BRAW or ProRes RAW? The Battle of RAW DOMINATION begins...

since the launch of both blackmagic raw and prores raw i always wondered which one is better and now with my s1h capable of recording to both formats externally i finally had the chance to use the same sensor to conduct a fair comparison blackmagic raw coming to mirrorless cameras was great news to advance filmmakers using davinci resolve and i know everyone is waiting for it to roll out to all other mirrorless cameras that are capable of prores raw recording but before getting too excited you should ask yourself does this version of blackmagic raw offer you the same performance you get from traditional blackmagic raw recorded on the pocket camera range also how well does it perform against prores raw in this episode i'll give you my honest and unbiased answers to all these questions i'll share some good news and unfortunately some bad news along with a major discovery i stumbled upon while testing it out i'll cover important topics like white balance control noise and a lot more all to give you an idea on which one brings the best out of this camera i assume you already know this episode is very technical so it's not for everyone if you're still up for it grab your drink clear your mind and get ready for another tech review [Music] before i start i invite you to check this two-part episode talking about the s1h raw output also this other two-part episode that offers more recent information about how prores raw works on the a7s3 those episodes have all the valuable information you need to understand how raw works in general they will also answer and explain many points i'll be mentioning here i'll leave the links down below also to avoid repetition gerald undone did a great job covering many aspects of blackmagic raw so i decided to skip those here again links below so let's start with the basics of what you need to record blackmagic raw from the s1h first update your s1h with firmware 2.4 then attach a blackmagic video assist 12g hdr monitor recorder you can choose between the 5 inch and the 7-inch connected with a reliable and high-speed hdmi that can handle the raw's high data rates coming from the camera many filmmakers ignore this detail and end up with cables that keep on cutting off after a couple of seconds so i'll leave my recommendation in the links below of course enable the raw output from the camera menu and you're done this setup will get you 5.9 k resolution maxing out at 30p unfortunately this is the only full frame format that can record in raw then 4k maxing out at 60p along with anamorphic maxing out 50p only in pal or 30p in ntsc all those are in super 35 crop mode and everything here comes in 12 bit which is a very good upgrade from the typical 10 bit you get from internal recording or external prores 422 recording side note please don't believe any camera that claimed to be recording or outputting 16 bit that's nothing but a marketing stunt there's nothing out there that can record 16 bit and you don't even need it it's a topic i already covered in previous episodes i'll leave a link down below so the important question now is this s1h version of blackmagicrot the same as the one that you get from the blackmagic pocket range the answer is no not exactly let's jump to resolve to check how i got to this conclusion in the raw camera menu davinci automatically detects the camera and sets its corresponding color space and gamma curve to v-gamut and v-log technically speaking they're optimized to squeeze the best results out of the sensor so it's advisable to keep them as is but there's nothing stopping you from choosing different combinations of color spaces and gamma curves you'll be playing in the creative territory and get different results that might actually please you so feel free to have fun with it while you do you'll realize that your gamma curve controls are inactive to get them back you need to set your gamma to blackmagic but you can get the same results from the standard gamma tools such as curves second you'll notice iso control is inactive but again you can get the same results with the exposure slider they're pretty much the same thing only different names third you also lose highlight recovery checkbox which is designed to squeeze out and recover some details in the highlight areas that usually gets tossed when you apply the standard decoding matrix by having it dimmed just like the iso control rather than be completely absent gives me hope that this can possibly be activated with an update let's wait and see and finally the apply lot checkbox is missing here which you can find when you go back to the clips from the pocket camera it's not that important honestly what it does is apply the monitoring lut you use when shooting this clip which again you can manually do yourself so it's more of a convenience option this one might not make an appearance with an update i won't miss it in all cases now i'm sure you were all keeping your eyes on the color temperature slider here with the million dollar question can i get metadata based white balance control we all know it's one of the main advantages we love about turing raw so the answer is yes and no let me explain to show you a reference of how i'm expecting it to work i shot two reference clips in black magic raw with the pocket 6k one at the correct white balance of 6200 the other at 2500 intentionally throwing it all the way off so the beauty of blackmagic raw and raw formats in general is with the least amount of effort in the color temperature slider i can dial in the white balance i want and perfectly match both clips so you don't really need to worry about setting the correct white balance on set anymore now let's test this one each with the video assist combo with a basic rec709 lut shooting another clip at the correct white balance of 5500 kelvin and another at 2500 which is obviously pretty off but unfortunately when using the same slider to bring it to 5500 results didn't match the image looks more yellowish orange which is clear here on the vector scope when i toggle between both the good news is that it took me a couple of minutes of color correction to get a close enough match you can see a subtle difference here when i toggle between them but with some more tweaking you'll probably reach 100 so here's the process once more for your reference the correct white balance of 5500 next to the wrong one of 2500 here's when i just used the color temperature slider to match it to 5500 giving me the wrong yellowish orange results then finally when i applied some manual color corrections to get a close enough match so it seems the raw color informations are there but i guess it's not properly transformed or interpreted by resolve and it needs some tweaking but that's not the point the point is white balance control is the first major difference between black magic raw from the s1h and from the pocket range this behavior is similar to what you get from internal recording by the way once again i shot the same composition internally in h265 one at the correct white balance of 5500 kelvin and the other at 2500. of course we don't have access to the camera raw menu with the metadata-based white balance control but instead we get color temperature control in the color wheels tab which is more of a color effect than a color control as i try to match it you can see it's hard to find a close enough value so i'll settle on this one it's a close enough starting point but a much worse starting point compared to what we saw from the same process in blackmagic raw side by side here are both formats with their corresponding white balance adjusted versions you can see how internal recording is way off with a blue tint all over it it's a cool fashion look but scores very bad when it comes to accuracy i tried to correct the internal version but it took me 10 times the amount of time to barely get a close enough match which still needs some secondary corrections so in this case it's better to shoot in blackmagic raw but you know what's better than blackmagicron in this case prores raw so i repeated the whole thing once again two clips correct white balance at 5500 wrong at 2500 went to the temperature slider in the 2500 punched in 5500 and perfect match simple clean no time wasted and no grading skills needed but the major drawback in prores draw is the fact that final cut itself is a very primitive grading app compared to resolve so my advice if you're looking for a more advanced coloring workflow you can adjust the white balance here in final cut then export it to prores 444 to gradient resolve or just use blackmagic raw and do all this in resolve if you're not doing any drastic color white balance shifts like i did here so bottom line based white balance control does exist in black magic raw recorded from the s1 h but no it does not behave like the standard black magic raw coming out of the pocket range not yet at least on the other hand pro res raw is ahead in this game and is meeting those raw standards we're expecting from raw formats so my theory is panasonic is probably aware of this issue they usually hold themselves to high standards and won't let such issues linger remember when pro is run from the s1h first launched in 2020 without having any white balance control in final cut then shortly after it was enabled so i feel it's a similar story here except that resolve apparently enabled an early and unfinished version of this white balance control so let's hope i'm right and it's just a matter of waiting for future updates let's now explore noise and details that's why i think i landed on a major and unfortunate discovery i wasn't aware of something that not only involves black magic raw from the s1h but black magic raw in general even the ones recorded from their own cameras so i took test shots without using any luts to prevent them from concealing any noise especially in the crushed shadows i shot two clips one at the native 640 iso and the other at 3200 basically to get both clean and noisy profiles marshall at 5.9 k in blackmagic raw prores raw and internal h265 the reason for this is not only to see how much noise you get in each format but also this difference in results will give you a hint of what's going on under the hood and that's exactly what happened using neat video denoiser i measured the noise levels here then did the same on all clips then took this data to this chart you probably fell in the trap of thinking the winner is the format that expresses less noise while in the case of raw it's quite the opposite simply because internal recording allows the camera to apply the noising pass to clean up the high amount of noise usually found in raw images in case you didn't know raw is usually noisy and that's absolutely normal so it was expected to see how blackmagic raw expressed more noise than internal but it was pretty unexpected to express significantly less noise than prores raw this should not be happening raw images coming from the same sensor should perfectly match across all raw formats with a potential of probably less than one percent imperceivable difference caused by the compression algorithms between prores raw and blackmagic rom but i made sure to record everything in the highest quality possible on both to prevent such huge difference so blackmagic raw having almost half the amount of noise we have in prores raw just didn't look right so after extensive tests and close inspections i concluded that prores raw is once again the better format of all three not only because it proudly expressed the most amount of noise but it's the shape of the noise that looked more raw than a black magic raw i know this might sound counter-intuitive comparing the three formats seeing the way noise looks in prores raw means it's not applying any denoising offering the highest fidelity and most honest translation of what the sensor really captured giving us a literal meaning of a raw image not a processed version of it like what i discovered happening in black magic raw which is not as raw as i expected it to be but still pretty good overall not a total disappointment if you want to know how to reach to that conclusion and learn about the best format to get the cleanest image then i'm warning you this next chapter will get very technical so feel free to skip it since you already know my verdict okay if you're still here try to watch this at 4k because we're going pixel peeping at a quantum level so let's check internal h265 first zooming all the way in what you're seeing here is the result of the camera's internal denoiser the image is relatively clean with subtle monochromatic noise but a bit soft with some loss of details to get a better view of what's going on let's check the blue channel it's like an x-ray that uncovers all noise and compression artifacts that you can't see in normal rgb mode and as expected you can see a ton of macro blocking all over the place and noise is just a bunch of smudge blocks but as scary as this looks there's nothing unexpected here that's what a typical compressed format looks like under the microscope now let's check blackmagic raw it's clear it suffers more from chromatic noise that's because it's not subject to any internal denoising like in the h.265 and you can see a bit more details here when you toggle between both but to me that looks more like a result of some sharpening effect rather than actual details which you can notice from the subtle darker outlines around the edges hold that thought for a minute till we check pro is raw not just for fun let's apply some dinosing to black magic raw and compare to the h.265 which is already denoised by the camera remember as you can see blackmagic raw looks a lot better than h.265 that's why i always advise it's better to have the flexibility of denoising your footage in post instead of letting the camera do this very bad job and sacrifice all those details in the process and if you try to denounce d8265 it re-confirms what i just said many details are already lost when we check some blue channel x-rays without the denoise you don't have macro blocking anymore like we saw in the h265 but what's also expected is at this high magnification you should be able to see noise pixelation not this kind of mushiness and softness typically found in compressed formats it's like a raw h.265 hybrid let's check prores raw to understand what i mean you can already see how it's more noisy but the noise has a different quality to it it has much finer grain less mushy maybe you can say less processed if i toggle between both you can see the image looks crisper like it has more details let's check the blue channel and that's the most revealing this is the kind of raw noise pixelation i was talking about when compared to black magic raw you can see how that looks too processed and mushy next to prores raw so to summarize this discovery i was talking about it seems that the recorder applies some sort of denoising and sharpening to the footage before it encodes it to blackmagic raw which kind of defies the purpose of shooting wrong but in case you don't know blackmagic raw is partially debayered and that could be the reason behind all this if you want to understand what that means i have another technical warning for you so my theory is we know that prores wrong is a true raw format where the untouched raw data coming out of the camera is included into a prores raw container in the ninja 5 recorder then when you take that file to your computer the file gets debayer to turn into an image and because it's a raw image the computer lets you control the log curve and the color temperature amongst other things the same kind of settings that the camera bakes into the clip in compressed formats but when it comes to black magic raw using the video assist recorder the raw data from the sensor is also sent to it but unlike pro as raw instead of getting packaged immediately in a raw file container to get the beard on the computer it goes under partial d-bearing right here in the recorder first which could include this de-nosing and sharpening that we saw and maybe some other things we haven't noticed yet and all this is blended in a half-baked image that still needs more de-bearing then finally wrapped into a black magic raw file and when imported into davinci it gets a second level of d-bearing to deliver the image but magically still holds enough raw data to give you the control over log curve and white balance while the white balance as we saw is still not behaving accurately at the moment so bottom line despite of acting like raw it is not a true raw format it's a hybrid format that went under some processing that changed some of its raw attributes and left others and to my other surprise the same softness we saw here was also present in clips shot with the pocket camera as well so it is an issue with black magic raw in general not just with external recording from other cameras let me know what you think in the comments below but after all i don't really care about what you call it or what it is whether it's raw or not as a dp i only care about the results and the results we're getting are not that dramatic but surely worth noting before choosing to record on blackmagic raw to wrap up and put everything in perspective when we compare both raw formats from the s1h white balance in black magic raw is not acting as expected something that could change in the future while prores raw is pretty accurate when it comes to raw fidelity meaning having a true raw file that didn't undergo any denoising sharpening or any destructive or irreversible process prores raw wins again and i don't think this will ever change in blackmagic raw those two things could already be deal breakers for many of us at present i would personally choose pro res raw over black magic rom with no second thoughts even though the whole setup you get from black magic raw and the video assist will give you a lot more advantages over prores raw setup with the ninja 5. like how davinci is a much more powerful grading app how you get a 5 inch and a 7 inch recorder options which have so many advantages over the ninja 5 already but for a marginal higher price so all that makes me look forward to the day when panasonic and blackmagic hopefully fix this white balance issue and when that happens blackmagic raw could make a lot more sense you

Channel: The DP Journey

Views: 26,852

Keywords: panasonic s1h, atomos ninja v, blackmagic raw, prores raw, panasonic s1h braw, bmpcc 6k, panasonic s1h blackmagic raw, blackmagic raw vs prores RAW, blackmagic video assist 12g, blackmagic video assist 7 12g hdr, s1h prores raw, s1h prores raw footage, ninja v, apple prores raw, blackmagic raw davinci resolve, blackmagic raw vs prores, bmpcc 6k pro, blackmagic design, davinci resolve, final cut pro x

Id: qPB6wrVKHiw

Length: 16min 55sec (1015 seconds)

Published: Thu May 27 2021