leagues behind most modern video processing workstations. (I think my wife's video machine has 32GB of ram, three internal drives plus 15TB of external workspace - and it's certainly not top of the line.)

My guess is that if you're shooting raw video, you're going to completely fill up your internal drive with media on your first meaningful projects.

If you really consider what's involved in raw video, and how it differs from standard compressed video, you'll grasp why it's so time/space/cycle intensive.

edit:
The camera has built-in hardware dedicated to converting sensor data to video frames. The computer has to do it in software.
Also, the raw files are simply huge, compared to frames of HD video. Like, a whole order of magnitude larger in both pixel dimension and filesize.

jonathanheierle wrote in post #16893055
I have a macbook pro retina with 8gb of ram and an ssd along with intel i7, so as far as hardware goes, I think I should be just fine

The i7 and 8gb of ram will help, the SSD won't. A separate GPU with 4gb or ram or so would go a long way though.

Actually RAW video may not need the same hardware as regular video. Yes, it takes a while to get all the .jpegs made, but for instance using Premier Pro, I can render the output much more quickly than a 'regular' video because most of the processing is done in the raw converter. To me the bottleneck is loading the dng's in PS and saving them. I'm not sure what holds up the process in loading them, but saving them is pure cpu.

Having said that, the difference in cpu power of different i7's is staggering (at least a factor of two), so I have no idea how quick a retina pro is. I have a i7 2960XM, it's OK but just about enough. You can probably go online and check how fast it is compared to other i7's.

Actually loading the DNGs into the raw converter is a big issue, I've never managed to load more than 2000 dngs in one go into ACR. If I could load 5-6000 or more and save them at once it would help (remember these are max 2MP each). I should probably look at using something else, but my other software (Bibble or AfterShot Pro) doesn't support DNGs.

Now if you want to play back the raw video smoothly in Premier Pro, you may need a nice machine, and super video card, but I don't usually find it that necessary. Again because I have already done the first part of processing, I don't need to see a completely smooth high quality rendition of minutes of video at a time.

I don't know what you have heard, but this is my workflow:

1. Fill up 1-2 32Gb CF cards of raw video (about 10-15 mins of footage). If you are thinking that you are going to take 30-60mins of raw video, then think again, or at least seriously consider the implications. Also note you are going to need about 100Gb of free space for all the processing for each 32Gb card you filled up.

2. Transfer to computer using USB3.0 (10 minutes)

3. combine files large than 4Gb (this depends on how long your clips are) - 10-15 minutes

4. put each clip into a separate folder (OK, creating 20 folders is boring, but doesn't actually take long)

5. create all the dngs from the raw video files - this is actually quick, so maybe another 10-15 minutes

6. This is what takes the time - loading the dng's into ACR for each clip, applying a preset worked out for the first clip and saving the .jpegs. Could be several hours for this step. It would be nice to be able to do several clips in one go, but I've tried it and PS doesn't seem to want to load more than about 2-3000 frames at one time. And it takes almost as long to load them as it does to save them.

7. import the .jpegs into Premier Pro, apply sharpening and some other adjustments as necessary. This is much, much quicker for me than using video files because the color and basic adjustments are made in ACR and the files look so much better they don't need as much work.

8. Export the footage to a quicktime file. As I mentioned this is actually 2-5 times quicker than for my typical video footage because I'm not applying as much correction. The 10-15 minutes will probably render in less than an hour.

If you have the raw converter and video software, you won't loose anything except a bit of time by trying it.

I should also say that for 'regular' video I can spend many hours trying to color-correct it and mess with it. raw video is definitely less frustrating and it's most just waiting for the computer.