tillkrueger
New Member
Hello everyone, my name is Till and I used to be active in this Forum but haven’t been in many years. I love and work in Berlin but just arrived for my yearly workation on Kauai.
After spending 25+ years shooting timelapses, landscapes, portraits, and videos with my Canon 5D line of cameras (5D mk I, II, and III), my 5D started collecting dust for many years after I started using my iPhone 13, 14, and 15 Pro Max as a much more portable and easy to work with alternative that got me 80% to where I wanted to be, quality wise.
Lately, though, I started missing the extra 20% I used to get with my Canon RAW workflow and big glass, so I decided to research the matter and ended up sinking a LOT of money into a used like-new R5C with only 6000 shutter actuations and replacing my 16-35 F2.8L and 28-70mm F2.8L lenses that were stolen with their newest variants at a steal of price…at the end of the day, I am out of close to $8k after all is said and done.
I basically just stacked up the boxes everything came in and decided to really get into all my new gear when I arrived on Kauai, where I’ve been shooting timelapses since 2001.
Now that I have been here for a couple of days and unpacked my R5C, slapped the EF 16-35 mk III onto it with my Canon RF > EF adapter with drop-in filters (just the neutral one, for now, but the variable ND one in my bag), I shot a few short Canon RAW Light 8K clips yesterday and everything since then has been a huge disappointment and time-suck.
Those files look terribly flat in Resolve and nothing that I though is possible, I can get to work. IN my mind, I thought that there is a way to get fairly quick results by using Resolve to do something similar as Adobe’s RAW module does in Photoshop, where I can first ste it to Auto to get close to perfect results and then tweak the parameters to my liking.
But I could find nothing like that. I have been working with Copilot a lot this past year, in many projects that require programming and strategy, and it did what it can to help me figure out a series of steps in Resolve, in the Color module, but it quickly became clear that that .crm files the R5C produced don’t seem to provide the metadata that Resolve requires to automate much of this process. They are interpreted as Rec.709 and I have to manually select “Canon Cinema Gmmut” as the Input Color Space and ended up choosing “Rec.1200 HLG” as the Input Gamma to at least get an approximate version of what I remember my eyes to have seen…and still, the footage just looks bland and has none of the quality that all the YouTube videos I watched and reviews I read. I must be doing something terribly wrong.
I must admit that I am a complete noob at trying to use Resolve to do my grading, but Copilot now tells me that Resolve’s implementation of Canon RAW Light is incomplete and that the R5C’s .crm files are not even supported by Canon’s own Cinema RAW Development app.
This post has been long enough as it is, so far, so I’ll stop here with the question: did I make a huge mistake committing so much money to the R5C or am I simply doing it all wrong? Does anyone have a proper RAW workflow for the R5C in Resolve that doesn’t require me guessing what all the parameters need to be to arrive at an acceptable image quality, still far from what I have seen this camera to be capable of?
After spending 25+ years shooting timelapses, landscapes, portraits, and videos with my Canon 5D line of cameras (5D mk I, II, and III), my 5D started collecting dust for many years after I started using my iPhone 13, 14, and 15 Pro Max as a much more portable and easy to work with alternative that got me 80% to where I wanted to be, quality wise.
Lately, though, I started missing the extra 20% I used to get with my Canon RAW workflow and big glass, so I decided to research the matter and ended up sinking a LOT of money into a used like-new R5C with only 6000 shutter actuations and replacing my 16-35 F2.8L and 28-70mm F2.8L lenses that were stolen with their newest variants at a steal of price…at the end of the day, I am out of close to $8k after all is said and done.
I basically just stacked up the boxes everything came in and decided to really get into all my new gear when I arrived on Kauai, where I’ve been shooting timelapses since 2001.
Now that I have been here for a couple of days and unpacked my R5C, slapped the EF 16-35 mk III onto it with my Canon RF > EF adapter with drop-in filters (just the neutral one, for now, but the variable ND one in my bag), I shot a few short Canon RAW Light 8K clips yesterday and everything since then has been a huge disappointment and time-suck.
Those files look terribly flat in Resolve and nothing that I though is possible, I can get to work. IN my mind, I thought that there is a way to get fairly quick results by using Resolve to do something similar as Adobe’s RAW module does in Photoshop, where I can first ste it to Auto to get close to perfect results and then tweak the parameters to my liking.
But I could find nothing like that. I have been working with Copilot a lot this past year, in many projects that require programming and strategy, and it did what it can to help me figure out a series of steps in Resolve, in the Color module, but it quickly became clear that that .crm files the R5C produced don’t seem to provide the metadata that Resolve requires to automate much of this process. They are interpreted as Rec.709 and I have to manually select “Canon Cinema Gmmut” as the Input Color Space and ended up choosing “Rec.1200 HLG” as the Input Gamma to at least get an approximate version of what I remember my eyes to have seen…and still, the footage just looks bland and has none of the quality that all the YouTube videos I watched and reviews I read. I must be doing something terribly wrong.
I must admit that I am a complete noob at trying to use Resolve to do my grading, but Copilot now tells me that Resolve’s implementation of Canon RAW Light is incomplete and that the R5C’s .crm files are not even supported by Canon’s own Cinema RAW Development app.
This post has been long enough as it is, so far, so I’ll stop here with the question: did I make a huge mistake committing so much money to the R5C or am I simply doing it all wrong? Does anyone have a proper RAW workflow for the R5C in Resolve that doesn’t require me guessing what all the parameters need to be to arrive at an acceptable image quality, still far from what I have seen this camera to be capable of?