Was curious to see the differences between compressed BRAW and ProResHQ myself, so I pulled some aggressive keys on clips of windblown trees in motion against the sky. I had to push it hard and colorize the sky to really show the difference between the two.
Below is just a quick comparison between ProResHQ and BRAW 12:1 using a color key from the same framing shot in both codecs on Ursa Mini Pro. The screengrabs are from Resolve, of 400% zoomed clips in highlight mode with identical keys on both shots:
- ProResHQ v BRAW 12 to 1.jpg (255.11 KiB) Viewed 1265 times
To be very clear, I would never grade a shot this way. I'm only pushing the clips hard and displaying in highlight mode to reveal differences. However, displayed this way its quite easy to see how the color data suffers with the 4:2:2 sampling of ProResHQ resulting in visible macroblocks.
Compressed raw debayered to 4:4:4 necessarily has cleaner edges than the subsampled chroma of 4:2:2, which from the numbers alone anyone could easily conclude, but its always better to have some empirical testing to confirm.
The conclusion for me is I feel quite confident that 12:1 BRAW is quite fine to shoot with despite the 12:1 compression. I used to shoot ProResHQ without worry, and now I'm going to go ahead and shoot in BRAW 12:1 without worry.
Just so I'm not only showing ugly crazy grades, here's a still from an interview setup yesterday shot 4.6K BRAW 12:1
- Screen Shot 2018-09-18 at 10.01.44 PM.jpg (119.22 KiB) Viewed 1265 times