Atomos Academy tutorial: Alister Chapman shooting ProRes RAW with Sony

[Music] hi my name's Alistair Chapman and in this session I'm going to look at what exactly is ProRes raw how is it different from a conventional codec and what benefits does that bring now I'm going to be focusing a little bit on how we use it with Sony's FS 5 FX 9 FS 7 cameras because those are the cameras I know best but the basic principles about how pro res Raw works and how you record it will be the same for more or less any camera so first of all then what is pro res Raw well pro res raw is a recording codec so it's a way of taking the data that comes from a sensor wrapping it up into a file that can be recorded that you can then manipulate in post-production now this is different from most most conventional codecs because of the way it stores that data and how we handle it later on so with a traditional camera working traditionally save the FS 5 here when it's recording internally using the X AVC codec we take the information from the sensor as a color picture and we then compress that as it is it has a gamma curve applied it has the color added to it it's already a baked in look and that's what we record we take that into post-production and then we just work with it more or less as it is we don't have to do a lot to it because all the processing is done in the camera now with raw what we do is we take the data that comes off the sensor and I'll explain this in a little bit more detail in a moment and we record that and then we take that into post-production and we do the processing in post-production instead so instead of processing in the camera we process in post-production but obviously to get it from the camera to post-production we have to make it small enough to be recordable and that's what ProRes raw so it's a codec designed for acquisition so that is for your capture at the camera point you can't use Pro res Raw for anything else so you can't do your editing make a program and then save it as a pro res raw file you can't that would have to then be regular Pro res it's just for acquisition and when you shoot but it's very efficient and it offers really amazing image quality so it has a lot of benefits pro res raw it makes a nice small file in fact it's no bigger than conventional Pro res in most cases previous versions of raw such as cinema DNG created very very large and unmanageable files that required really fast media and for most people were really difficult to work with and as a result raw got a bit of a reputation as being something that was hard or difficult to do but thanks to innovations in technology coming from Sony with the cameras and other manufacturers from Atomos with their recorders and the codec pro res raw raw has become far far easier and in fact now for most people it's not actually going to be any more difficult than working with a conventional and traditional codec so what makes it so efficient so if we look at this slide here we'll see this representation of a Bayer sensor so the vast majority of all the large sensor cameras on the market today from FS 5 to the FX 9 to Sony Venice they use this filter array above the pixels on a sensor called a Bayer pattern and it's a pattern of pixels that alternates between blue and green on one line and then red and green on the next line and from that we can create a color image now one thing that's really important to understand is that the pixels on a video sensor don't actually see color the pixels themselves just see brightness or luminance so when light falls on the pixel it gives an output that represents the amount of light or the brightness of the light that falls on that individual pixel to create a color image what we then do is above the pixels we have the color filters so that the pixel only sees one color or one range of colors of light so pixel that's under a green filter only sees green light and when we're recording traditionally in a video camera so if we take the fs5 here and we're recording X ABC we take the output from that sensor we know which pixels represent red which represent blue which represent green and from that we reconstruct a full-color picture so if we're shooting in 4k the sensor in this camera's 409 6 by tu-160 which is eight point eight point eight megapixels we will create three eight point eight makeup megapixel images or put all color planes one for red one for green or one for blue or more precisely actually one for Lumines why and then CB and CR because we normally record what's called component video but we have three lots of information that represent that color picture because it is when we record it in the camera a color picture that's what it is but when we record raw we do things very differently in fact in the camera it's much simpler because we don't actually make it into a color picture in the camera all we do is we take that brightness information from the sensor and record just that so so having three lots of information to make up a color picture we just take the four oh nine six by two and six so in this case of information from the sensor and that's what we record so it's just one lot of information so that means the file is much much smaller then with ProRes raw what we do is we take that information and we compress it and that makes it even smaller and by this point even with very light compression the file is no bigger than a conventional ProRes recording so it makes it very efficient the actual creation of the color image is done in post-production so we take that brightness information we match that up with knowing which pixel was under which color filter and in post-production in the computer it gets turned into the color picture so one of the advantage that that rawrr brings is that we do the processing later on in a computer where we have a huge amount of processing power and we can leverage that processing power to really get a higher quality image now what about file sizes because that all sounds like it's gonna be really big and take up a lot of disk disk space will the in reality no it doesn't so if we look at this chart here we can see there's some ideas of how much you'll get on an SSD and if we take the middle one here five one two gigabyte SSD that's my preferred size of SSD two five six is too small really you can't get a lot on that one terabyte well if you're shooting at 25 24 frames per second and you're getting a couple of hours sometimes the material on there if something does go wrong if you lose that drive or you accidentally format it you've lost an awful lot of information so I prefer to use the half terabyte five one two gigabyte drives as this is a nice comfortable amount of media and you'll see that if we shoot pro res raw we're gonna get ninety minutes on that now there are two versions of Pro res raw there's the smaller one regular pro res raw and that will give that 90 minutes but there's also a higher quality version which is pro res raw HQ and you know pro res raw pro is rh-q they're actually not that dissimilar in size to regular pro res so these are very manageable file sizes they're not enormous they're not huge it's not going to take you hours to back them up and it's not going to be a very expensive thing to archive them and one of the things to consider though is because the pro res raw is just a single chunk of data 409 six by two and six so in this case whereas pro res is going to be component video which is three lots of data even though the bit rates are similar what that's telling you is that actually the pro res raw is much less compressed so that means you're gonna have far fewer image artifacts in your footage and if you do a lot of grading and post-production work not having image artifacts and having a really clean image to work with is really beneficial so image quality with pro res raw is really fan astok in fact the way this the codec works in ProRes raw is that if you really do stress the codec if you shoot a very very detailed scene lots of textures and colors and maybe a lot of motion and everything else is that the worst artifact that you will generally ever see with ProRes raw is a very slight softening of the image if you approach the limits of the codec now a lot of other codecs when you overload them and when you stress them you might get extra noise you might get little ringing around the edges mosquito noise and things like that which isn't very pleasant you can actually see it and it doesn't look nice and when you grade if you have artifacts like that they just always seem to get much worse and it limits how much you grade but the ProRes raw codec because generally the worst you'll ever see is some softening of the image the end viewer and quite possibly yourself as the grader or colorist working on it will never even notice that those artifacts are there because unless you had a side-by-side comparison with the original scene you'd probably be able to not be able to tell that that softening was occurring so let's have a look at some examples so this image here it's been expanded greatly so you can see the differences on the Left we have the pro res raw and on the right we have the X AVC from the FS 5 and at first glance they don't look hugely different one of the important things to understand is that pro res raw or any other RAW format won't give you more dynamic range it's not going to give you the ability to suddenly shoot in the dark it's not going to do that for you because all of those things are limited by the sensor in the camera but what pro res raw will bring you is more data better quality data and that means you can do more with it in post-production and if we look at these two examples if you look if you look closely yes you can see there is some noise in the pro res raw especially in the darker parts of the image this is actually very slightly underexposed to show these differences but in the pro res raw you can almost sort of see every pixel of that noise it's it's it looks like grain but if you look at the x AVC recording which is much more highly compressed instead of seeing that noise and that grain texture what you see is blocks of color and if you look around the the mannequins mouth you'll see that there are these square purple blocks of color and that's a compression artifact from the codec and if you were to try and grade that you can bet your bottom dollar that that's just going to make it look worse than it does already and in this this example here where I've really sort of pushed things a little bit to really show what's going on if you look at my hand you can see how the skin tones with the ProRes raw look much better and it is I mean it's worth pointing out here that this we are comparing the internal uhd of the FS 5 which is 8 bit and has 235 shades compared to the 12 bit raw which has 4 thousand odd shades so there is a tremendous difference in the amount of tones and textures that you have but even between a 10 bit recording which would be around about 970 code values comparing that to a 12 bit four thousand odd code value recording there is going to be quite a noticeable difference between the two and that will come out in post-production in terms of how much you can manipulate and work with the image in fact here I've actually looked at the waveform of those two images and again on the right hand side in the 8-bit recordings from the camera the direct cording is from an internal recording you can actually see the steps in the waveform that's how course they actually are whereas the raw recording has a much smoother cleaner rise in the highlights there are no steps so you can just tell straight away that that's going to gray better it's this has more data in it so what do you need to record pro res raw so first of all obviously you need a camera that can record pro res raw and there's lots to choose from these days but I am a Sony fan I do like their cameras so in the Sony lineup right now you have the FS 5 FS 7 and the FX 9 if you have older cameras they're still the old fs700 from Sony and that's still even today actually quite capable with a raw recorder of producing really amazing image so let's say we've got our camera then we need something to record it on and of course what we're talking about there is a Natomas recorder now from the Sony cameras they're all SDI out so you need a recorder with a built-in SDI from Atomos so that's going to be inferno or better still the Shogun seven and this is the Shogun seven here and this really is a very nice piece of equipment from atomos we have a screen that can display close to 15 stops of dynamic range in HD our new monitoring and look a lookup table system compared to the previous generation of recorders better build quality everything about this is better than previous generations and it really is amazing value for money I really sort of only dreamt that I'd be able to buy monitors and recorders of this quality just a few years ago at this price point so it's a lovely piece of kit and really atomos in the last couple of years have really make some big steps forward in the whole quality of their product so I really do sort of recommend them so we've got our recorder in this case we're going to use the Shogun 7 as the example and then we need some way to power it now the recorders are all capable of taking Sony NPF style batteries directly on the back of them and you can use those and that's fine that works and they're cheap personally though I prefer to use the same battery for the recorder as the camera and the reason for that actually is simply because I've only got to take one charger with me so I travel a lot I know I don't want to have to remember to pack two different sets of batteries and two different charges for everything I find it's much easier if everything uses the same charger same batteries it's simpler so what I'm doing here is I have a third party it's not a Sony batteries on there's very few Sony batteries in fact there are no Sony batteries the D taps they do some with a high ROS connector but nothing with D tap so the third party battery with a D tap on it and then have a d tap cable going up to the Shogun seven powering both off the same battery and the other benefit of doing it this way is that let's say you can't see your Shogun while you're shooting and I'm just looking in the viewfinder I'm gonna get a battery warning in the viewfinder when this battery goes low and I'll know my battery's going flat there is always the risk when using separate power supplies of the batteries going flat up here before this doesn't perhaps you don't notice so that's our recorder sorted so and power so next you're going to need recording media so the Atomos device is record on two SSDs and there's quite a wide range of choice one of the nice things about the Atomos products is that you know there is a range of SSDs that you can use you're not tied to just one particular make model and brand you should refer to the Atomos website though for their latest recommendations as to which drives to use and if you're recording pro res raw you are going to need some of the faster drives because pro res raw can go up to higher data rates than your regular ProRes HQ just a little bit higher and actually one point that I didn't mention earlier is that pro res raw is a variable bitrate codec so the data rate does vary a little bit depending on what you're shooting so any run times or record times that you get they will change a little bit depending on whether you're shooting complex scenes or much simpler scenes because the data rate does change depending on what you're shooting angel bird makes some really great drives as do Sony as well so lots of choices with SSDs again look at the Atmos website for the latest information on what's good to buy you need a way to mount your inferno on the camera so right now I've got a very simple this is actually a little small rig double ball-jointed armed with a with a thumb screw that tightens up you could use magic arms you're the little articulated arms you could use dedicated mounts you could get a cage for your Shogun there's lots and lots of ways of doing this but what I will say is that it's really important that it's secure and it doesn't flop around there's nothing worse than having a recorder on an arm that every time you bump it or knock it sag or droops or moves or you go to touch the screen and it moves away from you so whatever you get make sure it is really secure I quite like these little small rig double knuckle arms because when they're tightened up they are really really solid that doesn't move it's very solid so do your research there finally find something nice and secure to mount the recorder now another thing I like to have with my mounting arrangement is something where I can actually put the recorder let me just move the screen out of the way flat like that and the reason the reason I like to have it flat like that is for traveling or if I'm using the camera on a shoulder rig because if the monitors sticking up high up here it gets very imbalanced so it's really nice to be able to put the recorder flat or at least out of the way somehow so let me just move this back into position so you can see it again right okay so next thing we need to do is we've got it all mounted up we need to get the video from the SDI out on the camera to the recorder itself if you're using an FS 7 or an FX 9 from Sony you are going to need to buy the appropriate extension unit for each camera so of the FS 7 that's going to be the XD CA FS 7 and with the FX 9 that will be the X DCA FX 9 because without those you can't get a raw output from the camera with the FS 5 though come straight out of the SDI on the camera and that makes it much simpler easier small lightweight compact package now that BNC cable needs to be very high quality I did a shoot in Vegas and outside the casinos with all the neon lights and flashing lights and everything I was having real problems recording pro res Raw onto my Atomos recorder and that wasn't anything wrong with the recorder or the camera it was that the cable that I was using was not a very good quality and interference mallya electrics of the lights was getting into the system and preventing it from working so do buy a good quality cable you don't have to buy miles long cable in fact I prefer to have a cable that's long enough and not any longer because that does minimize any chances of loss through the cable so a good quality BNC to BNC cable and then when you've shot all of this stuff you're going to be able to you're going to want to work with it in post-production so you're going to need some sort of computer to decode the ProRes R or turn it into a nice color picture and do your grading and editing etc and you do now have a lot more options than you did this time of year ago so originally when pro res raw first came out the only thing that can handle it was fcpx on a Mac but now that's opening up there is already a at the time of making this video a beta of Adobe Premiere and a plug-in a little download from Apple that you use to be able to work with pro res raw in Adobe Premiere on a Windows machine it's also supported in Adeus and there will be support in a lot of other packages in the near future there's a couple of other grading and post-production packages that also now support pro res rule so those are what you need so let's now look at how you actually would go about shooting pro res raw so the first thing that we need to do is to actually output pro res rule from the camera so on the FS 5 if I go into the menu and I go down to my setting here called rec set and here assuming you've got the raw option in your FS 5 FS 5 2 has it anyway at the moment it was already set actually the output is set to raw and X AVCHD so out of the SDI now I have raw as opposed to conventional SDI coming out and then that's going up into the recorder on the FS 7 and the FX 9 FS 7 there's a dedicated raw mode which is based on the sort of sin EEI type exposure so you have to use that mode on the FS 7 and FX 9 is very similar so once we've enabled the raw out from the camera then we need to make a couple of changes on the recorder to make sure that what we're recording is ProRes roars I mean just to come out of the menu there so on the recorder you need to go to your input settings and obviously we're SDI in and the recorder will actually detect with the Shogun seven it does detect that this is pro res raw being fed to it but what we need to do is to make sure that we are recording pro res raw and not pro res so one of the things that the Atomos products can do that is very clever and very useful is it can take that 12 bit raw output from the camera and it can convert it to conventional Pro res so let's say you don't have fcpx you want to edit in an application that doesn't support pro res raw what you can do is take the raw output from the camera to the recorder and then for the recording codec I go to record I could choose the codec here as Pro res and then I could record pro res ordinary pro res with log gamma curve applied to it or a lookup table however I want to do it so that does give me the ability to take advantage of that 12 bit output for workflows where I don't have the ability to actually edit or grade Pro res raw but if we really want to get the best out of these cameras what we want to do is to record the pro res raw so I'm going to select pro res raw as my codec and then I have to choose between the standard pro res raw which is very very good quality or the high quality version pro res war HQ which is even better I really struggle to tell the difference between these two when I look at the images if I don't have enough disk space my SSD is a bit slow something like that I'll use Pro res raw but otherwise I'll use pro res Hall H Q because the quality is better and it doesn't really take up many yet much extra space so that's our my input settings all set up here now one of the things to consider with pro res raw is because we're now outputting a very large dynamic we're taking everything that this sensor can capture and outputting that we're going to be much better off working in a high dynamic range mode in terms of monitoring and everything else so the next thing to just to check is that if I go to my input settings again is the camera output option here I turn on to log and HDR because now my Shogun 7 is going to operate in its high dynamic range mode and that's much much better for monitoring what is a high dynamic range signal coming out of the camera so we can now close that so we've got that far what else do we need to change on the Shogun well the next thing is if I go to my monitor options here is how are we going to look at the image now we can look at it as native in which case we're going to see what comes out of the camera in its native form or we could look at it as rec.709 so in native we're looking at the s log2 in the case of this camera we can look at it as rec 709 which is not HDR but sometimes you know what works quite well for getting your exposure right or we could look at it as hybrid log gamma if you're doing a hybrid log gamma production that would be useful to use or we can use PQ which is the normal HDR profile that's used by Netflix and all of those sorts of people and actually this is my preferred choice or you could load a lot onto your SSD load the LUT into the camera and monitor via a lot but I prefer to use PQ and you'll see why as we go along okay so we're pretty much ready to go now you can see also that I've got the waveform display enabled here this is very useful function to be able to use the waveform to see exactly the levels that you're recording it now coming back to the FS 5 now what do we have to change on this because there are some very important things that we need to do when we're shooting raw with any of these cameras to make sure that the sensor is working as well as it can be and this is really important so on the FS 5 we need to go to the picture profiles and we must use picture profile seven and if I just go in here you'll see that picture profile seven is outputting s log 2 and S gamut and it's really important on the FS 5 that that's what you use don't try to use anything else because you won't be getting everything that the camera can deliver you'll actually if you use try and use different gamuts you might find the pictures a bit noisier than they should be don't try to use s log 3 even though you might be using that later on in post-production you you should have the FS 5 set to s log to the FS 7 when you're using the FS 7 should also be set to s log 2 and s gamut but the FX 9 because these newer cameras bigger dynamic range s log 2 can't capture that the FX 9 operates using s log 3 so we have to set that the next thing that we need to do is to ensure that the camera is set to the optimum ISO the only way we're going to get the full dynamic range out of this camera is if it's operating at what's commonly called the base ISO or its native sensitivity FS 5 and FS 7 that's 2,000 iso so you need to set them to 2000 iso the FX 9 we have a choice of two different base iso's and that's going to be either 800 ISO or 4,000 iso and it's just a matter of picking the one most appropriate for what you're shooting shooting outside on a bright sunny day you're going to use 800 ISO shooting indoors or in very low light you use 4000 iso but those are the only two that you should use in that camera and FS 5 FS 7 mm I so don't try to use anything else because you're not going to get great results if you're using DB of gain on the FS 5 it should be set to 0 DB gain now one thing that I learnt the hard way with the FS 5 is that it's very easy to bump the ISO engane button down here and to accidentally turn the camera into auto gain or a GC so something else I like to do in the FS 5 is just a go into the menu and to go here in my record settings auto ISO limit and set that to 2000 if you're using DB of gain you go to the AGC limit and set it to zero DB gain and that way even if you bump that button and it goes into Auto it won't go above 2000 so you won't end up with really noisy grainy horrible looking images later on so the next thing we need to do of course is to make sure that we shoot and we expose correctly getting the exposure right is very important one of the things that pro res Raw or any form of raw won't give you is the ability to suddenly shoot in much darker situations or extra bright situations that you can't shoot at with log pro res pro res raw and raw in general isn't some sort of magic trick that makes the camera more sensitive if the sensitivity of the camera is governed by the sensor itself pro res raw or raw doesn't change that so it's not going to do some magic tricks that are going to allow us to shoot in the dark and it is really important when you shoot with log or shoot with raw that you do expose correctly because you're going to take that footage into post-production and manipulate it and if it's a bit underexposed a bit noisy a bit grainy you take it into post you start working with it and it suddenly becomes very noisy very grainy and you're going to be really disappointed so getting your exposure right is really important with pro res raw very often you'll find that exposing pro res raw of exposing raw in general a little bit brighter can be beneficial and that's simply because when you put more light onto your sensor the sensor output is greater and that helps to overcome any noise that the camera may have and when you take that into post-production and you grade it you'll end up with a less noise picture now something that's important to understand there though is that if you expose brighter you will lose some of your highlight range but you will gain some shadow range so you will always have the same dynamic range but what happens is if you expose brighter your midpoint comes upwards you lose a bit in the shadows in sorry you lose a bit in highlights but gain in the shadows if you've underexposed what happens is your mid point goes down and when that happens you get much bigger highlight range but you lose a lot of information in your shadows and that typically tends to happen when you're underexposed you're underexposed you're mid point comes down so you're imaged a bit dark anyway and then because you're losing data out of the shadows it gets noisy and grainy and the next thing you know it's just not working for you anymore and this is why I like to use the P Q mode on the Shogun 7 because when you are exposing brighter because we have such a big dynamic range we can actually see what's going on with the exposure as we bring it up so let's just go back to the so this is the point where on the viewfinder screen of the fs7 it's looking really bright on here it doesn't look really bright so what that's allowing you to do is it's allowing you to actually see the highlights in the shot and then you can bring your exposure up to the point where your highlights are not seriously overexposed so you can actually get a very nice bright exposure with which will work really well in post-production but you can also see what your highlights are doing because we have tremendous dynamic range on this monitor so for this particular shot what I can do is I can keep bringing my exposure up and up and up and I also have the waveform display on here so I can see whether I'm clipping if if the top of that waveform suddenly becomes a flatline that means everything's clipping so I can now see how that's the clip point here and we can just come down just a little bit below that clip point and we could shoot like that and this is infant in photography world this would be called exposing to the right and that's another way to work and expose and this will give you a very very low noise image when you expose this way because we're putting the absolute maximum amount of light on the sensor that we can without clipping everything and it looks really good if we look at the viewfinder screen on the FS 5 right now it looks really really overexposed and it would be very difficult to actually have the con to actually go out and shoot like that looking that but because we have the Shogun seven here we can see those highlights we can see what's going on and we can confidently safely shoot like this and this is going to give us amazing shadow details great highlight detail as well because with linear ROI you have tremendous information in highlights and this is going to be something that you can take into post-production and get a truly amazing result from so in a separate video I'll take a look at post-production some options for post productions with pro res rule I hope you found this video interesting please stay tuned for more videos about how to use Pro res how to use different aspects of these lovely devices from Atomos and again thank you for watching [Music]

Channel: ATOMOS

Views: 24,883

Keywords: Shogun 7, Sony FS5, Sony FS5 II, XDCA, High Speed, Slomo, Slow Motion, HFR, ProRes RAW, ProRes, FCP X, Sony PXW FX9, Sony FS7, Sony FS7 II

Id: AaaELaULnaY

Length: 34min 33sec (2073 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 30 2020