Blackmagic Forum

I understand that. The fee is mostly for Blackmagic, as a way to ease their personal motivations for not providing ProRes Raw capability.

+1 For this request.

You are hurting your users.

LMAO I just went to update my Atomos preferences and they asked me for my camera preference. Blackmagic cameras was not listed but basically every other one was.

Blackmagic's position not supporting ProRes Raw because Atomos does, and Atomos refusing to recognize that Blackmagic cameras exist seems just like two five-year-olds in kindergarten that refuse to speak to each other.

jallen0 wrote:LMAO I just went to update my Atomos preferences and hey asked me for my camera preference. Blackmagic cameras was not listed but basically every other one was.

Blackmagic's position not supporting ProRes Raw because Atomos does, and Atomos refusing to recognize that Blackmagic cameras exist seems just like two five-year-olds in kindergarten that refuse to speak to each other.

If DR implements prr it will mean a windfall of sales to atomos that will leave BMD VA and cameras in the dust. It really is a predicament. BMD makes its money off cameras and hardware not software. BMD has been put against a rock and a hard place. The only solution I can figure out is for bmd to get better at cameras and other hardware and makes DR even more compelling. Or maybe offer both raws on their cameras and VA and let the market decide. If atomos doesn't still have exclusivity


Ricardo Marty

Dear Black Magic Design,
My lovely little PANASONIC GH5S is gonna deliver Pro Res Raw. I have windows and the studio version of Resolve 17. Please help out with a separate piece of software that will transcode pro res raw to BRAW or done solution for Windows. My ONLY option is to buy Adobe Premiere Pro one month at a time at $30's+ just to transcode to send my files to Resolve. I'm stuck with an Atomos Ninja V and I mean dang... If nothing else can you with with Atomos to get BRAW on the Ninja V? If anything it'll increase the spread of BRAW. Sadness enters thinking about Adobe anything in my computer.

BRAW in Atomos product ? Read stories about relationship between BM and Atomos.
It will never happen
Your only solution is BM own recorder, but so far camera support is not that great.

You can also simply switch from ProRes RAW to standard ProRes in your recorder. Not exactly the same, but in many cases not that big difference at the end either.

+1 for PRR support. Format wars suck.

And whatever the spat is with Atomos, it's hurting both companies. They can't compete even just in the one area of monitors/recorders based on traditional things like features and value?

As far as I can tell DR(S) mostly exists to sell BMD hardware. Not really the software I want to rely on, come to think of it. But I already bought it, they got my money, and ironically now my opinion matters less since it's no skin off their back if I stop using DR. But will I buy their hardware if this is how they do things? Probably not, if I have a choice.

JerryG wrote:Historically, no company has ever increased sales by giving customers less choice--it's always the other way around.

Umm... Apple? Apparently many people are actually overwhelmed by choice. Or are fine with only one choice if they think it's "magical."

-Max

Andrew Kolakowski wrote:You can also simply switch from ProRes RAW to standard ProRes in your recorder. Not exactly the same, but in many cases not that big difference at the end either.

Not ideal in my setup for example, or anyone else who uses one of the (very few?) cameras which only output 10+ bit color in RAW. Like Sony FS5 in my case (4K RAW via 3G SDI to compatible recorders, internal 4K and via HDMI is only 8 bit). Sure, recording that raw output to PR 422 HQ is better than any 8-bit option, but it's far from ideal for shots actually needing a wide dynamic range. Or for example I could get a Ninja V and record my A7SIII in 12-bit RAW, but that would be useless in Resolve.

-Max

If you record ProRes444 it will be 12 bit as well. Those 12Bit are theoretical sensor number. In real world if you convert it to 10bit you may loose nothing or just tiny bit. I would like to see an example were 12Bit RAW shows real difference during grading compared to 10bit ProRes recording. You also don’t loose dynamic range itself at all. You loose gradation in your signal when you push hard you may get banding as there is not enough data to stretch it further. Have you seen many cases when you get banding when grading ProResHQ?
12bit in this case is rather weak argument. Maybe with better sensor which has 16bit converter you loose more, but 12 to 10 is very debatable. 8bit is obviously not good enough and easy to prove, but 10bit recording (for 12bit sensors) is not.

Best argument for RAW is storage efficiency. This is most optimal way to get best quality for given file size. There are also other arguments, but less important. It’s not like you should not use RAW if possible, but if it means you have a lot of problems in post then you should not try to stick to it for any cost ( only because it’s RAW and “the best”). Best is always a relative term.
Need of RAW (compared to good intermediate format) is definitely overrated ( of course Atomos thinks it’s world saver). Great to have, but as always not something 100% obvious.

I also would like to see ProResRAW import (and ProRes exporter) in Resolve for sure.

JerryG wrote:Historically, no company has ever increased sales by giving customers less choice--it's always the other way around.

Umm... Apple? Apparently many people are actually overwhelmed by choice. Or are fine with only one choice if they think it's "magical."

-Max

Well it depends on nature of the choice.
Too much choice is not good at all as Max said.
In this case it’s not really a matter of choice because there is no other RAW format which is supported by all cameras. If BRAW would have at least same coverage as ProResRAW then we could talk about choice and redundant formats. Not the case atm. at all.

Max Paperno wrote:+1 for PRR support. Format wars suck.
Umm... Apple? Apparently many people are actually overwhelmed by choice. Or are fine with only one choice if they think it's "magical."

That's true of the consumer world, for example I have no interest in switching to Android because to be honest, I just can't be bothered. and It certainly won't affect my work.

But if you're a freelancer and someone comes to you with a drive full of PRR, and you say you either can't work with it or you need to convert it into a format that might not have the same flexibility, then any talk of choice v closed garden comes a distant 2nd to whether you can do the job or not.

I accept the business difficulty, we are on a forum discussing a loss leading NLE after all, but the situation for many pro's has become untenable judging by this thread.

Andrew Kolakowski wrote:If you record ProRes444 it will be 12 bit as well.

Right, that would be better than 422 for the FS5 RAW, but unfortunately not an option on my recorder (from that other company). Jumps from 422 HQ to Raw, nothing in between. Also yea, file size.

I don't claim to understand all the nuances of stuffing the FS5 raw data into PRHQ. Alister Chapman "told me" it was a poor substitute, so I'm going with that. But seriously, it's hard to compare apples to apples when the NLE doesn't support one variety or another. From the bit of experimentation I've done with other software, it seems easier to grade the raw version in a program which understands it natively (anecdotal, I know, and that other software all has it's own issues). Banding, no, not pushing anything that far, at least yet.

I'm not running out to buy a recorder just to get 12b RAW out of the A7S3, and certainly have no experience comparing the two. I've seen the opinion that it's mostly a gimmick, and that may well be true for all I know.

Andrew Kolakowski wrote:Best is always a relative term.

Totally with you there. Didn't mean to sound like a PR RAW fanboy, and don't even know yet if it's really "best" for what I do (never mind other people). And luckily no one is banging on my door with a disk full of PRR, I do have choices. It would just be nice to use all the tools available. I've lived through several format wars, and they were all stupid marketing BS, sometimes with the superior technology actually losing out. And always the consumers.

Cheers,
-Max

AndrewKeil wrote:

Max Paperno wrote:+1 for PRR support. Format wars suck.
Umm... Apple? Apparently many people are actually overwhelmed by choice. Or are fine with only one choice if they think it's "magical."

That's true of the consumer world, for example I have no interest in switching to Android because to be honest, I just can't be bothered. and It certainly won't affect my work.

But if you're a freelancer and someone comes to you with a drive full of PRR, and you say you either can't work with it or you need to convert it into a format that might not have the same flexibility, then any talk of choice v closed garden comes a distant 2nd to whether you can do the job or not.

I accept the business difficulty, we are on a forum discussing a loss leading NLE after all, but the situation for many pro's has become untenable judging by this thread.

If you happy with conversion time then convert to something fairly good wit some rough grade touch if needed (ProRes444 or XQ if you really concerned) and then work as always. Fact that you went to intermediate is really meaningless here as it will hold all usable data anyway (unless conversion is done badly). You will get no difference at the end.
It just costs time/space which is at the end money

There is new Scratch Play Pro (19$) which is cheap way of transcoding ProResRAW (with full RAW controls and metadata as well) to ProRes or h264/5. This is for PC and Mac.

Andrew Kolakowski wrote:There is new Scratch Play Pro (19$) which is cheap way of transcoding ProResRAW (with full RAW controls and metadata as well) to ProRes or h264/5. This is for PC and Mac.

Have you tried it? ($19/mo, $299 for permanent license.)

Sorry- did not read price properly Scratch player use to be very cheap.
I have not tried it.

It now seems Prores RAW for me is less usable after the latest Atomos firmware update for my Ninja V.

When using an A7siii with the latest Ninja firmware update, the temperature and ISO controls in post have been enabled, but only in FCPx - but the real problem now is that the temperature, sat and gamma are really messed up unless you use FCPx to import, and then painstakingly export each clip from FCPx to 4444 or whatever you like.

I was using a Compressor droplet to convert from Prores RAW to 4444 which was working fine (only problem is highlight clipping sometimes), but now even compressor doesn't interpret the Prores RAW footage properly unless you send it to Compressor from FCPx first.

Madness. Please let us use Prores RAW in Resolve as soon as computerly possible!

Sounds like tools are not ready for the update and they don't read included metadata properly to give you correct start.

Pro Res Raw native support in Resolve would be nice as more jobs keep coming my way shot in that format. Regardless of the business or technical decisions to not support it, it's a pretty filmmaker unfriendly move to add a barrier. While Pro Res 4444 XQ has been a good work around, it's an additional barrier nonetheless.

It's a chess game. The bad blood comes from an ex bmd employ who took insider information to make a competing company called atomos.

Atomos put BMD is in check (or maybe apple) Im sure that unless Apple authorizes BMD to use PRR on BMD VA there will never be PRR in Resolve and for that to happen atomos will need to lose its exclusive deal with apple. BMD has very few options. So maybe BMD needs to purchase that company, if its public.



Ricardo Marty

Not sure why you are linking decoding and encoding? Those are 2 fundamentally different things.

Updated my GH5S and the NINJA V and shot some ProRes RAW. I use EDIUS as well as Resolve and EDIUS will edit with either BRAW or ProRes RAW and also export ProRes too. EDIUS sees the ProRes RAW from the GH5S correctly as ProRes RAW and colour space as Vlog/VGamut. Looks like a 12 bit Vlog file to the system as far as I can see as EDIUS cannot directly control ISO or WB separately from the normal colour controls in PCC filter.

Files are not small more than twice the size of ProRes 4:2:2 for a UHD 60P file. 10G for 40 secs.

160K views of this thread tells a lot

Andrew Kolakowski wrote:160K views of this thread tells a lot

This is apparently not enough for BM

I wonder how long this childish war will last

There are clearly lawyers involved. Which means it reverts to a kindergarten argument.

Don't expect a solution. These things rarely get one. Look at the battles between say Adobe and was it Dolby sound? There's been several such fights.

Sent from my SM-G960U using Tapatalk

Bear in mind currently, as far as I'm aware (though I'm sure someone will correct me ), on both Mac and PC, only FCPX has full control over ProRes Raw, for such as white balance, iso, etc. I definitely know Avid on windows doesn't. So even if it came to Resolve on pc it could have the same limitation. Not a deal-breaker, of course but if editors could choose a raw format for shooting, it would, for me preferably be Braw still - but then of course we can't

Assimilate Scratch was the first app to add ProRes Raw controls for temp/tint/iso. This was even before Final Cut Pro, in July last year (macOS and Windows).

I suppose this means Apple hasn't released a API that does everything (unlike BMD did with Blackmagic Raw), instead it's up to the individual apps to support specific cameras. Shouldn't be a problem for Resolve as it already has the framework for supporting specific cameras.

Yep. Beauty of ProResRAW is that you do have access to RAW pixels through official SDK, so you can do everything by yourself (or use limited functionality provided by Apple libraries). Resolve could use own processing (it already does it and allows to switch for some formats (Arri, Sony) between processing engines).

In order for all of it to work camera has to write settings as metadata first- then you can read it and interpret as needed. Without such a metadata you can't have proper control and adjustment (just some "blind" ones).

Bmd will never support prr. There is to much at stake.
Use another nle and don't aggravate your selves. Atomos is after bmd and apple after braw. Cinema cameras are changing bmd needs to change if not they will stay in a niche market that will shrink by the year.

Ricardo Marty0

Bmd will never support prr. There is to much at stake.
Use another nle and don't aggravate your selves. Atomos is after bmd and apple after braw. Cinema cameras are changing bmd needs to change if not they will stay in a niche market that will shrink by the year.

Ricardo Marty

Perhaps we need to start a thread on how to convert ProRes RAW (PRR) to a format that Resolve WILL use? I hate the idea of using ProRes 4444 because it is, from what I understand LARGER than PRR. Then I will need to keep TWO copies (RAW original and PR4444).

OK, perhaps I don't HAVE to keep both, but I tend to keep originals because I KNOW I can always get the max quality from them.

I guess another question I have is, does PRR actually cover the 444 color space. I don't care as much for ISO/WB corrections (if I do my job right recording the event, it should be good) as I do for the extra color space accuracy.

I don't know about anyone else, but the color accuracy between 420 and 422 is very noticeable to me, but I can see color differences between the original scene and 422 that I'm hoping RAW/444 will fix. Any thoughts?

Anyway, my $.02...

Scott

GlueFactoryBJJ wrote:I guess another question I have is, does PRR actually cover the 444 color space. I don't care as much for ISO/WB corrections (if I do my job right recording the event, it should be good) as I do for the extra color space accuracy.

I don't know about anyone else, but the color accuracy between 420 and 422 is very noticeable to me, but I can see color differences between the original scene and 422 that I'm hoping RAW/444 will fix. Any thoughts?

Any 444 file that originates from CMOS sensor camera does not have 444 sampling precision at sensor native resolution due to bayer pattern. 444 isn’t a colorspace but chroma component subsampling schema, it can convey any colorspace and subsampling does not specify the primaries in any way. What it does specify is the spatial precision of chroma samples.

If you ”see color differences between original scene and 422” what is your original scene reference exactly and what kind of differences do you see? 422 vs 444 can only improve spatial accuracy, and any 444 source that comes from cmos sensor camera originates from very similar raw data that is stored in prores raw.

GlueFactoryBJJ wrote:Perhaps we need to start a thread on how to convert ProRes RAW (PRR) to a format that Resolve WILL use? I hate the idea of using ProRes 4444 because it is, from what I understand LARGER than PRR. Then I will need to keep TWO copies (RAW original and PR4444).

OK, perhaps I don't HAVE to keep both, but I tend to keep originals because I KNOW I can always get the max quality from them.

I guess another question I have is, does PRR actually cover the 444 color space. I don't care as much for ISO/WB corrections (if I do my job right recording the event, it should be good) as I do for the extra color space accuracy.

I don't know about anyone else, but the color accuracy between 420 and 422 is very noticeable to me, but I can see color differences between the original scene and 422 that I'm hoping RAW/444 will fix. Any thoughts?

Anyway, my $.02...
Scott

Any debayered format will be bigger than its RAW as RAW has 3 times less data. It's just B&W data, so you can think about it as eg. Y channel. Once you pass debayer you get 3 channels (YUV or RGB), so there is suddenly 3x more data to store. This is exactly why recording RAW is the most efficient way in terms of storage/bitrate. You can't directly escape from it ( you can only subsample or compress more to get same storage needs). 4:2:2 is not that bad (4:2:0 starts to be bit visible). It only matters for some tasks like keying, masking, etc.

It's frustrating in the extreme that Apple ProRes RAW is supported by every major NLE except Resolve. Avid supports it, Premiere supports it, and both additionally support Blackmagic RAW. C’mon Blackmagic, get with the program and support APPLE ProRes RAW along with every other major acquisition codec. Purposely crippling Resolve not only hurts the user base, but also Blackmagic Design in limiting the adoption of a superb NLE. At the very least, make support of Apple ProRes RAW a component of Da Vinci Resolve Stdio.

Conversely, Apple should include support of BMRAW in Final Cut Pro. Make a deal, Grant!

Agreed, it's becoming a bit silly when every NLE can read ProRes Raw and encode ProRes on Windows except Resolve.

Regarding BRAW in FCP:
As stated by a BMD employee on this forum, they offered to create a BRAW plugin for FCP for free but they never heard back from Apple.

In my experience, the freebie BM BRAW plug-in was worth about what I paid for it. After continuing hassle I finally gave up and bought the Autokroma one.

Not only does it simply work reliably, they provide the best support of any BRAW use in Premiere. Even of the BM plug-in.

Sent from my SM-G960U using Tapatalk

+1

I just had a thought the other day:

How about Blackmagic adds ProRes RAW capabilities to DR for an annual fee? Like $50?

I know, a lot of users will now want to see me burn at the stake, but think about it - nobody would be forced to get the add-on, but for the people for which it would make a difference (all the content creators who invested in Atomos recorders or who have to work with footage recorded on these), they would happily pay it to continue working with Resolve.

Blackmagic would make money off Atomos on an annual basis (in a roundabout way that is) and everybody would be happy.

Then, in five to ten years time when nobody cares anymore about RAW this and that, they can just make the add-on a free part of Resolve.

To me that would make absolute sense - in terms of business for Blackmagic and customer satisfaction for everyone using Resolve.

What do you guys think? And what does Blackmagic think?

Licensing ProRes RAW decoder is FREE.
It's not a problem with costs in this case, so 50$ bring nothing to the issue.
It's all strategic/political decisions.

Andrew Kolakowski wrote:Licensing ProRes RAW decoder is FREE.
It's not a problem with costs in this case, so 50$ bring nothing to the issue.
It's all strategic/political decisions.

I beg to differ. It doesn't matter that licensing the decoder is free. The problem is that Blackmagic fears that they will lose money to Atomos if they implement ProRes RAW in Resolve. If they were making money from people who use it inside Resolve, that would offset some of their losses in terms of sales.

This makes a lot of sense in my opinion

That falls under strategic/political decision argument.

And 50$/license would never offsets potential losses. It would be no near enough. Such a plugin is not for general use, but strictly to load single format to Resolve.
1000 sold plugins wold give BM 50K.
1000 users buying into BM ecosystem (camera etc.) is worth more than 100x this 50K.
And of course 5K$ ProResRAW plugin price would never sell.
I still argue that this 50$ solves nothing.

Andrew Kolakowski wrote:That falls under strategic/political decision argument.

And 50$/license would never offsets potential losses. It would be no near enough. Such a plugin is not for general use, but strictly to load single format to Resolve.
1000 sold plugins wold give BM 50K.
1000 users buying into BM ecosystem (camera etc.) is worth more than 100x this 50K.
And of course 5K$ ProResRAW plugin price would never sell.
I still argue that this 50$ solves nothing.

We agree to disagree. I'd argue that there are vastly more people using Resolve than people owning BMD cameras (that includes myself and quite frankly anyone I know in my closer professional circle).

If all of these people, who never bought nor ever would consider buying a BMD camera would give BMD $50 a year (mind you, I didn't talk about a 'one-off' payment for the license, but an annual subscription type model), this would be a considerable revenue stream for BMD.

Wikipedia says that there were around 2 million DR users by the time BMD made the software free to use. This number has definitely grown since then. But lets just assume one third of these 2 million users would pay BMD $50 a year for the luxury of using ProRes RAW in their favourite editing system. That'd be over $3,3 million in revenue per annum - a decent extra income.

BTW, that's the equivalent of just over 13,000 BMD 6K Pros sold. You may disagree, but for me that's quite a lot of cameras and in today's heavily contested camera market with all the Sonys, Canons, Panasonics and who knows what other brands around, it'd cost BMD a lot of effort to sell this amount.

Lets not forget, we're talking about a rather niche market BMD is trying to corner, which is professional video cameras, where there are far less customers than your average "I want to take some snaps and a bit of video in my spare time" users that make up a lot of the people buying digital cameras.

Why not get some revenue from the customers/free users they already have instead? I'd be happy to pay the $50 by the way

What I'm saying is, this would definitely make them more money, than hoping that their insistence on cutting ProRes RAW out of their app will magically generate those 'millions' of BMD camera purchases. Because these customers do not exist in real life.

But as I said above, I appreciate that you may disagree. The more interesting question for me would be though, would you get the ProRes RAW add-on for $50 a year?

and BMD can't sold a codec which is free - would employ courts again

I would not as I don't use Resolve much at all (and don't use ProRes RAW at all), but I'm happy to pay 50$ for some add-on overall if it helps in my work.

2MLN users, but probably 95%(?) of them use free version and I don't think many of them would like to pay extra 50$.
Why 1/3 of 2MLN would pay for ProResRAW plugin? What for- to have plugin which they don't need?
How many of those 2MLN Resolve users do really need this plugin? It's not even 1% as 95% of those 2MLN will be Resolve free users (not Studio), who don't want (don't need to) pay 300 for Resolve itself.
How many people hit +1 for ProResRAW compared to all users of the forum? Again- it's probably way < 1%.
Your numbers are way to high- in reality it would be a fraction of it.

Way better (and more difficult though) approach is to push camera/recorders manufactures to implement BRAW and make it easy and cheap to license compared to ProResRAW. This would kill ProResRAW and then there would be no need for Resolve plugin at all.

Mark Foster wrote:and BMD can't sold a codec which is free - would employ courts again

It's not a problem. BM could sell ProResRAW plugin, even if licensing it is free.
Such a plugin needs to be developed and later maintained, so it's easy to justify its cost. Up to BM to make it free or not. They could charge for every camera RAW import ability separately if they wanted (regardless of their internal/licensing costs).

When Wil FCP support Braw?

Ricardo Marty

When there is big enough demand for it from FCP users? When Apple decides so? Never?
Who knows.
Resolve support for ProResRAW has nothing to do with BRAW in FCP. Not sure why people try hard to link one with another. Purely Apple and BM decision. I never heard of one blocking another, so trying to link those two is really pointless.

Andrew Kolakowski wrote:When there is big enough demand for it from FCP users? When Apple decides so? Never?
Who knows.
Resolve support for ProResRAW has nothing to do with BRAW in FCP. Not sure why people try hard to link one with another. Purely Apple and BM decision. I never heard of one blocking another, so trying to link those two is really pointless.

why won't you understand that neither apple nor BMD is the problem,
but atomos and their contract with RED for the RAW patent?
and the former quarrel between grant and jeremy

Patent is an issue when you want to use encoder. It has nothing to do with decoder in applications.

How many times do I have to repeat that if you want to put ProReaRAW decoder into your app it costs you 0 in fees. It’s just your implementation costs.

why won't you understand that neither apple nor BMD is the problem,
...
and the former quarrel between grant and jeremy

Exactly. All to do politics and history between BM and Atomos.
Any other patent, huge licensing myths etc. is just a an internet repeated crap. Same applies to argument: when Apple adds BRAW we add ProResRAW. This could be just a push to get Apple to add BRAW, but if BM decides add ProResRAW to Resolve it can at any moment. It’s their decision. Atomos would be rather more than happy for it to happen (as well as Apple).

Jeremy is being replaced as the new CEO of Atomos. Will relations with BMD change?