Blackmagic RAW in Natron

Hi all,

Some time ago @NodeMonkey requested Blackmagic RAW support in Natron on our Facebook group. Being interested in the format and their pocket cameras I decided to make a BRAW Reader for Natron on my vacation, but it’s been a while since that (a month?), and I totally forgot about everything :slight_smile:

So here we go, this is the initial beta for the plugin. I will only provide binaries for Windows at the moment, Linux/macOS users will need to build from source (see the openfx-arena repository for source) at the moment.

Hey, hold on! What is Blackmagic RAW you say? It’s an high performance, professional RAW video/image codec that is open (standard, not source), cross platform and free. For more information go to the official website.

The plugin is licensed under (L)GPL2+, but require libraries from the Blackmagic RAW SDK during runtime (they are not linked).

Installation (for Windows)

Option 1

Adding the plugin to an existing Natron 2.3.15 installation.

Download BlackmagicRAW.ofx.bundle.zip (229.1 KB) and extract to your OFX folder.

Note that this option is not preferred since the plugin will not be properly integrated in Natron.

Option 2

Download and extract Natron 2.3.16 Beta1. Then apply the following update:

Natron-BRAW-2.3.16-beta1-Windows-64.7z (4.9 MB). This archive includes Natron.exe, NatronRenderer.exe and BlackmagicRAW.ofx.bundle.

Overwrite the exe files and copy/move BlackmagicRAW.ofx.bundle to Plugins/OFX/Natron.

I will do proper releases at a later date…

The SDK

You will need to have the Blackmagic RAW 1.8 SDK installed prior to using this plugin. Download it from Blackmagic.

Supported hardware

  • Blackmagic Design Pocket Cinema Camera 4K
  • Blackmagic Design URSA Mini Pro G2
  • Blackmagic Design Pocket Cinema Camera 6K
  • Blackmagic URSA Broadcast
  • Canon EOS C300 Mark II captured by Blackmagic Video Assist 12G HDR
  • Panasonic EVA1 captured by Blackmagic Video Assist 12G HDR
  • Sigma fp captured by Blackmagic Video Assist 12G HDR

In use

Enjoy :slight_smile:

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I’m so bad about checking in here for things. ;p I was literally just chatting with someone about this, and how it was started and then suddenly just disappeared, and I was going to message you on Facebook later today to inquire about it. LOL!

I will definitely test this out and likely talk about it on the live stream at some point not to far off.

I’m curious can the Blackmagic Design Color Spaces and Blackmagic Design Gamma options be added to the OCIO profiles so that color transformations are not limited to the reader node it self? That would make it operate more in line with the rest of Natron, as in this current state it can be extremely limiting if one wanted to transform out of or into these color space and gamma options.

Not sure, will need to check the API docs.

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Is there a Mac version in the works?

it works on all platforms, but I didn’t have the time to do a build for macOS and Linux.

Updated BRAW 1.8/2.0 plug-in for Natron 2.4.0 on Windows:

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Nice! I’ll try to compile a macOS version (probably for macOS 10.15)

Is there a reason why one would want to use 1.8 instead of 2.0?

Also maybe you should edit the top post to use the newest versions and source repo

macOS is not ready yet, I will take a look tomorrow.

Probably not, it seems to be faster than v2, but could be the footage I tested.

I fixed a few things on macOS that caused crashes, but it still doesn’t work.
Also I think it’s OK if you want to move the code to natrongithub.
A nice feature would be to check on plugin load if the SDK libraries are available. If not, load should fail. There’s also a lot of redundant calls to ClipOpen - maybe you could figure out a way to cache the result.

I’m not sure if we can distribute the plugin with Natron, since it requires proprietary code to run. Let’s keep it separate for now - It’s easy enough to install anyway.

Can do.

Will do.

Ok, will take a look.

Not that important, as long as users are able to install it relatively easy.

So, there are issues with BRAW SDK v2 and the plug-in.

I’m able to read BRAW v1.8 files using the BRAW SDK v2, but not BRAW v2 files.

Tested on Windows and macOS. I will probably need to update the SDK includes and build against them.

Just wanted to say that BRAW 2.1 fixes issues present in v2.0. So the plugin is now able to read 12k BRAW footage.

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Proper!