A7SIII-PART 1: With ProRes RAW POWER...comes RAW RESPONSIBILITIES!

the a7s3 is what many described as a near-perfect camera now can record prores raw externally to complement its awesomeness raw being the staple of professional filmmaking in high-end productions made us wonder if we're really missing out by limiting ourselves to internal recording so you're probably asking yourself is shooting external raw really better than shooting internal xavc well there's no simple answer with raw's great powers comes great responsibilities raw footage indeed has a lot of advantages over internal xavc but being raw means it's a high maintenance format that still suffers from a lot of drawbacks which makes switching to raw become a very calculated decision rather than a no-brainer so after intensive tests and experimentations i discovered there's so much to cover that couldn't fit in one episode so i put together this two-part series to give you my full unbiased and honest feedback as a dp shooting pro res raw on the a7s3 and lets you decide for yourself whether raw is good for you and your style of shooting or not this episode will cover the technical details you need to know before shooting raw from the a7s3 such as camera setup resolutions compatibilities and restrictions while the second part will cover the quality color and post-production which has a whole other set of interesting surprises i must warn you this episode will get very technical in some parts so clear your mind grab your drink and let's dive in [Music] before we start let's recap on what prores raw is it's a compressed draw codec that sits on top of the prores family of codex it comes in two flavors prores raw and prodraw hq both supporting 12-bit color depth where hq obviously is a slightly higher quality as it applies less compression making it bigger in size the kodak was developed by apple meaning it's perfectly optimized for the apple ecosystem so expect it to perform flawlessly along with some advantages on their machines and apps versus how it performs on pcs or premiere pro for example atomus was working very closely with apple in the development of the format which came to be a successful collaboration as it clearly shows how atomos was a key player in democratizing external prowess raw recording through their recorders such as the ninja 5 over hdmi and the shogun 7 over sdi unlike its other prores formats prores raw is an acquisition format not a delivery format meaning you can't export prores raw from your computer you can only record it straight from the camera to the recorder then export it from your editor to any other format you like including all prores raw flavors finally just like its prores cousins it's a very efficient format optimized to balance between performance and high quality image and it pretty much delivered on both fronts if you want to dive deeper into the boring details i have another full episode talking about it so i'll leave a link in the description now let's start with the camera setup you'll need to connect the atomos ninja 5 make sure it's updated with the firmware 10.54 or later which enables prores raw recording from the s3 add a compatible ssd such as the compact at the max then connect it to the camera using a fast and reliable 18 gigabit per second hdmi cable you got to be very careful here as i learned the hard way that not all 18 gigabit per second cables are created equal brands tend to throw these high speeds on their packages without much quality control to guarantee it so you can go for the safe choice and pick the original and more expensive atomos hdmi cable or get the other high quality and slimmer option and save yourself some money i'll leave both in the description below now let's go to your camera menu scroll all the way down to the toolbox scroll down again to number 11 external output then hdmi output settings once you click on it scroll down again to raw output and change it to on now go back one level and enable control for hdmi this way you can trigger recording on the ninja 5 from the camera also one amazing thing i love about this camera is the ability to record on both internal xavc and external raw at the same time which gives you the sense of security you need while recording raw for having the redundancy backup in xavc in case external raw fails something you don't get with s1h as it gives you this message once you switch to external raw recording now back to the s3 the only restriction you get in simultaneous internal recording is only having 4k options in xavcs and si no full hd or hs options something i can easily live with keep in mind that with raw recording enabled frame rates controls are disabled in the movie settings you need to set them from the hdmi output menu instead which are restricted to 3 options of 24 30 and 60p in ntsc and only two options of 25 and 50 in pal so no 120p internal or external recording when raw is enabled moving on to resolutions the great news is that prores raw will give us the full 16 to 9 area of the sensor in its native resolution of 4.2 k almost 24 higher resolution than the internal ultra hd which will resolve slightly higher details than the internal xevc here's a clip shot at 4.2k raw compared to the same clip shot internally in ultra hd if we pixel peep you'll see that raw resolves slightly more details than the internal 4k fees like xavc is a bit softer not a deal breaker but worth noting the only minimal inconvenience for this resolution is when downscaled to ultra hd it will give you an odd height of 2169 instead of the standard 2160 which can simply be fixed in final cut for example by setting the spatial conform options for the clip to fill instead of fit the other solution can be set in the ninja 5 just tap on the prores raw format on top and at the bottom of the record tab you'll find the resolution tab setting called metadata crop that's set to off tap it to turn on the 16 to 9 ratio what it does is record a slightly cropped image with a resolution of 4240 by 2385 which gives you a perfect 16 to 9 ratio this way when done skilled it will fit perfectly in the ultra hd frame size of 3840 by 2160. keep in mind that despite the fact that internal and external have different resolutions both share the same exact field of view which means that the ultra hd is sampled from the 4.2k this 4.2k resolution is pretty useful for cropping in post without compromising the ultra hd resolution take this clip for example shot in prores raw 4.2 k this is how much i can crop to reach 3840 by 2160 ultra hd resolution which by the way is the same 1.1 digital crop that is applied when you turn on the active stabilization mode when recording internally which leads us to the next point stabilization as you might know there are actually three ways to stabilize the s3 footage two in camera and one in post the first is the standard mode aka ibis which uses the physical five axis stabilization to stabilize the shot the second is the active stabilization mode which is a digital stabilization using the gyro data to stabilize the shot further by applying a 1.1 crop to the image similar to post stabilization you apply in premiere or final cut the third and not very popular way is what we can call post gyro stabilization it's a post workflow exclusively found in their media management app catalyst browse which applies stabilization using gyro data saved on the recorded clips i recommend watching brandon lee's video doing an amazing job covering that awesome feature now going back to raw as we said before since the camera is sending the full 4.2k image from the sensor to the recorder cropping won't be possible anymore meaning active stabilization option will be disabled in the menu and the other bad news is stabilization is also not possible in post on catalyst browse i shot that same clip both internally and externally with stabilization off but the app was unable to recognize the prores raw version not sure if an update will fix this issue since it's not only about making sure the gyro data being saved on the prores raw file but also about the compatibility of prores raw within the app itself so not sure if i can be optimistic about this one unfortunately and to sum up enabling raw recording will disable all your digital stabilization modes and you're left with the standard stabilization only and your steady hands of course so make sure not to drink coffee before you shoot or just use a gimbal now when it comes to file sizes and performance as a rule of thumb prores is usually known for its fast performance on all nles it's very smooth to work with especially if you're working on final cut raw on the other hand usually has bigger file sizes when compared to internal compressed formats such as xavc on the sony so if you add the two together you get prores raw a very high performance raw codec to get an average size comparison i recorded a 10 second clip on all poorest recording presets externally and at the highest xavc quality presets internally here's what i found starting with external raw recording prores raw hq has the biggest file size it's getting close to being double the size of prores raw standard even though i didn't find any visible quality advantage in hq versus standard that would justify this huge size difference so i would just stick to standard draw and save on the hard drive space now when it comes to performance despite those big sizes both perform equally fast you would think raw hq might be more sluggish than raw due to its bigger size but its smaller compression ratio that caused it to inflate in size was compensated with fast performance as it made it easier to process now let's check real quick the non-raw or traditional prores formats if you haven't used prores raw before you'd be surprised at how it's not that much bigger than prores hq not to forget that prores raw has 4.2k resolution which would already contribute further to a bigger file size also proves hq is 4 to 2 10 bit versus raw with 12 bit color depth and being raw it doesn't resample color information making it theoretically equivalent to 444 for the sake of oversimplifying the comparison and yes even though sony is claiming to output 16-bit signal raw is recorded in 12-bit standby as i'll talk about it right after this now let's move to internal we have three formats to choose from x a v c s i s and h s they all max out at 10 bit 4 to 2. first x a v c s i it's an h.264 compression that can virtually be considered as the internal version of standard prores since it offers a fast performance at the cost of having the biggest file size of all internal recording formats then comes the xcvcs which used to be the standard in older sony mirrorless cameras it also uses h.264 codec but it's long gop which applies a more complex compression than all i slashing file sizes to almost half and sacrificing a bit of quality especially in moving subjects but mostly at the cost of much slower performance while editing and finally xevchs also new to sony mirrorless cameras this one is an h.265 codec and long gop compression the worst combination for performance yet packaged in a very good quality that's because h.265 is a much more advanced and highly efficient version of h.264 it can give you a much better quality for the same data rate but that high efficiency in quality is what causes it to be the most sluggish codec of the bunch especially on old mid-range computers and laptops something the camera will warn you about when you select it from the menu so to recap the lowest prores raw setting is more than double the heaviest high quality internal xcv csi codec both high performing presets yet raw offers a lot more color data reflected in the absence of any color compression and the 12 bit color depth which segues to my next point bit depth i will get a bit technical in this part so feel free to skip it if you're not into nerdy explanations okay so now we know that sony said it will output 16-bit raw via hdmi it give us the impression of superiority over the 12-bit league of pro-res raw enabled cameras but the ninja 5 can only record a maximum of 12 bit from all those other cameras so how will it record 16 bit from the sony does this 16-bit make any sense anyway well as many of us already knew i would just call it out for being nothing more than a marketing stunt not only because the ninja 5 max is out at 12 bit but also prores raw maxes out at 12 bit and the announcement specifically mentioned the ninja 5 as a recorder of choice so i wasn't sure how that 16-bit will fit into a 12-bit format recorded in a 12-bit recorder unless it gets compressed also let's look at the other pro sony camera with the 16-bit output the fx9 we thought maybe being a pro camera we might get proper 16-bit through sdi instead of hdmi but again atoms just announced an update to its shogun 7 recorder enabling it to record prores raw at guess what 12 bit again not 16 bit the trick here is that this 16 bit is linear and this 12 bit is log which is a very common recording practice in cameras capable of outputting 16-bit and i felt that atoms kind of needed to clarify the situation on its website to justify why it converted sony's 16-bit to 12-bit log by explaining how 12-bit log is visually indistinguishable from 16-bit linear and they're absolutely right they also released a video to talk about it which i recommend watching in the link below to understand why it's visually indistinguishable let me try and simplify things by showing you the 16-bit linear graph of how the camera distributes its 15 stops of dynamic range in a very disproportionate way the problem is actually in our eyes they're designed to discern contrast levels more in the shadows and midtones than in bright and super right parts of the spectrum in this case linear encoding becomes very inefficient in storing so much data in the highlights that are not discernible to the human eye so what the lock conversion does is redistribute the 15 stops of luma values across the smaller 12 bits to match the human eyes way of seeing the world which not only makes a lot more sense but is also smaller in size and much more manageable in post so in short it doesn't really matter what any of those cameras output beyond 12 bit since they will all end up as 12 bit pro res draw in the ninja 5 or shogun 7 which proves that this 16 bit feature sony was flashing before us was nothing more but a flashy spec to sound better than others and puts the a7s 3 back in the 12-bit pro res raw club and even if you can hypothetically record 16-bit raw in another format on another more capable recorder there's no real use or implementation in a screen or even a pro grading suite that can display or make practical use of this amount of data anywhere yet with that said 12 bit log is pretty much the standard bit depth in raw formats and if hollywood hasn't complained from it yet then rest assured it's more than enough for you and everyone else moving on to compatibility there's a whole list of apps that can support pro res draw at a different level of compatibilities i'll leave a link to the official list in the description but i'll only cover the important ones here as mentioned earlier prores raw is an apple product meaning it'll be fully compatible with final cut x offering us raw to lock conversion and metadata based controls such as white balance tint iso and exposure offset those controls could become very useful in your grading workflow but the catch is that they are camera specific and as of the date of this episode there are only nine cameras out there that take full advantage of those controls namely the panasonic s1h eva-1 the varicam lt along with the z-cam in all its flavors of course this list will grow in time i already know a couple more cameras that will potentially make it to this list before the end of the year so keep an eye on it but let's check them out in final cut so you can relate to what i'm saying these are two touch clips i shot one with the s3 and the other with the panasonic s1h if we check the info tab you'll see in the s3 you're only able to control the rotolog conversion here where i set it to convert to slog3 then as you can see the white balance metadata shows it was shot at 4700 but you can't control it and not only can't control iso but the iso metadata is not even displayed let's jump to the s1h you can already see that the list expanded you have the same raw to lock conversion which is set to vlog then comes the iso metadata shown here at 634 even though i set it to 640 but i guess that's the real native iso gain value for this camera then right below it you get the iso control in the form of a list with all those other values you can set it to all of which will behave exactly like how you would have said it on the camera then comes the exposure offset which acts exactly as it's labeled meaning it offsets your exposure virtually delivering identical results to what the iso control does actually not much of a difference there then comes what i believe is the most important slider at least for me which is white balance control this literally changes the white balance as if you change it on the camera while shooting so technically speaking you shouldn't worry about setting the correct white balance on set anymore of course this is an oversimplification of why it's important okay let's jump back to our app's compatibility probably the majority of filmmakers are using premiere instead of final cut and the good news is that a very recent update fixed some graphic card compatibility issues with it so now premiere supports prores draw on all machines including pc you just need to install the corresponding driver for both apple and pc operating systems when it comes to raw controls it supports raw to lock conversion no white balance tint or iso controls here i found an exposure slider under the raw effects which i assume is also metadata based same goes to the s1h then comes scratch not the most famous post-production app out there at least in our indie community you probably heard about it for the first time when they announced support and compatibility with prores raw on all controls except exposure offset not only on the a7s3 and s1h but also for all prores raw enabled cameras something final cut couldn't do and there's a reason for that apple is still developing prores raw and working out its compatibility issues that will roll out once they're ready but what scratch did is they didn't wait for final cut but took matters in their own hands and they implemented their own algorithm that manually changes the metadata settings more like a very calculated guess from their side based on their years of experience in the field so i would take the current results you get from scratch with a grain of salt and i would advise you to test it yourself before you shoot to see if the results meet your expectations and anticipate those results to change a bit once the official apple update are released and implemented which could happen very soon so keep an eye on their updates now the bad news for davinci users is that it does not support prores wrong at all not now and probably not in the near future i don't want to get into the politics behind this but let's just say it's probably a decision from blackmagic's side not to include that support in an attempt not to jeopardize the progress of their own blackmagic raw format which is completely understandable i wouldn't advise you to wait for this compatibility to be available anytime soon and i really hope i'm wrong again prores raw is still being developed and all these options will be updated as we go so keep an eye on them as they come out last topic in this episode is metadata which usually covers three types of informations camera lens and video file related metadata one of the advantages of shooting in raw over compressed is how it provides us with more information about the clip you shot in a form of metadata which can become very useful and valuable in post-production process i took screen grabs of metadata panels on both xavc and prores raw and got some interesting results let's check on final cut first i'll go beyond the basic info such as file size duration and frame rates and rather focus more on the important differences if you look at both prores raw and xavc you'll obviously notice the difference in the codec and resolution then the lower part of prores raw provides some more info and controls starting with router conversion which is more of a control than a metadata then the only one that's present here is color temperature aka white balance then you'll find the camera model here which is good to know if you have a multi-camera setup but sadly that's all about it when it comes to what prores draw can offer over xevc nothing about iso speed or lens data such as focal length or aperture so i checked the files on media info a third-party app that reads metadata from video files and managed to find not only the camera model white balance log and gamma info but also aperture and the recorder id i even went to scratch and it had identical metadata with no sign of iso setting so i was pretty disappointed that first final cut being the native app for pro res raw it still didn't display the full info that you can find in other apps second iso speed focal length were nowhere to be found so i thought of comparing it to the s1h and i got better results first on final cut white balance was found on both cameras but it's controllable in the s1 each footage as we saw before and iso is totally absent from the e7 s3 one in the s1h not only displays the iso value that was set from the camera but you also get a slider that can change it from here yet again aperture value is missing but you can find it from both cameras in other apps such as scratch here at the bottom of the list and of course lens model and focal length are still nowhere to be found just for fun let's go for a final comparison against prores arch nemesis black magic raw just to give you a taste of what kind of metadata prores raw is missing and show you how blackmagic raw in my opinion is still in the lead when it comes to raw formats even though both formats were launched at the same time which makes it a fair comparison especially when comparing their metadata in their native apps prores raw and final cut versus black magic raw and davinci resolve and i know many of you will say that blackmagic raw is not a true raw format maybe i would care if i was a dit or a programmer but as a dp i really and truly don't care what it is or what it's not you can call it whatever you want to call it i only care about how it performs and if an on raw format performs better than a true raw one then i'll take it i hope this clarifies my position about this topic once and for all okay let's go back of course you get all the basic metadata including the white balance and iso on both apps then blackmagic has the advantage of offering you not only the exact lens model but also the aperture value and most impressively the focus distance to the subject which is very useful in vfx work there's a whole lot of other pro type metadata blackmagicrock can offer us but that would be covered in a different episode so to summarize when talking about the a7s 3 the only good thing compared to xavc is having white balance aperture and camera model info but their visibility is inconsistent across apps compared to the s1h you don't get the iso details and generally speaking it's missing lens information such as the lens model focal length and focus distance i personally find prores raw metadata to be pretty disappointing honestly coming from the a7 s3 when compared to other raw formats especially black magic raw but it's slightly better than what you get from xcvc after all there's a whole lot more to cover from the a7s3 prores raw output a lot of pros and cons you need to know before you take that leap and start shooting in raw but i hope this episode clarified at least some of the basics and you're ready for the second part which will cover the color science and post-production process in general i'll also be sharing inconsistencies in color and quality i discovered between the xavc and raw along with the tools you need to fix them so go ahead and subscribe if you haven't already to get notified once i upload it and don't forget none of what i'm saying matters if you're not shooting with your camera so make sure to practice shooting in raw let me know what you found in the comments below and we'll finish our conversations in the next episode thanks again for watching stay safe and i'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: The DP Journey

Views: 126,028

Keywords: sony a7siii, sony a7s iii, sony a7s iii footage, a7s iii, sony a7s3, sony a7s iii review, prores raw, sony a7siii specs, a7s iii review, a7siii prores raw, sony a7s iii video test, prores raw workflow, sony a7iii review, sony a7iii video, sony a7s3 review, atomos ninja v 5, fcpx prores raw, Premiere Pro ProRes, premiere pro prores raw, Scratch Prores RAW, Scratch prores Raw, assimilate scratch prores raw, atomos ninja v sony a7siii, sony a7iii cinematic video

Id: EmiEQq2MAeU

Length: 21min 37sec (1297 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 01 2020