devinpickering wrote:Justin Jackson wrote:devin. What are we losing though? That is what I am not understanding. We can all agree what we gain.. file sizes are down, speed is very fast to copy/edit with, 12bit vs 10bit Prores, etc. But in a typical 4K image, that is almost certainly going to be turned in to h.264 before any eyeballs other than a few, see it... what are you losing? Dont get me wrong, I want the absolute utmost awesome image quality we can get. I was looking at buying a 4TB drive (possibly) to handle 60fps RAW. And I dont even need 720p h.264 quality for my audience. I just want it.. just in case. But BRAW satisfies just fine.
Are you and others saying, because of some of the detail missing, color correction will be bad, overall image quality is going to be less, etc.. to everyone that watches the youtube/bluray/bigscreen version of the video? Cause I dont see that. Short of doing 400x blown up VFX work, which still looks good to me, what are you losing on a day to day workflow?
It seems you and others (and not trying to say it in a mean way.. just pointing out that there are two camps) are nitpicking about something that is irrelevant in most video recording anyway. I mean, if you record 30 different scenes for a tv show, are all those 30 scenes in BRAW going to be ruined because you lost the quality that CDNG had? Are you really recording that many TBs of CDNG for everything you do such that a lot of it couldnt be done with BRAW (or even ProRes)? That is what I am baffled about. To my eye, blown up, it looks damn good. The superman image does seem a bit blurry on the BRAW version, but as others have done, there are a lot of example images that look nearly identical in both formats, and certainly enough to use for any purpose where not a single person is going to be like "OMG.. the detail is missing.. what did you record with". I just dont fully comprehend why this is such an issue I guess. Is it that oh man, they took something we had that was a hair better away from us.. so now we cant use the camera any more.. they took control from us? Or is it that you actually record everything in RAW, have a massive workstation to work with it all, and BRAW like ProRes and DNxHR just sickens you?
I honestly hate this argument. I hear it all the time. "Who cares everyone is going to end up watching it on their phones anyway". Well, no actually. I'm trying to make movies, that end up on a big screen in a theater as a matter of fact. If that's the logic then who the hell cares what you shoot it on, let's just shoot all our movies on a hi-8 then, if it doesn't matter. I'm not saying you can't tell stories with any camera, that's not my point and I'd never argue that. I would love to use any camera to tell a story if that was the challenge.
I think my point is pretty simple - let's just say, as an example - that I don't have a grip truck. And no gaffer. But I'm faced with a very difficult or extreme shot, where my foreground is underexposed and my backround is overexposed, in that specific situation, I would like to shoot in the most uncompressed RAW format available, to work with that difficult exposure in the color grade, and I hate to say the term 'fix it in post because that's almost always indicative of lazy cinematography, but there are times, when I would like to either enhance light, or take it away according to how I feel it might help push the story. And if I might be doing something where it calls for that codec, I'd like to use it!
So I'm merely trying to understand what BRAW is capable of in the most extreme situations - it's not about will the audience see the difference in sharpness or detail, of course they won't, but it's something that's there, there IS a difference. And I really do love the BRAW codec, it's great! But I also really like what David Cherniak wrote earlier - which is "The consensus of those who are fully delighted with it for capture is that it's so good that we don't care about what's missing" - let's not be so happy with this that we're just ignoring anything that might not be great or something that they need to work on.
I also just wanna thank everyone for adding in their opinions on here, what a great community! After hearing your thoughts I went back into the color nodes and indeed have found more latitude in the shadow and highlight recovery areas within the color tabs themsleves like you suggested - and it's 'better' but not 'prefect' as it is with CDNG. And that's okay. I know we don't have a choice. I also understand and just hope - that BM will keep pushing this codec as far as it can go in the future. I'm sure we'll see updates and new functionality, I hope they keep working on it to make it even better. I really think they've created something VERY special and efficient, BM needed this very badly, but I just hope they keep pushing it further.