Working with ProRes RAW in Final Cut Pro

[Music] hi it's mark from ripple training so a lot of shooters these days are using cameras like the sony a7s iii that are capable of outputting a pro res raw signal to an external monitor recorder like the ninja 5. you can then work with these prores files directly in final cut pro now i've been getting a lot of questions about prores raw so in this macbreak studio i'm going to show you how to set up your camera and your ninja 5 for shooting prores raw and i'm going to show you how to work with these prores raw files in final cut pro before we dive into the details a couple of disclaimers first atomos sponsored this video they're interested in more people understanding the benefits and process of working with progress raw since their monitor recorders enable it however they had no input for the content and they did not review it before we published it also i purchased my ninja 5 last fall when the a7s3 came out well before this video was conceived for me this device is a no-brainer even if you don't use it to record prores raw or even progress for that matter the monitor features alone make it an indispensable part of my production gear having a larger brighter screen for evaluating composition focus and exposure using customizable zebras false color and focus peaking installing custom luts that match the luts i plan to use in final cut and the ability to use battery power in the field or ac power in my studio are all features i use regularly add on top of that the fact that it can record edit friendly prores files in multiple flavors to inexpensive ssds simultaneously with my camera recording xavc internally for redundancy so i'll use my ninja 5 even in situations where i'm not even shooting prores raw which brings me to my second disclaimer although i'll be discussing the benefits of prores raw and some of the drawbacks i'm not trying to convince you to use prores raw i'm assuming you've come to that conclusion yourself and you just want to know the workflow for doing so if you're still on the fence i'd recommend a couple of excellent videos first it's a two-part video by the dp journey on the pros and cons of working with prores raw links are in the description below i'll also provide a link to gerald and dunn's fantastically detailed video on setting up the ninja 5 in general so we can focus on prores raw if you don't already know these guys i highly recommend that you go immediately check them out on youtube and subscribe go ahead i'll wait here oh all done fantastic let's get into it okay to shoot prores raw first you're going to need a camera that supports exporting parallels raw like the a7 s3 on atomos's website you can find an extensive list of cameras that are compatible with the monitor recorder of your choice just make sure the camera includes the prores raw graphic second is the ninja itself or there are a few other monitor recorders from atomos that will do that the ninja is kind of the least expensive and most portable version and like i said i love this thing so you'll need that you'll need a cable to connect the two supposedly any hdmi cable will do but um i've found a few of my cables don't work that great i've had some issues with the connection so i actually bought the atomos cable and this has worked flawlessly so i recommended that just to make sure you've got a good cable i like the coiled cable since it doesn't really get in the way very much and it still works well on a gimbal in fact i've had this kind of stretch this out so that it doesn't bind on the gimbal too much but it seems to be a good solution the next thing is media and i'm using these little uh plastic cases that hold standard ssds and atomos makes these really cool atom x drives that perfectly fit on the back of this these stick out a little as you can see here it just sticks out a little bit but i don't care it's uh inexpensive and a great solution then you just buy internal ssds and put them in with four screws that come with these little plastic cases and then for the battery you can either use uh it comes with a power supply so like in my studio i have it connected to a power supply so it's powered all the time when i'm doing uh zooming or you know streaming in the studio but this is an np 750 batter i believe and you can get smaller ones but this is nice it gives me several hours of recording time and just clicks right in there very easily so that's pretty much what you need you can see i also have this small rig kind of rig on here but it's not necessarily in fact all the shooting i just did this didn't arrive in time for my trip so i just shot with this mounted directly to the camera's hot shoe and worked great but i love this rig so it's even better now and that's what you need so now let's look at how to set up the camera and your ninja first thing you want them both connected you want the ninja turned on and the camera turned on and let's start with our camera settings now if you have a different camera from the a7 s3 obviously these settings will be a little bit different but they should be close to the same i'll press the menu button and then i'll scroll down to the last icon which is the tool box within the toolbox i'll go down to the second to last set which is external output number 11. and then we'll walk through these so first one is hdmi resolution you could set this to 1080p if you had space considerations but really probably want to set that to 4k or 2160p then we go to hdmi output settings there's several in here first one is record media during hdmi output i put that to on so that i have a backup in addition to all my media being recorded in prores raw to the ninja 5 i also have media being recorded to my internal sd card in the codec that i've selected next output resolution you want to match to what we just saw for hdmi output resolution in my case i'm choosing 4k you could also do 1080. and then here's the key one really is raw output off by default you want to turn that on once you do you'll get a warning that you need a device that supports raw output which the ninja 5 does fantastic next once you enable raw output two new parameters become available the raw output setting which allows you to choose a frame rate in ntsc world that's 24 30 or 60p in pal you're going to have 25 or 50. i don't think there's a 30 option but 25 or 50. so 60 as high as you can go if you need to shoot some slow motion i would choose 60p otherwise i choose 24p to save on disk space the color gamut for raw output depends on your camera and what color science it has available on the a7s3 you can choose s gamma 3 or s gamut 3 cine i prefer the look of the cine and both of them have the same s-log 3 gamma so i'll select that i'll leave time code output set to on and then i like wreck control to be on what this enables me to do is to trigger both the ninja and the camera recording just by pressing the record button on the camera we'll back out of that we don't need to mess with control for hdmi i'll back out of that and we're pretty much set up one important thing to note is once you've set your frame rate for prores raw output that frame rate dictates the frame rate that the camera is going to do internally so if i go up to my very first menu item for shooting go to image quality you can see my file format right now is xavc hs 4k what you choose is really up to you there but my movie settings notice i cannot change my frame rate because it's being determined by raw movies so that's what's happening there you just need to be aware that your frame rate will be dictated by the frame rate chosen for raw output okay now for setting up the ninja when it's turned on we want to go into the menus now you want to make sure that this button is not pressed here which will give you the display menus if you press the menu button but i'm going to turn that off so when we press the menu button we get the general menus first thing i want to do is scroll all the way to the right to info and make sure you're using the most recent firmware update which at the time of this recording is 10.62 and check if you have that or check if there's a newer one available because it will give you more functionality which we'll talk about a little bit later from there you go to activation and if you haven't already done so you need to activate the capability to record in prores raw use a qr code or go to the url there it's free but you do have to go through the activation process you can see i've already enabled it here from there let's scroll over and i'll go to record here's where we choose our codec and you can see i have prores raw chosen if i click there we can go to dnxh dnxhd or regular prores and different flavors of regular prores but i'll go to pro's raw and then you can choose two different compression formats prores raw or prores raw hq i think prores raw is great and you don't necessarily need the hq version which is going to take a little more space so i'm just using regular progress raw here you can see the record format is 4.2 k that's based on the sensor size the 24 frames per second or 2398 is based on our settings in the camera and then one more important thing at the bottom left corner it says 69 metadata crop if you turn that off the the sensor that's recording it doesn't have quite the same aspect ratio as 169 so i find it better and safer to turn on that metadata crop and i'll explain that a little bit more once we're in final cut pro the only thing you might want to consider doing here is over in your meters if you have audio being fed directly to the ninja you'd enable this analog audio here i'm taking my audio as you can see by the meters here straight from the camera and it's actually just a backup audio because i'll use a second device to record audio in the field usually and not do it directly off the camera but just something to be aware of so once that's all set up we can go out of that menu now i'll go into display and i'll go to the display menu so a couple things here let's go to monitor here you can choose how you want to view the image being sent from the camera if you choose native you're looking basically at that linear raw output it looks kind of like log i don't find that useful for recording you can do rec 709 which will give you kind of the broadcast standard by mapping that native raw output into a rec709 color space that's great and useful if you're not doing anything custom i would skip hlg and pq unless you're doing hdr workflows and we're focused here on more on sdr workflows what i do is i go to lut and then that will apply a lot based on what i've set up in the lut tab you can see here it says neutral a7s3 g3 that is one of the uh phantom luts which are a set of third-party luts that i like and i use in final cut pro if i go over to luts you can see that i've installed one two three four custom luts here and installing constant lens is super easy you just copy them to your media for the ninja and connect that and then you load them up very straightforward to do that you can see this first light that i have is actually for a different camera but it's one of the leaming luts the second lot i have is another leaving lut also for for this particular camera more useful this lut for me for bright outdoor scenes where i want to kind of push to the right exposed to the right the third one is a standard cine mapping from s-log cine to rec 709 and the fourth is the one that i'm currently using which is this neutral lut from uh from phantom so i set it to that so that i can see exactly what i'll see in final cut pro if i'm using the lut in both places and that's a great thing about these lookup tables in terms of monitoring and then seeing what you get in post and we'll take a look at that so with that we're all set up and in fact you'll notice if i press the record button now i'll get a red box around both devices and you'll see that recording is enabled on the ninja i'm recording to both simultaneously just by pressing the record button on the camera and the ninja is recording pro as raw that you can see at the top there and my camera is recording an xavc hs 4k 24p 4200 uh 10 bit which is what i had chosen in my settings there and we're ready to go so what about when you're on set is there anything you should do differently in terms of lighting exposure and white balance when shooting prores raw as opposed to a camera processed codec my opinion is no even though prores raw will allow you to change your onset iso and in some cases also your white balance in post i would still perform normal white balancing on set and i'd still make sure to set iso to a base profile which for the a7s iii is either 640 or 12800 for s-log 3. in fact i'd recommend using a base iso even if it means slightly over or under exposing your shot now you might say wait a minute mark raw recording is bypassing the in-camera noise reduction so does using a base profile even matter well let's take a look at that in final cut so here i have two identical clips that were shot simultaneously through the method i told you about earlier to enable dual recording the first one is an xabc clip and the second one is a prores raw clip they both are set to a camera lut of the sony s log s3 gamut 3 cine you can see that here and you can see it here for the camera lut for the raw clip and i changed the iso in each of them from 12 800 to 10 000. so check this out right now i'm just at 61 i'm gonna go just to a hundred percent because it'll be even obvious there and let's just look at this area of the books now remember when we're looking at this xavc clip that was shot in camera it includes the in-camera de-noising that's built in okay so here we are at 12 800 iso and here we are at 10 000. so anything close to a base iso you get a lot more noise all right let's check out the prores raw version here we are at 12800 at base iso and you'll notice there's a lot more noise than the xavc version at 12 800 that's because remember prores raw you're getting before any in-camera noise reduction you need to do that in post but the point here is if we go from from 12 800 over to 10 000 we still get a big jump in noise so we're totally bypassing the in-camera noise reduction here but we're still seeing a big difference by using a base iso profile that inherently has less noise in it so when shooting previous raw just like any other time you want to try to target one of those base iso 640 or 12800 in this case but kind of the cool thing with prores raw is you can let's say you can't end your way to get there exactly you can choose to under or over expose it's usually better to overexpose a little bit in s-log 3 but you could even underexpose a little bit to hit that 12 800 number you know if you don't have quite enough light because you can adjust that iso in post adjusting the iso and post as we'll see has no impact on noise it's only in camera that it helps to hit that bass profile okay let's get into some of the benefits of using prores raw in post first you're not going to need to create proxies or optimize media in-camera codecs like hebc while creating smaller files are difficult for even newer computers to play back especially 4k 10 bit 422 files this clip right here is hevc but it's 420 which i shot on purpose so that i can get good playback on these clips when i'm just shooting directly with in-camera files it's 10-bit but it's 4-2-0 and i've discovered 4-2 actually looks quite good if it were a 4-2 10-bit clip i'd have trouble playing this back even on this is 2019 macbook pro the pro is raw version on the other hand i will not have any problem playing back whatsoever even though it needs to be both decoded and demosaic in software it's still less taxing on a computer system and in fact is quite comparable to playback performance of prores 422 hq one downside is larger file sizes so how much bigger well if we go to this hevc version shift f to reveal in browser right click and choose reveal in finder we can see that it's 375 megabytes and if i hit ctrl d it's about 30 seconds long 30 seconds 375 megabytes the pros version of the same clip shift f to reveal in browser right click to reel and finder is 3.84 gigabytes and here's the hevc version so it's about 10 times larger than the hevc version which is significant but it's only slightly bigger than prores hq and in fact this clip right below it is a prores lt clip of about the same duration if i double click to open in quicktime we can see it it's actually shot with the output set to record the screen so it's not very useful but it's useful for this example if i get info on it well first of all we can see here it's about 30 seconds long and it's pro was lt 2.85 gigs so my prores raw clip is only about 30 percent bigger than my prores lt clip which is quite amazing so but it's something to keep in mind for planning purposes the actual size of progress raw will depend on the scene that you're shooting how noisy it is i've found i get anywhere from 6 gigabytes per minute to 20 gigabytes per minute for these prores raw clips for planning purposes i would expect that you can get about an hour and a half of prores raw not pro result hq but regular prores raw about an hour and a half into a one hour ssd [Music] next you can manipulate your prores raw clips in ways that simply aren't possible with camera processed clips with a clip in the browser selected in the info inspector which is currently set to the basic view we can confirm that the clip is prores rob that's about it if we go to the general or extended view we can see that final cut has automatically applied a raw to log conversion and a camera lut while you can choose whether to use a camera light and which to use for log encoded footage only with raw can you choose the raw to law conversion for example you could use the conversion of a different camera manufacturer and that would then apply their color science to the transform giving you a look more like the shot that came from that camera type or you could set it to none so that you're grading with the original linear values in general i'd recommend leaving this at the default or in this case since i know i shot with the cine variation i'll choose that for the camera lut i'll use the same lut i used in the ninja which in this case was a phantom lut note that i've previously installed these luts here by using this add custom camera look command you could instead set this popup to none and then use the creative lut effect from the effects browser or you could set it to none and just grade the login coded clip directly and now i have a starting point that should look very much like what i saw on the ninja screen when shooting note that i'm currently working in a regular sdr library so the lut that's applied automatically is tone mapping this hdr log encoded clip to sdr now just below these settings we see camera iso and camera color temperature but they aren't adjustable that's because we need to switch our view to settings so keep that in mind now i can select different isos from the pop-up menu and i could set an exposure offset much like an in-camera ev adjustment making these changes here is like changing them in camera during the shoot since they weren't baked in at that time we are manipulating the raw sensor data this is different from using the color grading tools which are applied to the processed image and therefore won't have as much latitude this is one of the key benefits of working with raw media the ability to adjust exposure parameters non-destructively after the shoot now if you didn't shoot at base iso changing to a base iso here won't improve the noise in your shot but by the same token if you did shoot at a base iso for the cleanest image you can now choose a nearby iso without increasing the noise that's why i recommended that you shoot at the base iso even if you have to slightly over or under expose to do so since you can adjust that iso in post now what about color temperature it's clearly not adjustable here that's because at the time of this recording prores raw shadow sony a7s3 and recorded to the ninja 5 does not allow for adjusting this white balance in post here's a list of devices that support adjustable prores raw camera settings in final cut pro now note it was published in november of 2020 and it's terribly out of date in fact the sony a7 s3 isn't even on it however i expect this to be updated soon so stay tuned for that personally i'm disappointed that adjustable color temperature is not supported from my a7 s3 at this time but the good news is that since i shot in prores raw if that changes in a future update to final cut pro i'll have access to it so shooting progress raw is a great way of future proofing your footage for greater manipulation in post as well as for hdr deliverables [Music] so i mentioned that i'm in an sdr library in fact if i select the library you can see that right here where it says standard in the inspector if i click modify you can see right here i'm in a standard or sdr as opposed to hdr library what this means when i add this hdr clip because all raw clips by definition are going to be hdr i'll press e i'm going to get a warning saying that break content will be clipped and then i need to either color correct or use the hdr tools effect to deal with that this warning isn't really accurate with raw media because our camera lut is already tone mapping the hdr image to sdr so we can ignore it and just a side comment on that if you're working in an hdr library the lut that's applied will automatically know that it's in an hdr library and will be properly tone mapped to an hdr library but since we're in sdr the lut that's applied tone maps to sdr and we can really ignore this warning but what's important to note is that another key benefit of working with prores raw is that it's a great format for delivering an hdr although hdr workflow is beyond the scope of what we can cover today so we'll continue working in this sdr library assuming we need to deliver in rec 709 for broadcast or for web delivery okay earlier i had you turn on 69 cropping on the ninja so i want to show you what that does here i have a clip recorded with the cropping enabled notice the pixel dimensions in the inspector are 4240 by 23.85 while that's larger than my 4k timeline which is 3840 by 2160 they have the same aspect ratio if you divide the numbers you'll get 1.78 or 16 to 9. now this next clip i shot with the cropping turned off notice the size is 4264 by 2408 slightly larger in both dimensions and the ratio is about 1.77 final cut by default is scaling both of these clips down to fit into the 3840x2160 timeline but the second uncropped clip doesn't quite fit perfectly it's so close you won't see letterboxing along the top and bottom in fact that's why i put this little white square here to see if you could see it but it doesn't show because the difference is so small but to be on the safe side you really should go to the inspector to the video inspector to spatial conform and change the type from fit to fill and you'll see a very very very slight change because it's going to scale it up a tiny bit but if you use that crop function on the ninja you don't even have to worry about this [Music] okay we've imported our prores raw clips set the raw to log conversion and the camera light and added some clips to our timeline now we can take advantage of the fact that these are 12-bit files with full color sampling that additional color depth means we can manipulate luminance hue and saturation more than we could with for example the xavc clips recorded in camera so let's take a look at this example my first clip is the prores raw clip and we can see in the inspector that i've set the raw to law conversion to use the sony s log 3 s gamut 3 cine version because that's what i chose in camera and then for the camelot i'm using this phantom lut that i also used loaded into the ninja so i'm getting a result that looks very much like what i saw on set i recorded simultaneously to xavc which is this clip here and we can see since i've applied that same camera lut our results look very close if i go back and forth between them if we just look in the viewer they look pretty identical the difference is you'll see there might be a slight bit of color shifting and they'll also be more noise in the prores raw clip since we're bypassing the noise reduction in camera we're also bypassing all the lens correction for things like chromatic aberration or lens barrel distortion so we'll see some differences there as well but in this particular clip those aren't very obvious and it looks very similar but what i want to bring your attention to is the waveform if we look at the xabc clip and check out the detail in the waveform and then switch to the prores raw clip notice how there's a lot more information there's a lot more luminance information and color information especially look down here when i toggle between the two they're thicker traces it means that there's more color information to work with so for example this clip seems to me a little bit under exposed by default it's not crushed in the in the shadows it's certainly nowhere close to blown out the highlights but it's a little bit underexposed because i shot in raw i can adjust that iso here in post of course i could color correct for it as well but by adjusting iso i'm doing something that is less destructive and by destructive you know nothing's really destructive in manipulating colors but as you continue to manipulate them more and more you can start to break down the image so setting the ice to say to a thousand here will give me some additional detail in the shadows i'll still have nice low shadow luminance values but i can spread out some of this luminance information in the shadows and get more detail available that would be a little more difficult to achieve in the version that was shot with everything baked in in terms of iso and white balance baked in so with that adjustment made here to my iso i did make a color correction here and i'll open up the color board all i did was raise the highlights i just worked on luminance i'm not really worried about color balance at this point in order to get my highlights a little closer to 90 95 in that area to do the same thing with my xavc clip that's not prores raw because i can't adjust iso i needed to do more work i needed to adjust the highlights the mids and even the shadows to attempt to get these two waveforms to match if i toggle back and forth you'll see they're very close and the images are very close but i needed to do more work on this xavc clip to get it in that same range and you can see again there's just not as much detail look how much more detail there is in the prores raw clip so hopefully this example illustrates how this 12-bit raw files give you more information to work with and the fact that you can set iso in advance before color correcting gives you more latitude [Music] now here's an example where i'm really pushing the color correction to demonstrate the difference between prores raw any other codecs that are done in camera so i have this sunrise clip and right now i'm on the prores version of it and if i go to the info inspector you can see i have the same rotolog conversion and the same camera load that we've been talking about and if i go over to my xavc clip you'll see that has the same camera let applied so if i toggle between them they look quite the same notice the lens barrel distortion correction is much more obvious here the ninja shot the pros raw shot doesn't have that in-camera lens build distortion fix so if you look especially at the horizon line you can see kind of warp between the two so that's something that you need to take care of in post when you're shooting with pro res raw if there's noticeable lens belt distortion or chromatic aberration as well but these two match pretty well now what i've done is added a significant color correction i'll go and start first with my xavc clip and enable this color correction and show it to you where i've really crushed the shadows here and the reason i did that if i let's make this a little bit wider so we can see this a little better you'll see there's some significant banding that appears up here now you're looking at a youtube compressed version of this so i don't know how obvious this will be but especially if i scrub the playhead you can see some banding up here in fact let's go to a hundred percent and look over here it actually shows a little bit better if i'm looking at the full clip where you can really see that banding right there now if i go to the prores raw clip on the other hand and enable the same correction in fact let's just toggle between them so you can see that's the prores raw and that is the xavc clip so from a color perspective they're the same but hopefully you can see the banding just completely disappears on the prores raw clip versus the xavc clip and obviously this is really pushed but it really shows you the difference of working with 12 bit versus 10-bit and of course if this was 8-bit it would completely break up but prores raw really allows you to push the grading without creating that kind of banding [Music] finally we need to talk about noise raw files as we've discussed they bypass the in-camera processing like noise reduction sharpening and lens compensation which includes adjusting for vignetting chromatic aberration and barrel distortion so while you get more control over each of these things in post it does mean you need to address them let's focus on noise reduction so i have this interview shot here and i purposely exposed it for the bright background and here's this prores raw version and you can see in the inspector we have the rod law conversion the same as the other clips and the camera lut also using that phantom lut if i pop over to the xavc version it has that same camera light applied so that we get the same result if i toggle between them you can see that they are very very similar now i've color corrected both of these to uh reveal our subject and i'll show you my color correction here and just a basic color board adjustment i didn't do anything at saturation and color i'm just working with luminance here uh to show you what i needed to do in order to reveal our subject and if i go to the prores raw clip i did a similar color adjustment now let's zoom in close we're currently at 61 percent on this 4k clip i'm gonna go to 200 percent and let's take a look so this is the xavc clip and again this is a sort of extreme version because i really had to lift the shadows but i wanted to demonstrate what's going on and make it clear and you may or may not see this in the youtube compression but right now uh he has a lot of sort of breakup on this left side of his face in the shadow where we're seeing splotchiness and areas of color solid color and areas of gray this has been processed by the in-camera noise reduction let's look at the prores raw clip in the same point and at first you might be oh my god this is terrible because it's much noisier let's toggle between them that's the in-camera xavc remember hevc codec in this case be the same thing with h.264 where uh we have basically what looks to me like some macro blocking in that shadow detail that you know we've pushed a lot but it's much more even here in the prores raw clip now you can use final cut's built-in noise reduction but i don't find that that's very flexible so what i've done here is to use neat videos noise reduction and i've already run a profile and tweaked it i'll turn it on so you can see the impact where we get a really nice result compared to the other one let's toggle back and forth so this is uh let's go back into our timeline and go down to xavc and you see this is really kind of broken up here and then here with neat video it needs to render again give it a second it looks quite good and remember we're zoomed in at 200 percent here so the moral of the story here is that prores raw forces you to do noise reduction in post but it gives you more flexibility and control and you can probably get a better result than the in-camera noise reduction you may not notice any difference at all on properly exposed clips but clips that have a lot of shadow detail or where you do a lot of color correction you can definitely notice a difference the downside is number one you need to do the noise reduction in post and uh using neat video you have to pay for a noise reduction plug-in and it takes a lot of processing power a ton of render time ton of render time to work with neat video great product but that's what you pay for and is this render time uh on that side of it i'll go back to 100 here you can kind of see the difference here there's a little bit of color shifting as well between the two that i'm seeing but i i find this prores result so much better in this kind of situation where let's say it just wasn't shot properly even though i did this on purpose it's a recoverable shot when shot in prores raw and it's really not a recoverable shot if it's encoded to something like hebc well that took a bit longer than i thought but i really wanted to show you the entire pro resolve workflow from setting up your camera and your ninja through to using it in final cut pro and demonstrating some of the benefits and some of the drawbacks of doing so i'm really interested in your thoughts about prores raw so please post a comment below thanks again to atomos for supporting this video and we'll see you next time here on macbreak studio [Music]

Channel: Ripple Training

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Length: 37min 26sec (2246 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 23 2021