Raw vs ProRes: Can You Tell the Difference?

i've been shooting a little bit of b-raw on the ursa mini pro i come from kind of just doing pro res because way back when that was like the easiest mode to shoot in on the ursa mini and then b raw came out and i was already comfortable with prores i was like ah i'm not going to worry about it too much i'll deal with prores because it's fine i've never had a problem highlights have always been there i've had plenty of dynamic range resolution everything's been great why do i need raw it seems like it's going to be complicated thankfully in my testing it's actually been not that complicated at all b-raw has edited really well it's great i did a video kind of in my initial impressions or walking through it but i wanted to do some more uh showing kind of the differences between b-raw and pro-res as it relates to like the high-end and the low-end versions of those so with b-raw you know at the high end you have three-to-one compression on the low end you have 12 to one with prores on the high end you have xq and on the low end you have prores proxy very different file sizes different data rates what's the actual difference though this is a shot of my lovely wife who graciously stepped in even though she didn't want to be on camera so i filmed her as well as a little clip of my son who i think made his first appearance on my channel and my initial gh5 review uh he was much younger then so he's gotten quite a bit older so here he is uh kind of sitting handsomely uh as i'm you know pointing a camera and i'm shooting some test footage i wanted to get skin tones i wanted to do shots that resonate with what i think a lot of people actually film in my other video it was kind of a sunset it was a last minute you know just quick test as the sun was setting and i was like i'll capture that for you know the highlights but it ended up not even being in the film film mode it was in video extended so for this one i want to do a little bit better do some controlled lighting have actual skin tones and people in the shot so we take a look at these differences between prores proxy pro as xq and then b-raw you know 12-1 and 3-1 i think the results are kind of interesting so here you can see the shots and i'm going to just scrub through these real quick again in premiere at least and if you're using davinci resolve or something from you know some other you know if you're using a final cut x or whatever else like that's fine use whatever nle you prefer i do imagine davinci resolve would be the best solution for blackmagic raw since it is a blackmagic product but i'm using adobe premiere because that's what i'm comfortable with and that's what my whole team uses so we can all kind of work and collaborate together but resolve is probably the way to go although there's a macbook pro and it plays this footage just fine there's no hiccups no issues it plays smooth seamless and this is 4.6k not a struggle for the macbook pro in premiere which i would expect maybe it would be thankfully it's not plays just as well as the prores stuff which is i'm great to see so here are the clips we'll go through them that's b-roll 3-1 you can see in the bottom left-hand corner of the frame the compression there so that's prores x-cube and then we've got prores proxy there as well so we take a look i did throw a lut on here so if i pop that on you can see what it looks like colored and this is the leaming lut uh that i pulled uh on here and let me just go through the settings here real quick so it's the leeming one it's for the blackmagic pocket 6k so the leaming lut there isn't one for the ursa mini pro so this isn't maybe as pixel perfect as it could be but for some baseline uh adjustments i threw it on here so you get an example of like what it kind of looks like right out of the box of course with color grading and color correction you can do it however you like make it look the best to to what you prefer it's very very subjective so rather than getting into like what i think looks good i just wanted to throw a lot on here sort of designed for you know black magic and their kind of uh generation 4 color science so that's the baseline lut is on there and then there's also a creative lut also from the the leaving pack that you can throw on there so you can see the difference of the base lut so if i that's as shot put the base light on and then you can do the creative lut and i kind of like how the leaving stuff is set up that way where you use the base lut to kind of get it into proper color and then there's some of the creative effects that can be easily added on from that point so if you don't like how this looks totally fine you can color it however you like but we can see both shots here and as we skip ahead premiere will catch up so we've got you know some color on here and again before and after if you like brighter highlights fine if you like darker shadows fine it's very very subjective do it however you like just wanted to do baseline lut stuff so hopefully you can see as i'm skipping through here do you notice any difference between the different codecs is there anything standing out to you as being strange or odd one way or the other no you're not going to notice a whole lot granted this is you know youtube compression we're dealing with this is a windowed mode on premiere so i'll go i'll go i'll pop it up full screen here and we'll go take a closer look is there any any difference here you're noticing significantly between prores proxy and pro as xq i'll give a few more seconds for you to really evaluate the differences between prores proxy and pros xq and granted pros proxy is like a tenth of the file size so you would think that it's going to be just trash compared to xq but you noticing anything anything standing out no no not noticing too much okay well how about we look at b-raw maybe b-raw 12-1 and then b-rod three to one twelve to one three to one oh three to one anything anything standing out okay well like how about this shot so b raw three to one versus b raw 12 to one anything i'm keeping it static i don't want to play back i don't want any youtube compression to like you know mess with the motion or anything just trying to give you the best quality we can look at let's let's zoom in let's zoom in to like a hundred percent okay there's i'll keep a little bit of shirt in there that's 12 to one that's three to one any differences any differences no i i know i'm kind of being silly here and just kind of making it excruciating going through all these but there really isn't anything noticeably different for these types of shots when you're dealing with these different compression uh you know styles prores versus raw proxy versus xq versus 12-1 versus three to one most people i think and you know we're doing we're doing some color correction here it's not like you know we don't have anything on there we're just looking at the camera it's like no we're putting a lot on there we're converting those colors if you had to go more extreme would it be helpful to have raw yeah potentially maybe if you had to recover more highlights yeah maybe it might be beneficial but just right looking at the footage right out of the camera with a lut same blood applied it's applied to everything right so i've got this one adjustment layer i'm not doing individual color correction they all come in basically looking identical the one thing i will say that this doesn't account for is highly detailed shots maybe there's someone out there thinking yeah but it's a face and it's you know the background is all blurry if it was a landscape and there was tons and tons of detail you would need you know the higher data rates that may be true however a lot of people don't always shoot that way and if you know that going into it you can pick and choose your codec or your compression based on what you're shooting so if you need the crazy high data rate because it's a super detailed shot with you know everything is sharp everything is in focus it's this beautiful landscaping you want every bit of detail you want any of it lost to compression sure throw it into a higher mode and capture that but if you're doing something like this with like a face and you know blurry background you can record at the highest data rate you want you can record with the you know least compression you want but also don't feel bad if you can't because the budget doesn't account for it this is what i talked about in the other video in that some of these modes don't make sense for certain budgets if you only have you know a couple thousand dollars for the project well it doesn't make sense to put all that into you know a giant hard drive just to store all the raw footage and then no one gets paid you can't afford anything else because it's all spent on hard drives so really take into consideration what the project calls for what the budget is and calculate it that way i actually did a breakdown spreadsheet of all the different you know record times for each of the compression uh ratios and with the test shot i did it was like oh yeah like there's not really much of a difference here and then even more so here make your own judgments make your own decisions but don't feel the guilt of needing to you know upgrade your your codec or your compression just because it's like not the best you know sometimes if it's if it's a cost thing for sure shoot a little bit lower if you have the budget shoot a little bit higher of course but don't feel like the the differences are so drastic that you're gonna ruin a shot because you shot it at prores proxy or you shot at 12 to 1. it's just not the case for the most part for most shots again not talking about landscapes and fine detail but i think most people shoot you know footage that looks similar to this it's faces it's people it's you know close-ups or it's medium shots with blurry backgrounds because that's what looks cinematic and what most people associate with cinematic stuff and then yeah if you have a wide shot bump up the compression or bump up the prores if you need to not taking into consideration you know highlight recovery and that kind of stuff and just the functionality of raw which maybe i should talk about uh briefly that when you're looking at this stuff and you're in you know premiere let's say that's where you can do it with the prores stuff if you click on the clip and you go to the master tab for the clip there's nothing there if you go to the raw clip and you go to the master tab you have all the raw camera data this is the blackmagic raw plugin for premiere so you can change the clip settings and you can switch the color science to gen 5 or gen 4 you've got tons of flexibility here just changing the white balance even with dialing in the number is so nice compared to doing it with color correction like you can but just dialing in the white balance you want just helpful it's nice so the raw workflow i think the fact that you can edit it as fast as you can it's kind of nice to just be able to change some of these things on the fly like your iso let's say oh i want to drop it down to 200 or i want to bump it up to 3200 for whatever reason being able to make those adjustments to exposure to white balance on the fly with the raw files is a lot better and a significant upgrade from prores so that's the one thing i would say if you're worried about playback speed and performance the b-raw stuff plays back fine the prores stuff plays back fine so you do get the nice benefit of being able to change all your camera settings if you're shooting raw so if you shoot b raw that's the one thing i would say is valuable out of all this shoot raw because the playback works great even on kind of a macbook pro something basic it's not anything super high-end and you know don't feel like you're losing all this data and resolution and compression if your budget doesn't call for it you can definitely get away with a lot with the lower end stuff so you can kind of make the most of your day make the most out of your cards you're not just filling up hard drives full of data that you don't actually need at the end of the day and i think that's what is valuable doing these tests i'm going to keep doing more testing it out see how it goes but i probably will switch from prores to b-raw just because the playback is fantastic and those raw settings are really really helpful in a lot of different situations so if you haven't shot raw or b-raw definitely test it out because it might surprise you you're not losing anything if anything you're gaining a few extra features that you just don't get with prores you

Channel: Stronz Vanderploeg

Views: 14,947

Keywords: behind the scenes, stronzv, dslr video production

Id: Y9Kyek4BBFA

Length: 12min 41sec (761 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 25 2020