Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K gets BRAW in extensive FFPGA hardware update delivered via software

[Mattias Burling]

According to a competitors raw developer there is sharpening in the BMPCC raw. Even if there isn't, it at least mean that there could be and that raw by definition isn't the same as untouched. 

[amanieux]

14 hours ago, HurtinMinorKey said:

So without DNG, the camera no longer supports a lossless codec, correct?

yes

14 hours ago, Emanuel said:

Should we infer BRAW is lossy then? What about visually lossless Blackmagic claims? ; -)

yes all flavors of braw in 6.2 are lossy but i guess they can deliver a lossless flavor of BRAW in a future update if they want to (this will shut down the controversy about BM really having a patent issue with cinemadng lossless RAW )

[Emanuel]

Well, visually lossless happens to be the new paradigm. There's no controversy, only for a few which means to be pointless : -)

All this pretentious purism is nonsense when there's no actually scientific tests to testify any lack of flawless claims.

 

The patent topic is even beyond than that (written by a lawyer as secondary background). Fat eye as Brazilians call.

Without mention that RED (the other contender other than Adobe also befriended of this scribe BTW) is already used to open files (Arri, Sony...) only to close settling all them somehow later on.

Let alone David Newman per se, if memory applies.

[cpc]

Up till BRAW the only consistently present characteristic of raw video from a camera manufacturer claiming "raw" was a Bayer image. There's been lossy compressed raw (Cineform, Red, BM), there's been tonally remapped raw (Arri, BM, Red, Panasonic, Canon), there's been white balanced raw (Canon), there's been baked ISO raw (Canon, Sony), etc. But all "raw" has always been Bayer.

In this sense BRAW is a stretch of the term "raw" as we know it: it is not a Bayer image. I wouldn't call it "raw", but obviously there are market reasons for naming it this way. This is similar to how "visually lossless" is being abused as marketing speak for "lossy". "Visually lossless" can only be applied to delivery images viewed in well defined viewing environments (that's how it is used in any scientific paper that takes itself seriously). By definition, it is not applicable to acquisition formats (raw or anything else) meant to be hammered in post: you can't claim "visually lossless", because you have no knowledge about what will be done to the image, nor where it will end up.

 

[Emanuel]

I've seen now that link in your signature... Nice stuff : ) Terminology is not an important matter for filmmakers, only pictures apply to and count in the end. Geeks talk. Deep pockets for legal issues. Consumers (there's no Berlin wall to separate PROs) to pay the bill.

[sanveer]

14 hours ago, Novim said:

Perhaps not a full stop, maybe a half or 2/3 of it in my testing of BRAW in the last couple of days.

Thank you. That is pretty amazing. 

 

 

The timing of the CinemaDNG Patent seems to indicate some conflict with BRAW more than anything else. Otherwise its been on various Blackmagic camera for like 1/2 a Decade and no word about Patent or any other form of IPR conflict. So, there must be licence agreement that prevents 2 forms of RAW being used or run on Blackmagic Cameras, simultaneously. That is also why the original BMPCC (and the original Cinema Camera 2.7k) will stick on with CDNG whereas others that allow for reprogramming and multiple codecs will move on.

[deezid]

20 hours ago, Emanuel said:

Should we infer BRAW is lossy then? What about visually lossless Blackmagic claims? ; -)

With these strong amounts of spatial noise reduction creating all kinds of detail smudging, color bleeding, low frequency texture removal etc as well as edge enhancing creating halos and fringing - nope.

[Emanuel]

What nope? In every compression modes? Hey, you go from 12:1 to 3:1...

[deezid]

57 minutes ago, Emanuel said:

What nope? In every compression modes? Hey, you go from 12:1 to 3:1...

tried Q0.
Which basically looks like ProResHQ.
Still no comparison to DNG (even 4:1 compression) which is free of any processing when sharpening set to 0 in Resolve while Braw and ProRes show some serious halo, fringing, chroma bleeding, texture loss etc.

BMD really has to optimize this codec which means doing less.

[Emanuel]

20 minutes ago, deezid said:

tried Q0.
Which basically looks like ProResHQ.
Still no comparison to DNG (even 4:1 compression) which is free of any processing when sharpening set to 0 in Resolve while Braw and ProRes show some serious halo, fringing, chroma bleeding, texture loss etc.

BMD really has to optimize this codec which means doing less.

I understand you... but it is pretty unfair. Seems to me glass comparitives: the world is not divided between Fujian and Fujinons.

Q0 is much different of ProRes HQ... Only to begin with.

 

[deezid]

1 hour ago, Emanuel said:

I understand you... but it is pretty unfair. Seems to me glass comparitives: the world is not divided between Fujian and Fujinons.

Q0 is much different of ProRes HQ... Only to begin with.

 

It uses the exact same internal processing which is why they look the same - Braw below Q0 actually even worse than ProRes.
Only advantage of Braw right now in comparison to ProRes is providing a WB/Tint slider, exposure slider and highlight recovery - while Cdng actually had a completely different look.

[Emanuel]

Only?? Only to begin with... 10-bit vs 12-bit don't make any difference?! C'mon, let's drop pixel peeping sport in benefit of some positive vibe ; ) If has served Peter Jackson, it will likely fit me as well : -D

[Emanuel]

PS:

Dennis, I took some look on it in the meantime... I don't even agree with. The quality from highest bitrate on BRAW is simply amazing, makes ProRes obsolete for this camera : )

May CinemaDNG be better, no surprises here. The higher bit rate the better quality. What's new to see from this equation? BRAW is better than equivalent ProRes though. Let features alone. This is the news.

On 6.1 you'll have CinemaDNG at your discretion, 6.2 something in-between BRAW and ProRes which means something much upper front than the usual H.264 crap, a delivery recipient BTW. ProRes was meant to be for intermediary use at post. Not BRAW, made for acquisition as well, this time.

Where's a fair perspective for the subject matter?

[Emanuel]

Faulty units are a bitch!

https://www.bmpcc4k.tech/2019/03/08/old-news-braw-is-soft-with-aliasing-vs-cinemadng-proof-poof/

Sorry, couldn't resist : )

 

Aside the narrator looks like more biased to find .braw goodies this time, the low light approach this round seems to me more interesting and fair enough -- even though the equally sustainable overprocessing claims we may stand up against the new format to not leave to post department the task to handle noise:

 

As someone says pretty accurately here in the comments section of the next comparative video:

Something lossless vs .braw aka visually lossless by BMD "it is like comparing a boat and a car" -- what about apples to oranges and compare both lossy CinemaDNG 3:1 vs BRAW or .braw as you wish but 3:1 instead?

 

Here, only one or another comment is worthy to read:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77nUZZKAlSY

 

Finally, take a look on this:

http://www.slimraw.com/

by @cpc

I guess this might solve some headaches at post. Seems a good compromise between acquisition and post needs. You can keep your 6.1 firmware version then ; -)

 

[Emanuel]

1 hour ago, Emanuel said:

(...) what about apples to oranges and compare both lossy CinemaDNG 3:1 vs BRAW or .braw as you wish but 3:1 instead?

PS -- To make it pretty clear: I meant both lossy formats, that is, the visually lossless : D .braw 3:1 (and Q0 too, why not?) vs CinemaDNG 3.1 (and 4.1). To compare CinemaDNG lossless is pointless.

[amanieux]

On 3/12/2019 at 12:53 AM, CaptainHook said:

By that definition you have probably never used raw then, as I haven't come across any camera that supports uncompressed/lossless raw that doesn't alter the sensor data in a process referred to as "calibration" - where every pixel is altered. That can include noise reduction and other processing that's already applied before the raw file is created. Some sensors do this on chip before the ADC! I've also never seen a camera that doesn't do pixel remapping as all sensors suffer hot/dead pixels. Some even offer user initiated pixel remapping to address this as it can occur over time. Which means lots of pixel data is CREATED because the sensor didn't provide useful information. So yeah, no camera from any manufacturer I have seen or used would qualify as offering "raw" to your standard.

People seem to have a romantic and idealised notion about what raw is.

ok fair enough, you are certainly right if you say that the very first stages of the image pipeline are always applied in camera but you are never going to sell me that lossy compression can be part of the definition of a raw data format

[amanieux]

3 hours ago, Emanuel said:

PS -- To make it pretty clear: I meant both lossy formats, that is, the visually lossless : D .braw 3:1 (and Q0 too, why not?) vs CinemaDNG 3.1 (and 4.1). To compare CinemaDNG lossless is pointless.

i suggest we stop amalgamating "lossy compression" with " visually lossless compression" like you involuntary just did

"lossy/lossless data compression" is coming from the area of signal processing where there is no room for ambiguity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossy_compression 

[Emanuel]

1 hour ago, amanieux said:

i suggest we stop amalgamating "lossy compression" with " visually lossless compression" like you involuntary just did

"lossy/lossless data compression" is coming from the area of signal processing where there is no room for ambiguity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossy_compression 

No man, it was not involuntary at all : D I am joking with the terminology because they actually mean the same : ) I am not the one to firstly use it for sure ; ) Thus, there are market reasons to have it named differently (I wish, you wish technical ones to really justify it too!) as Mihail @cpc hinted on his own and above-posted.

There are technical aspects but they are not the only ones to consider when we use certain terminology. And at times if not much more often than we'd like, those other ones count even more ; -)

[Papiskokuji]

So I tried a bit of BRAW. I'm not too worried about the very slight loss in sharpness everybody's talkin' about. I actually kind of like the braw management tab in Resolve. The only thing I noticed though, is it seems the footage has more moire than in cdng. And that's a BIG concern, at least to me ! (When will blackmagic finally add an OLPF ?  :/ ) Some people talked about the fact that BRAW acted like some kind of low pass filter (just like the PRORES did on the original bmpcc). But it seems to be the opposite. And the superman video Emmanuel linked tends to confirm my first impressions. This only could make me go back to firmware 6.1...

[Papiskokuji]

So I tried a bit of BRAW. I'm not too worried about the very slight loss in sharpness everybody's talkin' about. I actually kind of like the braw management tab in Resolve. The only thing I noticed though, is it seems the footage has more moire than in cdng. And that's a BIG concern, at least to me ! (When will blackmagic finally add an OLPF ?  :/ ) Some people talked about the fact that BRAW acted like some kind of low pass filter (just like the PRORES did on the original bmpcc). But it seems to be the opposite. And the superman video Emmanuel linked tends to confirm my first impressions. This only could make me go back to firmware 6.1...

The big thing besides gaining disk space with braw is the possibility to choose rec2020 color space. When you use a lut to go back to rec709, you can get rid of these extreme reds, the color are way more natural and pleasing !