BLACKMAG I C DES IGN RAW PART 2 | USER REVI EW
“YES, THAT’S RIGHT FOLKS. PROPER 12-BIT CAMERA RAW FILES ONTO SD CARDS”
equally excellent results. However, when you get shadow detail that needs to be brought up in the grade – and that may be why you are shooting BRAW in the first place – the compression setting you choose will have some impact. NOISE IN THE SHADOWS Q5 definitely shows some more noise in the shadows than Q0, though oddly the sensor’s fixed pattern noise was more obvious in Q0 (perhaps the raising of the overall noise floor in Q5 masks the fixed pattern noise). The same is true of the constant bit rate codecs. As the compression increases from 3:1 to 12:1, so does the apparent noise in the shadow areas. Fixed pattern noise seemed less in 3:1 than in Q0, but it was hard to quantify. The increase in apparent noise as you go from 3:1 to 12:1 is not unexpected – essentially, random noise is incompressible, so as the compression ratio increases
so does the ratio between the (incompressible) noise and the (compressible) picture. What all that means is, if you are shooting a scene with wide contrast, and you are exposing for the highlights (because you want all that delicious cloud detail) hoping that the shadow detail will hold, choose a higher bit rate codec. That said, the increase in noise is pretty small – remember that with Raw, no noise reduction is being done in-camera. It takes just a tiny bit of noise reduction in post production to clean it up. POST PRODUCTION At the time of writing, only two bits of software will play BRAW files – Blackmagic’s new Raw player (a
simple viewer) and DaVinci Resolve. Blackmagic have provided a free software development kit, and the code is royalty free, so hopefully the major NLE manufacturers will include support in future releases. In some ways, the success of BRAW hinges on this adoption, so fingers crossed for that. Copying BRAW files is simply a matter of... copying the BRAW files – no more individual frame files in an enclosing folder, like with CinemaDNG – so any of the DIT tools around will do the job, as will Explorer/Finder and DaVinci Resolve’s Clone function. The optimising that Blackmagic have done to the de-bayer in BRAW files mean that they will play with
ABOVE Part of the RAW processing is moved out of software and into the camera, where it can be accelerated.
DECEMBER 20 1 8 | DEF I N I T ION 63
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