ACADEMY REAL-WORLDRAW
ProRes422
CODEC CHOICE
the 24, 60 or even 120 or 240fps in video. That takes a whole lot more computing power, heat dissipation and memory card speed. Most Raw video needs exporting to a separate recorder for that reason. For video, there have been attempts at a creating a Raw file format that actually works. Red has Redcode Raw, its own format. And Kinefinity has its own, too, as well as Blackmagic and Canon with their compressed Raw formats of Braw and Canon Raw Light respectively. These have to be opened and tweaked in their own software – DaVinci for Blackmagic or Canon’s Raw Utility – before being exported to your NLE of choice. CinemaDNG was an attempt at an uncompressed universal format, and it even appears in cameras like the new Sigma fp as well as some Sony and Blackmagic camcorders. But the files are huge and few NLEs can read them, so it’s
An increasing number of cameras can now shoot Raw, but does it makes sense for most filmmakers?
WORDS ADAM DUCKWORTH
T he majority of professional best-quality information right from the sensor instead of letting your camera compress it to save space. That means in post you can set a precise white-balance, push and pull it around, and use all that highlight and shadow detail your camera can actually capture. If you have a stills photography background, where all serious shooters use Raw, it’s actually a shock to find that almost all video cameras compress the files at capture then decompress them filmmakers are well aware of the theoretical benefits of shooting Raw video, where you use the
for viewing. That’s the compression- decompression work that a codec does. But while stills cameras are all about the quality of the file coming from the sensor, for shooting video it’s actually more about the speed of the processor and the ‘pipeline’ to get all those Raw images off the sensor and saved. It’s OK to shoot a couple of dozen Raw stills and expect the camera to write them to a memory card without buffering and locking the camera up. It’s a whole different ball game to expect it to store thousands of Raw files at
RIGHT An Atomos Shogun Inferno on the Sony FS5 is all you need to start recording ProRes Raw
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PRO MOVIEMAKER SPRING 2020
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