Giving the BMPCC4K the same look as the BMPCC and BMMCC

[Shirozina]

5 minutes ago, webrunner5 said:

Braw is limited to 12 bit. It is never going to be as good as Red Raw or Arri Raw, etc.. But yeah it ought to help out over what we have been used too. But people are going to have to really up their grading, coloring skills. Because of that I sort of doubt there will be a great reason to go that way. It might end up worse than better. ?

Why on earth will people need to 'up' their grading skills because it's 'only' 12bit and not 14/16bit?

[webrunner5]

14 minutes ago, Shirozina said:

Why on earth will people need to 'up' their grading skills because it's 'only' 12bit and not 14/16bit?

 It is Braw is never going to look as good as the better Raw can look no matter how good you are. It is about the total editing process. Raw is not going to be some saving grace for the vast majority of people. It is just like Magic Lantern, it is a pretty big pain in the ass which most people are hardly qualified to use it to it's potential. What good is throwing a Lut on Raw and having every frame look alike. Sort of defeats the purpose of Raw. How many people on here have the skill to edit 30 minutes or more of Raw footage? Sort of a dream world scenario.

[Shirozina]

12 minutes ago, webrunner5 said:

 It is Braw is never going to look as good as the better Raw can look no matter how good you are. It is about the total editing process. Raw is not going to be some saving grace for the vast majority of people. It is just like Magic Lantern, it is a pretty big pain in the ass which most people are hardly qualified to use it to it's potential. What good is throwing a Lut on Raw and having every frame look alike. Sort of defeats the purpose of Raw. How many people on here have the skill to edit 30 minutes or more of Raw footage? Sort of a dream world scenario.

I highly doubt anyone will be able to tell BRAW footage from 1:1 RAW - you will hit the basic limitations of the sensor, ADC etc before you hit the limits of the codec. RAW is pretty easy to handle esp in Resolve and in many ways easier than high compression internal camera codecs like H.264. Storage requirements are obviously a lot bigger but storage media is not a huge cost these days. I agree that shooting RAW on a camera like the P4k does not unleash hidden image quality that will turn you average looking footage into cinematic nirvana. RAW is just another codec - I've been using it for as long as I've been using a digital stills camera. It's nicer and more flexible to work with than jpeg but it's not a miracle codec.

[webrunner5]

Oh it is the best thing since sex if you are pretty good at it. Just like in Photos. But for average scenes I doubt it is worth the effort for the average person. Most cameras in the past few years have gotten really pretty damn good with WB and with the rise in DR also it is becoming a lot easier to get it right, even on auto in camera. I meant look at Smartphones. They have become just about Dummy Proof.

Video was I was young was a real ball buster to use. Even TV stations had a hard time hiring people smart enough on the tech side to even run the station. But back then almost all of it was vacuum tube based, even the cameras. And they drifted all over the place. I remember often the tech just coming over and hitting the equipment with his first and fixing a lot of problems LoL. We weren't Allowed to hit it ?. Now, that would be less of a problem. I am sure it is still complex, but I bet it screws up a lot less than it did then, just like new cameras are a lot more reliable from catastrophic results. I don't see using Raw much in my future. Too lazy, and can't afford the computer power, storage space to do it right. ?

But if you can do all the above why not. It is what separates the men from the boys. The reason there is good footage and great footage. I truly believe most people ought to hone their editing, grading skills than worrying about new cameras. And editing, Grading skills really don't cost any, or very little money to improve. An old C100 or a BMCC shot and edited well would probably be as good if not better than the new ones..

[Emanuel]

5 hours ago, deezid said:

In ProRes it clearly does - even when turned off, you can easily spot sharpening halos around high contrast edges such as trees, lanterns, roofs etc... Also there's noise reduction and other filtering going on using ProRes which causes a low contrast texture loss (which is not as extreme as on Panasonic GHxx, Fuji X-Tx or Sony A7SIII or A7RIII). With the Pocket 4K Blackmagic finally went the route basically every other prosumer camera went: a full blown processing pipeline.

Thankfully these problems completely disappear using RAW when sharpening set to 0 in Resolve.

 

That's why the Pocket 4K is claimed to be a videoish looking camera -  which at least when using ProRes is true.

Have you tested it with 1080p?

[deezid]

3 hours ago, webrunner5 said:

Braw is limited to 12 bit. It is never going to be as good as Red Raw or Arri Raw, etc.. But yeah it ought to help out over what we have been used too. But people are going to have to really up their grading, coloring skills. Because of that I sort of doubt there will be a great reason to go that way. It might end up worse than better. ?

Arri Raw is 12 bit as well. The magic word here is: logarithmic 

1 hour ago, Emanuel said:

Have you tested it with 1080p?

yep and the halos get twice as big lol
Exactly the same issue I have on my GH5. 

[mercer]

1 minute ago, deezid said:

Arri Raw is 12 bit as well. The magic word here is: logarithmic 

Uncompressed 12 bit.

[deezid]

23 minutes ago, mercer said:

Uncompressed 12 bit.

So does the P4K

[mercer]

13 minutes ago, deezid said:

So does the P4K

The discussion was in regards to B-Raw? But even their current Raw offerings, I assume most people are shooting 3:1 Raw and not full Raw? 

Btw, I don’t know if this has been asked but since you’re the noise artifact guy, have you noticed any difference with 1080p ProRes on the P4K? It’s an internal downscale, right? So the noise artifacts should be lessened?

[webrunner5]

6 hours ago, deezid said:

Arri Raw is 12 bit as well. The magic word here is: logarithmic 

 

Yeah but the Arri stuff actually uses 16 bit linear to capture and process images inside the camera, then spits it out @ 12bit. Little bit different than I think is 12 bit max in camera like the PK4 is. Arri has a lot more data to work with. logarithmic like you said.

[drm]

50 minutes ago, webrunner5 said:

Yeah but the Arri stuff actually uses 16 bit linear to capture and process images inside the camera, then spits it out @ 12bit. Little bit different than I think is 12 bit max in camera like the PK4 is. Arri has a lot more data to work with. logarithmic like you said.

The Arri also has more dynamic range, likely ~ 2 stops.

I honestly think that shooting RAW is one of those things that looks great on paper, but there are lots of professionals that don't bother shooting RAW most of the time. Many jobs simply don't have it in the budget to shoot RAW with all the extra overhead that entails. I know lots of people that just shoot ProRes 422 (or similar codec) and move on. For movies, music videos, etc. using RAW might make sense. But, there are lots of jobs where RAW wouldn't make much difference.

I do, however, like knowing that I have the ability to record RAW available as an option  If the BRAW is truly similar in file size to the Prores 422, I will probably use it regularly. At the moment, we seldom use CinemaDNG.

 

[kye]

12 hours ago, Anaconda_ said:

Isn’t that Braw? 

I was referring to taking already heavily compressed data like H264 and reconstituting it to make a signal that is like it was never compressed in the first place, and how that isn't possible.

To put the challenge in different words, how do you write the least data to a file such that you can decode it later to get as close to the original data as possible, which is the goal of every codec.  And if you think about it, they're doing a spectacular job.

No-one is complaining about the quality of 4:1 RAW, which only a tiny bit different to full RAW, only they did it with only 25% of the data.
Then if we look at the common H264 bitrates, they're mostly operating with less than 10% of the bitrate available.
And we evaluate all of this via YouTube, which at 35Mbps is around 2% of the original image data.

Just think about how crazily good that is - the 4K stream from YouTube is decoded to make a signal 170X the size, and that's what's displayed on your monitor when you watch it.  If most other things were made to work with only 0.6% then they'd be so bad you'd have problems with things like recognition and being able to tell what's going on.

128kbps MP3 for example is only 11:1 compression.  If audio had 170:1 compression it would be 8kbps, which is in the lower end of VOIP bitrates, hardly what anyone would use for music.

The challenge of taking the older cameras and trying to make them look like the P4K is attempting to do better than the people that made YT quality video at 170:1 compression.  That's what I mean

[Edit, original post had some wrong numbers, so I just fixed them]

10 hours ago, webrunner5 said:

Video was I was young was a real ball buster to use. Even TV stations had a hard time hiring people smart enough on the tech side to even run the station. But back then almost all of it was vacuum tube based, even the cameras. And they drifted all over the place. I remember often the tech just coming over and hitting the equipment with his first and fixing a lot of problems LoL. We weren't Allowed to hit it ?. Now, that would be less of a problem. I am sure it is still complex, but I bet it screws up a lot less than it did then, just like new cameras are a lot more reliable from catastrophic results. I don't see using Raw much in my future. Too lazy, and can't afford the computer power, storage space to do it right. ?

 

You're not really a true technician unless you've fixed something by just hitting it on the side.  I used to be an IT tech and sometimes you'd just give a computer a thump and that would fix it.

We always used to call it "percussive maintenance" ???

[zerocool22]

5 hours ago, drm said:

The Arri also has more dynamic range, likely ~ 2 stops.

I honestly think that shooting RAW is one of those things that looks great on paper, but there are lots of professionals that don't bother shooting RAW most of the time. Many jobs simply don't have it in the budget to shoot RAW with all the extra overhead that entails. I know lots of people that just shoot ProRes 422 (or similar codec) and move on. For movies, music videos, etc. using RAW might make sense. But, there are lots of jobs where RAW wouldn't make much difference.

I do, however, like knowing that I have the ability to record RAW available as an option  If the BRAW is truly similar in file size to the Prores 422, I will probably use it regularly. At the moment, we seldom use CinemaDNG.

 

Yeah I never bothered with cinemaDNG because of the file sizes. But now with BRAW I dont use prores at all anymore, it is so much better at the same datarates as prores! Its a gamechanger for sure. 

[kye]

45 minutes ago, zerocool22 said:

Yeah I never bothered with cinemaDNG because of the file sizes. But now with BRAW I dont use prores at all anymore, it is so much better at the same datarates as prores! Its a gamechanger for sure. 

Which NLE are you using and do you render proxy media?  I'm not sure of the workflow, but prores had the advantage of being a dream to edit with.

[zerocool22]

Just now, kye said:

Which NLE are you using and do you render proxy media?  I'm not sure of the workflow, but prores had the advantage of being a dream to edit with.

I use Resolve. (dont use proxies)

[kye]

1 hour ago, zerocool22 said:

I use Resolve. (dont use proxies)

And it's smooth to edit with?  That's pretty nice.  Are the standard flavours of RAW also fine to edit with, or just BRAW?

[zerocool22]

Just now, kye said:

And it's smooth to edit with?  That's pretty nice.  Are the standard flavours of RAW also fine to edit with, or just BRAW?

I never used the usual raw from the ump.  So cannot compare. But RAW from 5D III was also smooth sailing over here. Yeah smooth over here, possible that I had to reduce the playback quality a bit. Can't remember. 

[drm]

2 hours ago, kye said:

Which NLE are you using and do you render proxy media?  I'm not sure of the workflow, but prores had the advantage of being a dream to edit with.

Our situation is a bit different because every shoot is a multi-cam shoot. I almost always have an A, B, C cam setup. We use Final Cut Pro & Resolve. With Prores, we don't need proxies, but with the footage from the Panasonic cameras, or the footage from our Sony cameras, we have to encode proxy media for it. Without the proxies, we can not get a smooth edit experience even on our top of the line iMacs or Mac Pros. That consumes a huge amount of our time. We have many hundreds of gigabytes of footage to encode weekly.

If BRAW allowed you to have three angles without needed proxy media, that would be amazing. Have you edited a multi-cam timeline using BRAW? 

[zerocool22]

2 hours ago, drm said:

Our situation is a bit different because every shoot is a multi-cam shoot. I almost always have an A, B, C cam setup. We use Final Cut Pro & Resolve. With Prores, we don't need proxies, but with the footage from the Panasonic cameras, or the footage from our Sony cameras, we have to encode proxy media for it. Without the proxies, we can not get a smooth edit experience even on our top of the line iMacs or Mac Pros. That consumes a huge amount of our time. We have many hundreds of gigabytes of footage to encode weekly.

If BRAW allowed you to have three angles without needed proxy media, that would be amazing. Have you edited a multi-cam timeline using BRAW? 

I have not

[deezid]

14 hours ago, webrunner5 said:

Yeah but the Arri stuff actually uses 16 bit linear to capture and process images inside the camera, then spits it out @ 12bit. Little bit different than I think is 12 bit max in camera like the PK4 is. Arri has a lot more data to work with. logarithmic like you said.

And so does Blackmagic:
16 bit linear sensor readout -> 12 bit non-linear logarithmic raw.

Exactly the same technology behind since the BMCC except way higher quality components, sensors, filters etc on the Arri Alexa.
Probably the reason why the noise floor is so much higher on the GH5s despite using the same sensor.

20 hours ago, mercer said:

The discussion was in regards to B-Raw? But even their current Raw offerings, I assume most people are shooting 3:1 Raw and not full Raw? 

Btw, I don’t know if this has been asked but since you’re the noise artifact guy, have you noticed any difference with 1080p ProRes on the P4K? It’s an internal downscale, right? So the noise artifacts should be lessened?

Shooting in RAW and downscaling in post using a bicubic filter will give you way smoother footage. But honestly wouldn't downscale anyway, basically finished every project in 4K since 2014 and stuff still looks good on big screens . ?