Do RAW file sizes make you treat it more like film?

[kye]

As affordable cameras continually raise the high-waterline on bit-rates, are we getting to the point where the cost of media necessitates bringing back some of the frugality of film?

I crunched some very rough numbers, and the cost of SSD is about 10% of the cost of 16mm film for 4K30 in 3:1 RAW, which will be more like 40% of the cost for 8K, but that's re-usable so it's not that direct a comparison.  Of course, CFast and other media is more expensive, but you can dump footage to a cheaper storage medium every few hours on set, so that's relatively re-usable too.

How are you folks shooting 4K RAW or 6K RAW and salivating over 8K RAW approaching your media management?

[Andrew Reid]

It's not going to be treated like film on a shoot, because with digital you can quickly offload a reel to affordable storage via USB.

However it is treated like film in the way you archive 8K RAW material. After a few years you will need a building the size of the Paramount studios lot to put the hard drives

[FranciscoB]

I don't think so. Sure, with smaller productions you don't have so much freedom with space but who wants to keep rolling and rolling? Pick a format that's right for your job. Only a fool would try to do a long day's shoot with few cards and heavy files. 

Ps: I worked as an assistant in a job like that. Two cameras with three cards (total) in a controled environment. Three different talents so you had a few moments to offload the cards but it was an unnecessary headache. 

[kye]

35 minutes ago, Andrew Reid said:

It's not going to be treated like film on a shoot, because with digital you can quickly offload a reel to affordable storage via USB.

However it is treated like film in the way you archive 8K RAW material. After a few years you will need a building the size of the Paramount studios lot to put the hard drives

I have no idea what you're talking about...

I was once waiting for some friends outside a movie theatre and a couple of people walked in carrying something that looked very heavy, and after walking over to the front desk and very carefully setting it down they had a quick chat with the staff before leaving again.  A couple of the rather young staff then tried to lift the object, but one girl wasn't strong enough to lift her end, so got someone else to come and help carry it inside.

Bored and curious, I went and asked the staff what the box was, and it was a roll of projection film being delivered for a movie that was about to be released.  I remember it being about 1m tall, 1m wide, and about 30cm thick, with very sturdy looking handles on each side.

[FranciscoB]

Film is still a desired medium for long time storage. Nobody knows the media of the future but film can always be digitized. That's why it's still a relevant medium beyond acquisition. 

[tweak]

12 hours ago, FranciscoB said:

Film is still a desired medium for long time storage. Nobody knows the media of the future but film can always be digitized. That's why it's still a relevant medium beyond acquisition. 

Haven't they made that lazer/ crystal cube tech now? Don't remember what it's called, but it's far less volatile than film, pretty sure that's what's next.

[FranciscoB]

Never heard of it but it could be 👍

[Andrew Reid]

In the future digital will be so far gone... so far manipulated with computational photography... that documentary filmmakers will use film, to prove what they shot was real. Digital cameras are going to be reality distortion fields.

The archival of so much digital data is still an ever present challenge for such large file sizes. If you shot everything at 2400Mbit/s you should add a zero to the cost of your camera.

[KnightsFan]

33 minutes ago, Andrew Reid said:

In the future digital will be so far gone... so far manipulated with computational photography... that documentary filmmakers will use film, to prove what they shot was real. Digital cameras are going to be reality distortion fields.

One option is to use hashing to determine whether a digital file has been altered or not. The one technology I saw about it was that the user is directed to make certain camera movements, which are hashed with the content of the video. That makes it virtually impossible to edit the video without anyone being able to immediately tell it's been altered, since the hash would change. So that technique won't help you immediately determine if a video you see on YouTube is real or not, but it would be possible for the filmmmaker to provide source clips to prove that they are real, if necessary.

[gt3rs]

If you want to keep the RAW  for example of the 1Dx III at 30fps is 1 TB per 73min of video. HDD cost is around 0.02$ per GB so it would be around 16-17$ per hour of RAW....
Copying 1 TB from CFexpress to HDD will take quite a bit do > 2h.... 

 

[FranciscoB]

1 hour ago, Andrew Reid said:

In the future digital will be so far gone... so far manipulated with computational photography... that documentary filmmakers will use film, to prove what they shot was real. Digital cameras are going to be reality distortion fields.

 

That would mean they would have to edit on an old moviola and never touch a computer for digital editing. The moment you scan your footage and edit it somehow you're already subject to doubt and distortion. But isn't film always a distortion? For various reasons you manipulate time and emotion with cutting. Before that you manipulate what you see with blocking, lighting and framing. Even if you never cut and only use real people and situations, you're always going to manipulate what other people see through framing and distance. And that only shows a portion of what is on front of you. I could ramble on this topic for a while. Sorry. 

[maxmizer]

1 hour ago, gt3rs said:

If you want to keep the RAW  for example of the 1Dx III at 30fps is 1 TB per 73min of video. HDD cost is around 0.02$ per GB so it would be around 16-17$ per hour of RAW....
Copying 1 TB from CFexpress to HDD will take quite a bit do > 2h.... 

 

for some professional jobs it is mandatory to keep the original ... then the disc price is useless but it is necessary to keep in mind the expense for a Nas with at least two discs!

 

[HockeyFan12]

I think Andrew is exactly right on both points, about storage and about film.

[Andrew Reid]

4 hours ago, FranciscoB said:

That would mean they would have to edit on an old moviola and never touch a computer for digital editing.

Not quite my point. With the original film negative, you have the proof (of untouched "real" scenes).

Doesn't matter if the edit is digital or not.

If somebody questions if what they see is real, unaltered, the proof is there in the background, on a reel.

Quote

The moment you scan your footage and edit it somehow you're already subject to doubt and distortion. But isn't film always a distortion? For various reasons you manipulate time and emotion with cutting. Before that you manipulate what you see with blocking, lighting and framing. Even if you never cut and only use real people and situations, you're always going to manipulate what other people see through framing and distance. And that only shows a portion of what is on front of you. I could ramble on this topic for a while. Sorry. 

All that is a form of manipulation and fantasy yes, sure...

But computational photography goes through a phase-change into something else entirely different.

One example - deep fakes. In the future we'll have AI driven cameras that can film in real time a completely fake scene, superimposing specific people and faces over anybody in the scene, in a way that looks so real you can't tell.

Another example - news footage. In the future, AI driven cameras will be able to film statements and interviews which are completely made up from a script. You will never trust what you see again from a digital camera.

Give it 10-20 years to reach this point, and suddenly the analogue film negative becomes incredibly valuable as a source of "truth".

[FranciscoB]

I agree that deepfakes could be a big problem in the future that will only create more doubt and confusion. Fake news with lies and manipulated media are already here. But the argument that film will be a solution to fight for truth in the future doesn't seem very likely to me. Probably someone will create a software that tells you if something has been manipulated or just plainly demonstrating your original digital files. People will always believe in what they want or try to descredit you with false acusations.

 

Ps: You can print a digital movie on film, so you still have that "possibility" of manipulation. 

[kye]

8 hours ago, Andrew Reid said:

Not quite my point. With the original film negative, you have the proof (of untouched "real" scenes).

Doesn't matter if the edit is digital or not.

If somebody questions if what they see is real, unaltered, the proof is there in the background, on a reel.

That reminds me of (IIRC) National Geographic which doesn't permit any manipulation of the content of an image.  To verify this you would submit your final images (with all the cool colour grading, cropping, etc you did) and also the RAW file and they would compare the RAW file with the edit to ensure you didn't photoshop out powerlines or whatever.

It makes sense that the edited version would be the one published but the RAW capture would be retained to prove the content of the output.

I definitely agree that digital video will gradually descend into fakery, in much the same way that photography has done with things like Mariah Carey being photoshopped to basically be a different person.  The only difference between still images and video is processing power, and things like Resolves Face Refinement is just the beginning.

It's interesting to use film as the proof, although if digital is the source then the manipulation could be done before printing to the film, so tech like @KnightsFan mentions would be required.

[BTM_Pix]

13 hours ago, Andrew Reid said:

Another example - news footage. 

In light of what has been going on covering protests recently, I think ENG cameras might have to have secondary dash cam type of units onboard to provide both the broader context and provenance of what we are seeing through their main lens.

If I was out there covering the current protests I'd have a 360 camera in the hotshoe already.

 

[androidlad]

23 hours ago, Andrew Reid said:

In the future digital will be so far gone... so far manipulated with computational photography... that documentary filmmakers will use film, to prove what they shot was real. Digital cameras are going to be reality distortion fields.

The archival of so much digital data is still an ever present challenge for such large file sizes. If you shot everything at 2400Mbit/s you should add a zero to the cost of your camera.

Digital archiving relies on LTO tapes, which are very very cheap.

[kye]

3 hours ago, BTM_Pix said:

In light of what has been going on covering protests recently, I think ENG cameras might have to have secondary dash cam type of units onboard to provide both the broader context and provenance of what we are seeing through their main lens.

If I was out there covering the current protests I'd have a 360 camera in the hotshoe already.

There's definitely a use-case for having a camera to capture a signal as evidence, but I'd suggest that one with a wireless connection that is continuously uploading would also be handy.  People that do the wrong thing aren't afraid to confiscate the evidence of it.

What's that saying...  once you've crossed the line it's hard not to go all the way.

[BTM_Pix]

8 minutes ago, kye said:

There's definitely a use-case for having a camera to capture a signal as evidence, but I'd suggest that one with a wireless connection that is continuously uploading would also be handy.

The cameras themselves are already streaming from the scene so a lowish res additional stream would be viable or even a full res one for encoders using multi bonded cellular uploads.

An enterprising small company with a good stock of Araldite could build a witness camera into an encoder to enable this setup with all the existing cameras out there.