Are there any validations to these claims made by Blackmagic Design?

[Misha Engel]

Which isn't wavelet.




If Cupertinosaurus totalitarism is not a goal, yes there is.


...


Also...TV series production would greatly benefit from hevc intra 12/444. Right now it's stuck between borderline usable and overkill.

What is wrong with wavelet, it's smaller and faster on the same hardware with the same output quality than it's ProRes or DNx counterparts.
We have Apple ProRes, AVID DNx, Opensource Cineform, AVC all-intra, HVEC in about every flavour you can think of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding, AV1 is comming and we have BRAW, when a new all-intra codec is not better than it's cineform counterpart, I don't need it, when it's better.. I would love to try it.

TV series productions can use any codec they want, they oftened just don't and stick to what they are used to.

 

[Phil Holland]

I'm dating myself here, and I won't even discuss film in the same breath, but if you track the earliest implementations of all of the RAW formats the tools were barely acceptable from the get go.

Obviously through time and development the technology greatly improved.

ProRes RAW is in it's absolute infancy, currently can't walk, and certainly isn't potty trained.

But. I would expect that once a few things are buttoned up and perhaps deals inked we'll be seeing it implemented and matured greatly.

Apple very literally is very good at refinement. And though in the professional space it's been a bit of a mixed bag, having a flexible internal motion RAW codec empowers not only what's predictable, but quiet a few things we aren't considering here.


It's always a game of sides and preference I guess, but from my perspective it's important to look at the realities and potential. As I mentioned I think BRAW is a good thing and it is nice that BMD states it's partially debayered and all that goodness that helps their core user base in processing the footage. It will also allow thier 2020 models to do what they are looking to do and it's something they have control over.

But there are better RAW formats compressed and not for sure that maintain their um.... RAWness.

Meanwhile we have a different conversation in some circles about the usefulness of RAW versus some sort of well recorded mezzanine codec, but anybody who's anybody will point out why each has their place and there most certainly a difference.


Apple has all the reason in the world to license and develop further the ProRes RAW ecosystem.


On a complete tangent, since I'm looking at OG REDCODE RAW files through modern stuff at the moment, their have been notable improvements from many corners to REDCODE which are rarely discussed or talked about. From my perspective one of the greatest strengths of the DSMC2 lineup is some of the more nuanced REDCODE RAW improvements and of course IPP2 which helps all footage get better.

I do dream though.... I love compressed RAW in what it helps with on the on camera and general storage side of things, but I do dream of shooting 8K 2:1 or 3:1 at speed. Hell, I dream of shooting higher FPS at 5:1 all the time too. Lots of hurdles before we get there, but I hope that is where the arrow points. With DSMC2 we have 5K and 6K at 2:1 and 3:1 respectively and once I got a taste of that general world, well I want more.

But mainly where I'm going with that is I really want an ecosystem where compression ratio can stay consistent. Like going 24fps 8K 5:1 and then 60fps also at 5:1. That's the big dream.

 

[Hrvoje Simic]

What is wrong with wavelet, it's smaller and faster on the same hardware with the same output quality than it's ProRes or DNx counterparts.

Smaller, more flexible - yes.
Quality, faster...uhm no.

Did you miss the part with folks getting a $15K computer for cutting a brand new affordable 6K camera material ?

How about a 56x Afterburner TurboX-32V in case you want 15 layers with 125 effects applied on each, of yourself talking on YT, recorded in that one codec invented yesterday which all should use. You are not cool enough if you can't do that. Real Pros use that. 32 Cores & 4X GPU with liquid Nytrogen cooling and quantum-parallel-hyper-injection-extra^3 module or bust.

Meanwhile, one can edit Alexa 4K Prores 12 bit 444 on an 8 year old 4 core MBP with 8GB RAM and mediocre GPU, using an "old" NLE thrown in the trash by Cupertinosaurus. Make sure you update OS regulary because animated emoticons, dark UI (hello Win 20 yrs ago) and Scarecrow.

#plannedobsolescence

#keepthemspendin'

 

[David Rasberry]

Cineform runs better on my i7 quadcore under Win 10 than prores by a significant margin.
Apple doesn’t support Cineform.
Cineform SDK supports 4:4:4:4 12 bit RGB in three quality levels Filmscan 1 through Filmscan 3.

 

[Misha Engel]

Smaller, more flexible - yes.
Quality, faster...uhm no.

Did you miss the part with folks getting a $15K computer for cutting a brand new affordable 6K camera material ?

How about a 56x Afterburner TurboX-32V in case you want 15 layers with 125 effects applied on each, of yourself talking on YT, recorded in that one codec invented yesterday which all should use. You are not cool enough if you can't do that. Real Pros use that. 32 Cores & 4X GPU with liquid Nytrogen cooling and quantum-parallel-hyper-injection-extra^3 module or bust.

Meanwhile, one can edit Alexa 4K Prores 12 bit 444 on an 8 year old 4 core MBP with 8GB RAM and mediocre GPU, using an "old" NLE thrown in the trash by Cupertinosaurus. Make sure you update OS regulary because animated emoticons, dark UI (hello Win 20 yrs ago) and Scarecrow.

#plannedobsolescence

#keepthemspendin'

You can only edit the 4k ProRes 12 bit 444 on an 8 year old 4 core MBP when you use column/line skipping, otherwise it is impossible (ProRes is very CPU intensive).
With the same quality level (or higher at filmscan 3) in cineform you can edit it natively in resolve running on the same MBP in bootcamp (windows 10).

This guy pretty much nails it:

While I see the release of ProRes RAW as a very clever move to enable already ProRes licensed camera manufacturers to enable a way of RAW recording to their camera fleet, with minimum requirements, I doubt it is the super clever format some seem to hope for right now. It will take less I/O, it'll not require the demosaic from Bayer to RGB, so it actually saves efforts inside the camera.

Saying this new codec is 6.x times faster than R3D is a bit of unfair. RED is stuck to JPEG2000 encoding. The by far best single frame encoding scheme available to date - bit rate vs. quality wise. However, the EBCOT bitstream entropy coding is fairly slow. GPUs, FPGA, ASICs all help and there are numerous hardware implementations, often driven by the begium team behind IntoPix (who already worked on the OpenJPEG in the beginning), who are also the heads behind TICO. However, ProRes will only enable this by either being not compressed or DCT compressed. Uncompressed is large, DCT can introduce artefacts.

TICO is a line by line wavelet codec. So you can decode a line at lower horizontal resolution, but you can only skip lines to decrease the vertical resolution. So itsa a 1D wavelet only. Not a big saving. Designed to enable 4K via HD SDI lines.

R3D/JPEG2000 and GoPro-Cineform/SMPTE VC5 are true 2D wavelet codecs. You can actually decode at lower resolution, with using less computing resources, and get a best quality downscale image, line/collumn skipping not spoken here. No other codecs can do this, no ProRes, no ProRes RAW, no DNxHD, no DNxHR or whatever. This is the MAIN feature of wavelets, and so many poeple out there still don't get it.

With ProRes RAW you'll need a beast of a machine, because you NEED to decode full res or you are set for line/column skipping to see proxies.
In fact, I can edit and play 4K, 6K or even 8K R3D on a 2002 HP xw8400 workstation or on my i7 notebook in its native format. I doubt I can to that with ProRes RAW of the same resolution source.
And Cineform/SMPTE VC5 is about 5-7 times faster than R3D, because this codec employs a much faster bitstream entropy coding (huffmann), which will give it that benefit. In other words, Cineform/SMPTE VC5 can be expected to be as fast as ProRes RAW (if told numbers remain true), but with smaller requirements for the playback hardware. And its open source now, while ProRes RAW will be proprietary. Big point IMHO.

On systems where I can edit R3D in 2K proxy, I can edit Cineform/SMPTE VC5 in 4K easily due to its speed benefit. Too bad RED and Cineform didn't manage a cooperation back in the beginning of RED...

Bottom line:
ProRes RAW is welcome to increase RAW recording options. However, I tend to transcode e.g. to Cineform/SMPTE VC5 RAW for better options in post for my workflow if I really need RAW. Or pregrade and go to e.g. Cineform RGB instead.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen,
Best regards,
Axel Mertes

 

[David Rasberry]

I did a short demo video awhile back comparing the performance of 30Mbps 8-bit AVCHD to a Cineform 10 bit 4:2:2 DI at 137Mbps for Lightworks users on low power laptops to show why they need to transcode for fluid editing response. You also get better quality H.264 web video exports from the DI than from the original footage.

 

[Mike P.]

But mainly where I'm going with that is I really want an ecosystem where compression ratio can stay consistent. Like going 24fps 8K 5:1 and then 60fps also at 5:1. That's the big dream.

BRAW cameras do this currently. The lowest it goes is 3:1 (presumably because it’s considered visually lossless), but the cameras can do it from min-to-max fps regardless of resolution.

Re: partial debayer: While I certainly appreciate being able to re-bake old r3ds (using software-side upgrades like IPP2), if/when BMD implements “BRAW2.0” all their existing cameras will probably be upgradable via firmware since they’re based on FPGAs. So if there ever is a “BRAW IPP2” I expect all their BRAW capable cameras will get it *internally* for $0.