ACADEMY
BLACKMAGIC RAW
IMAGES Blackmagic’s menus are among the best in the business. BRAW is coming to the new Pocket camera too
fixed pattern noise. The same is true of the constant bit rate codecs. As the compression increases, 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 noise as you go from3:1 to 12:1 is not unexpected as, essentially, randomnoise is incompressible. 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 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. At the time of writing, only two bits of software plays BRAWfiles: Blackmagic’s new Raw Player and DaVinci Resolve. Blackmagic has provided a free software development kit and the code is royalty free, so hopefully the major NLE manufacturers will include support in future. The success of BRAWhinges on this adoption, so fingers crossed. Even 8:1 compression is about 40MB/s, so if you are using shared storage over gigabit ethernet, you aren’t going to be able to do more than a couple of clips at a time, but it’s still impressive. If you
want to render the files to a more universal codec, conversion is fast. I whacked a 3D LUT on to a bunch of UHD BRAW clips and converted to full resolution ProRes 422 HQ at about 33fps. Lowering the resolution to 1080p, ProRes Proxy ran at over 40fps. I hope Adobe, Apple, Avid and the rest implement support for BRAW, because what Blackmagic has given us is a Raw codec that you can edit with on a laptop. The support for sidecar files means that Raw settings can be automatically communicated across software packages, irrespective of the manufacturer. Blackmagic Raw is available on URSA Mini Pro, but rolls out to other cameras, including the new Pocket Cinema Camera 4K, in the comingmonths.
“If youwant to render the files to amore universal codec, conversion is very fast”
More information blackmagicdesign.com/uk
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SPRING 2019 PRO MOVIEMAKER
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