Just wondering what the best workflow is. weve got a grade happening on resolve. the raw material is largely ARRI log C4 - most of the stuff from an Alexa,. there is the occasional shot from the DJI inspire. which is shot 8K apple pro res RAW. the grade is expecting me to send back what the camera has shot in. which is fine for the arri - but the DJI?!
I can use resolve to convert the pro res RAW to aces cg and then I can use my flame pipeline to convert to array log C4 - but the graded is going to complain. do I need this new mythical release of flame that works withe apple pro res raw to make this work? or do I need to go back into resolve with every shot like this and convert back. at the moment im using resolve to convert the apple pro res raw to apple pro res 4444 with no lut. but when I convert in flame to aces cg there is a huge difference. any ideas?
We had a similar experience last year, before Resolve could handle PRRaw. I wasn’t finishing, so I kept my distance, but the post company (who flippantly said “Sure, Pro Res Raw is fine” then flipped out when they realized the ramifications) had everything converted to DNG. If it were up to me I would go with your first instinct. You don’t mention the nature of the work, but what would happen if you needed to combine shots that were arri and PRR? Tell the colour company to stuff it and take the arri conversion.
im thinking tell them to stuff it and accept arri log C4. were early on in the process. I can do a weird colour management thing that gets it from my 4444 conversion to something that looks very close at Arri log C4. So I think its ok. unless of course the mythical flame 3.0 is almost here!
My last conversation with @Slabrie alluded to the fact that we shouldn’t hold our breath. If Flame is to offer PRR, then at the earliest it would be in April when 2027 is realeased, I would assume. My words, not Stephan’s.
I sadly cannot disclose future capabilities but for now I guess it would be a good idea to circle back to the finishing team since the source Apple ProRes RAW content on which you would apply VFX could not be encoded back to ProRes RAW. It would be a good idea to then decide on what Working Colour Space and media format should be used to make all this easy and fun.
The progress of Flame’s feature updates in recent years has fallen far behind that of Davinci Resolve, which is not a good trend. Especially in today’s booming AIGC era, Flame needs drastic reform and innovation even more. Otherwise, more users may turn to Davinci, and more functions may be replaced by AI large model platforms. Flame’s updates are very conservative, and its support for some mainstream encoding formats, such as ProRes RAW, H.265/HEVC, which many users have been looking forward to for a long time, is not active. In today’s era of significant changes in the media industry, Flame needs to inject more fresh blood. We hope that in the future, Flame can support more camera and streaming media encoding formats like Davinci, add more local and cloud large model support, and continuously enhance its editing, color grading, and compositing functions. Lustre has been discontinued, and We don’t want to see Flame decline. We look forward to Flame becoming stronger and stronger!
well most of the footage is arri log C4. so im converting into aces cg working on it and unconverting back to aces log C4. so im just going to have to tell the grading bunch thats the way it is. it is a shame flame cant be sharper with supporting camera formats.
@johnt Flame is sharp but the fantastic ever changing world of camera formats, which often involves law firms, moves quickly and is filled with pitfalls…
Keep in mind that if you had Apple ProRes RAW support in Flame, you would still need to provide ARRI LogC V4 in OpenEXR / Apple ProRes 4444 to finishing since you would not be able to encode your content as ProRes RAW.
We all agree that our products should be able to provide this capability.
well im sure thats the case. but some formats are more useful than others. right now I need apple pro res raw and to be able to read DJI Inspire camera files.
Asking for it in source colorspace back is a bit shallow when its raw data that doesnt have a colorspace as that is all “made up” by whatever decoder is deciding to decode the prores raw.
second of all, if they knew what they where doign they would be totally fine with acesCG as its 1 node or 1 setting to convert it to whatever they want in resolve,.
but of course you have to be practical:
Convertinf everything into a common coulrspace is very reasonable especially when dealing with a A and B cam situation, do you want the overhead of having to make sure to convert to multiple log/ whatever spaces on every send yo color? thats crazy. So i would try to fight for a logc4 delivery of everything ..
Or you go with the “i dont care” variant where you comvert to just prores444 in whatever log space resolve debayers the stuff in and ingest that as logc4 into acesCG and back out to logc4 you jusr did a no-op but its not “pretty”
its still fixable “properly” of course, we have OCIO, if we assume this inspire footage is debayered into dlog/gamut by default in resolve we can ingest it as that and export it as that too,
just ask a llm to make you a modified ocio 2.4 config with dlog/dgamut from the ocio that ships with flame for example
Agreed with that. Sometimes we torture ourselves with stupid requirements born out of ignorance or sheer whim. Specially from our dear color-artist-storytellers colleages.
sometimes my german brain is angry that our industry isnt highly regulated so that you actually need to have prove of knowledge before you are allowed to turn the wheels
