MishaEngel wrote:In the ProResRAW whitepaper, it's only blabla... how great it is, no technical details or objective image quality comparisons what so ever, it's the marketing BS at full speed (isn't that what Apple is all about!)
ProResRAW is a lot, but it's not RAW as in flexible, exporting all the pixels, etc... and what is ProResRAW HQ?
What marketing crap? Apple's white paper is very plain and simple, but has no special marketing crap. It's about the same as BM info about BRAW, which actually causes more debates ( specially partially debayered part without any details etc.).
ProRes RAW is just plain RAW compressed with ProRes 'scheme'. It's real RAW data which you can do whatever you want, g. bypass Apple's own debayering provided in SDK. Not sure what else you want to know as there is nothing hidden or special there. It's the same as Cineform RAW- open (well SDK is not public).
BRAW (or RED) is actually "black box" which provides final debayered end data which you just pass to your app. You have no way to access RAW data (maybe there is a way in BRAW, not in RED) and have to accept de-nosing which is enforced on you by BM. Is this RAW?
I'm based on facts- details from developers who have access to ProRes RAW SDK (BRAW is publicly accessible so no problem here although still no one confirmed if you can access RAW data or not). It's not a crap repeated through internet based on nothing.
If anything then format which won't let you access RAW data could be called "RAW on paper only".
Also based on an assumption it was originally Atomos' idea to create ProResRAW not Apple's. Atoms (from obvious reasons) wanted to give universal RAW format which different camera manufactures could use. It's good idea, they just didn't put enough thinking and work into it (eg. not having SDK ready or using some exclusivity time).
Proper compressed RAW format should be plain simple- get RAW sensor data, compress it and store together with needed camera metadata. On decoding side SDK
should let you access RAW pixels, so they just get decoded from compressed form, nothing more. Then you
can have a built in debayering, de-nosing etc., but as an optional processing. This is basically what ProResRAW is (and maybe BRAW could be).