Importing h265 to IPad Pro

[CanadaDrone]

CD: FINALLY, the answer appears! Ever since you or someone else mentioned Luma on an iPad for editing 10-bit video, I've been scratching my head as to why this is possible on such a limited piece of hardware when it took a fair chunk of change to get my PC to the same position.

NOW I find out that Luma drops to 8-bit and that explains EVERYTHING!

Thanks a bunch.

Glad you found that info useful, I was not aware of it until recently myself, so it could have been me that mentioned it before and I am happy to now have confirmation from the company itself.

I originally thought LumaFusion was a 10bit Environment (because the new iPad Pros support it) but after editing some files on there I was suspicious. I sent an inquiry to their team (which is awesome by the way) and the first guy didn't know the answer so he went to the trouble of discussing it with one of their engineers, and confirmed my suspicions. So even though 10bit H265 video can easily be imported and played on the iPad pro, and further imported and edited in LumaFusion, you just aren't doing so in a 10-bit environment inside LumaFusion. I was told that support is coming in future updates. I also confirmed that using a LUT designed for 10bit footage on what is now 8bit footage in LumaFusion will not have any negative effect, so if you have made custom LUTs or purchased LUTs for M2P DLog-M footage, you can still use them without any downsides within LumaFusion.

For now, if you are only using LumaFusion for your editing, you might as well shoot in 8bit with -3 contrast so you get a decent amount of dynamic range still but without needing a separate program to deal with lens distortion corrections. If you are editing on a different platform, like in DaVinci, then there is still a significant benefit to shooting 10bit H265.

So LumaFusion is still missing two things - lens distortion correction and 10bit support. Once it has those I probably won't need any desktop programs for video editing at all.

 

[kilomikebravo]

CD: My only other question is, since the eleven inch iPad Pro only has a resolution of 2388 x 1668 and, if you shoot regularly in 4k, do you find that the reduced resolution impacts editing? When I switched from 2k displays to 4k displays, I noticed a marked difference during color grading.

 

[CanadaDrone]

CD: My only other question is, since the eleven inch iPad Pro only has a resolution of 2388 x 1668 and, if you shoot regularly in 4k, do you find that the reduced resolution impacts editing? When I switched from 2k displays to 4k displays, I noticed a marked difference during color grading.

Resolution wise, it's no different than a much more extreme scenario of editing a 46MP photo on a 2 or 4MP computer monitor. Ideally the iPad Pro's would have native 4K displays for all our drone footage needs, but they aren't nearly powerful enough to run something like that (depending on the task). It would be something else that is affecting your color grading.

The iPad Pro display isn't that good - there is no way to calibrate it properly, it's glossy/reflective which is the last thing you want for critical editing, brightness uniformity isn't great, and there is no hardware calibration (LUT). It is a very capable display in terms of the colors it's able to reproduce but with no way to calibrate it regularly, or to your specific environmental conditions, it has it's limits. If I'm at home, I do my editing on a NEC PA272W computer monitor which has a 14bit LUT (hardware calibrated every 2 weeks) and is much, much, better than the display on the 2018 iPad Pros in every way. While travelling though the iPad Pro suffices, or if the footage is just for fun which it usually is for me.

All else equal, resolution shouldn't really affect your ability to color grade, so I suspect the two displays in question are simply not equal in terms of how good they are otherwise. If they aren't calibrated identically, you are going to notice differences regardless if their respective resolutions. Further to that, even if you have two identical monitors, it's impossible to calibrate them identically unless those two monitors have built in LUTs. Another key advantage of a monitor with hardware calibration / LUT is that the information is stored in the monitor itself, so you can switch computers (say, from a desktop to a laptop) and the monitor will not lose it's calibration. When you use software to calibrate a monitor without it's own LUT, what you get is an approximation sent to the GPU that degrades quickly and will be linked to the computer, not the monitor. If you want more than one monitor that looks identical, or consistency between multiple monitors, you need something that has a built-in LUT for proper hardware calibration. Does the average hobbyist need that? Probably not, but it's the only way to do it properly.

 

[kilomikebravo]

As always CD, excellent info. Using the iPad for the non-serious editing makes perfect sense. I'm old enough to remember when an "NEC Multisync" display was the cats meow but until you mentioned them, I haven't seen their name in decades.

I've also never heard of a monitor that uses a LUT but of course, it makes perfect sense. Me thinks that capability might not come cheap, too.

Anyway, many thanks for all the info on the new iPad and Luma and while I have an older Pro (that she will want upgraded before long,) I don't see myself editing on it.

 

[CanadaDrone]

As always CD, excellent info. Using the iPad for the non-serious editing makes perfect sense. I'm old enough to remember when an "NEC Multisync" display was the cats meow but until you mentioned them, I haven't seen their name in decades.

I've also never heard of a monitor that uses a LUT but of course, it makes perfect sense. Me thinks that capability might not come cheap, too.

Anyway, many thanks for all the info on the new iPad and Luma and while I have an older Pro (that she will want upgraded before long,) I don't see myself editing on it.

You're welcome.

NEC is on the higher end ($1000 USD or so) but you can buy some more reasonably priced monitors with built in LUTs from BENQ and DELL that would do a fine job for about half that. For casual editing, a quality IPS panel monitor without a LUT that you are able to calibrate regularly is more than enough for the average user. If you are having color problems though, that is one area to look at improving.

Editing on the iPad Pro in LumaFusion (especially with the Apple Pencil) is actually quite a good experience. It's unfortunate it doesn't maintain 10bit video for now, but it's hard to beat that platform for editing on the couch or on a plane. The previous generation 2017 iPad Pro's run LumaFusion very well still. You'll never beat editing on a nice PC, but on the go it is as close as you'll get to an (almost) fully featured editor without having to bring a computer with you. Once it is updated for a 10bit work space and distortion control is added, that will be a huge boost to it's utility in my opinion.

It's actually photo editing that I find much harder to do properly on the iPad - there is no batch processing, no ability to load custom color profiles, no file system, no ability to quickly view/cull images, no properly full-featured editors, etc.