RealSting wrote:Mark, There are huge advantages of ProRes RAW over RAW DNG. For example PRORES RAW is a continuous video stream whereas DNG is a series of still images. This makes for much smoother editing as it’s less processor intensive and much easier to manage. It’s not just FCP taking advantage of this as several NLE’s can use ProRes too. ProRes has already established itself as an industry standard.
That's technically not an advantage of PreRes RAW. While Blackmagic has decided to implement CinemaDNG as image sequences, the CinemaDNG standard supports using an MXF wrapper. So CinemaDNG can be a single continuous file as well.
That being said, the way BMD currently records cDNG has an advantage for recording... though it doesn't apply to the Pocket 4K.
Because the Ursa Mini Pro has two SD card slots and 2 Cfast slots, it can record all odd frames on one card and all even frames on another. This allows you to use two slower and smaller cards as if they were one faster, larger carder. This saves on the price of media and can even allow for bitrates higher than the max speeds that Cfast and UHS-II SD cards can reach.
CDNG also support lossless compression as well as different levels of lossy compression. While BMD currently only has 3:1 and 4:1 lossy modes which have bitrates about on par with PRRHQ and PRR, it's possible to do 5:1, 7:1 and anything in between without needing to specifically support each ratio in software. ProRes RAW is ALWAYS lossy and only has two levels of compression.
Because lossy CDNG in BMDs cameras is a fixed bit-rate, it's more predictable. If you know the bitrate, you can determine how much footage you can fit in a given amount of space and you don't have to worry about bit-rate spikes creating dropped frames during recording and playback. However that doesn't mean that CDNG can't do VBR. It can and SlimRAW can currently convert lossless RAW files to it. Meanwhile, PRR ONLY supports VBR.
Am I against BMD bringing ProRes RAW to their camera's? No. But at the moment it doesn't seem to be technical superior to CinemaDNG at all.