Bitrates. Where do you draw the line?

[newfoundmass]

5 hours ago, Al Dolega said:

Yes, same here, I wish the camera companies would be brave enough to do some intermediate resolutions/frame rates between HD and UHD.

A 2.5-2.8K option would be a really great choice for finishing to HD while having some room for cropping and having a bit of oversampling for that nice sharp-but-not-sharpened look.

It could also help fill gaps in the spec sheet for marketing, for instance the A7IV (and my S1) can't do 4K60 at less than an s35/APS-C crop, but if it could do 2.5-2.8K at ~1.3x, or even full-frame, that would be a lot more attractive, while still keeping some distance to the A7sIII, A1 etc.

Agree with all of this. 

---

I think it's great that cameras are adding ProRes as there are clients that demand it, but the bitrates in 4K are just too much for the bulk of my work, and the editing performance on my M1 Pro MacBook Pro really isn't that much better than h.264. My modest MacBook Pro can handle four camera 4K multicam editing with color correction, titles, and motion graphics with ease. 

I haven't used h.265, but I've heard it's pretty easy to edit. 

[Parker]

For the past year or so I have been shooting almost everything in ProRes Raw on my S1, (the normal mode, not the HQ) I think it is somewhere around 2 Gbps, which is pretty insane, but shooting with one of the 2TB Angelbird SSD's to my Ninja V still gives me more than enough room, even over multi-day shoots.

I used to shoot with Red cameras quite a bit, and I did get used to the easy flexibility of the R3D files, so the ProRes Raw was such a huge upgrade for me on the S1. I love being able to dial in ISO and WB in post, and the image just has a thickness and creaminess to it that I just don't see with the internal codecs. Granted it's also generally quite a bit noisier, and completely unsharpened, so it all requires more work in post. 

The only time I don't use ProRes Raw is for interviews — the internal 5.9k hevc does the trick, and is nice and small — or for certain anamorphic shooting where I prefer the 6k, 3:2 open gate recording, for better use with my scopes, a mode that sadly doesn't have external Raw support. I've also been using it a lot lately for social media work, when clients know they want both vertical and 16:9 versions of edits, the extra headroom of the open gate makes the reframing so much easier. 

I back everything up to my Unraid server — it's sitting at 60 TB right now, with six 12-TB HDD's, and 4TB of SSD cache for really fast writing to the server, this is probably the most economic way of storing data. If you're okay with a little tinkering, I highly recommend it. Easy to just buy used PC parts, and Unraid has a ton of community support. I run a 10gbit thunderbolt 3 connection to either my 16" mbp or my M1 mini, and I just edit straight off the server without a problem. 

With Unraid, unlike other storage solutions, it's very easy to just keep adding new drives to the array as necessary, so I'm really not too worried about space. In the long run, I may end I'm just batch-exporting archived project B-roll to hevc or something similar, but I'm not really too concerned about it right now, as I still have oodles of space. 

 

[FHDcrew]

2 hours ago, Parker said:

For the past year or so I have been shooting almost everything in ProRes Raw on my S1, (the normal mode, not the HQ) I think it is somewhere around 2 Gbps, which is pretty insane, but shooting with one of the 2TB Angelbird SSD's to my Ninja V still gives me more than enough room, even over multi-day shoots.

I used to shoot with Red cameras quite a bit, and I did get used to the easy flexibility of the R3D files, so the ProRes Raw was such a huge upgrade for me on the S1. I love being able to dial in ISO and WB in post, and the image just has a thickness and creaminess to it that I just don't see with the internal codecs. Granted it's also generally quite a bit noisier, and completely unsharpened, so it all requires more work in post. 

The only time I don't use ProRes Raw is for interviews — the internal 5.9k hevc does the trick, and is nice and small — or for certain anamorphic shooting where I prefer the 6k, 3:2 open gate recording, for better use with my scopes, a mode that sadly doesn't have external Raw support. I've also been using it a lot lately for social media work, when clients know they want both vertical and 16:9 versions of edits, the extra headroom of the open gate makes the reframing so much easier. 

I back everything up to my Unraid server — it's sitting at 60 TB right now, with six 12-TB HDD's, and 4TB of SSD cache for really fast writing to the server, this is probably the most economic way of storing data. If you're okay with a little tinkering, I highly recommend it. Easy to just buy used PC parts, and Unraid has a ton of community support. I run a 10gbit thunderbolt 3 connection to either my 16" mbp or my M1 mini, and I just edit straight off the server without a problem. 

With Unraid, unlike other storage solutions, it's very easy to just keep adding new drives to the array as necessary, so I'm really not too worried about space. In the long run, I may end I'm just batch-exporting archived project B-roll to hevc or something similar, but I'm not really too concerned about it right now, as I still have oodles of space. 

 

To you does Prores RAW HQ or even normal Prores RAW have a similar level of thickness and organicness to that of Cinema DNG?

[FHDcrew]

Also do you convert to CDNG using the Mac app “Raw Convertor” to edit the raw files in Davinci?

[TomTheDP]

14 hours ago, newfoundmass said:

Agree with all of this. 

---

I think it's great that cameras are adding ProRes as there are clients that demand it, but the bitrates in 4K are just too much for the bulk of my work, and the editing performance on my M1 Pro MacBook Pro really isn't that much better than h.264. My modest MacBook Pro can handle four camera 4K multicam editing with color correction, titles, and motion graphics with ease. 

I haven't used h.265, but I've heard it's pretty easy to edit. 

I personally have found 10 bit H265 and H264 to be a pain to edit even on my M1 chip 16gb ram Mac. 

 

8 hours ago, Parker said:

For the past year or so I have been shooting almost everything in ProRes Raw on my S1, (the normal mode, not the HQ) I think it is somewhere around 2 Gbps, which is pretty insane, but shooting with one of the 2TB Angelbird SSD's to my Ninja V still gives me more than enough room, even over multi-day shoots.

I used to shoot with Red cameras quite a bit, and I did get used to the easy flexibility of the R3D files, so the ProRes Raw was such a huge upgrade for me on the S1. I love being able to dial in ISO and WB in post, and the image just has a thickness and creaminess to it that I just don't see with the internal codecs. Granted it's also generally quite a bit noisier, and completely unsharpened, so it all requires more work in post.

 

RAW is definitely a huge upgrade on the S1. I found when you set the log footage to vlog it looks different than the internal codec, but maybe that was my imagination. 

[A_Urquhart]

ProRes422 is my flavour of choice. For most of the broadcast work I do which is sports documentary pieces the production house still prefers 1080p most of the time due to the fast turn around nature of these. We shoot during the week and the pieces get broadcast at the half time break during the sports telecast. 

For TVC's it's usually ProRes422 in 4K unless there is VFX involved and then it's ProRes 422HQ or very rarely BRAW.

For some corporate work I do that I cut myself, I was shooting ProRes422LT until I did a shoot where the wide shot of an interview setup that was on a motorised slider contained a lot of foliage and I found the image did not hold up well so I have gone to shooting ProRes422 for corporates as well.

[BenEricson]

18 hours ago, mercer said:

After shooting ML Raw for the past 5 years and ProRes on a BMMCC, I don't know if I can ever go back to a highly compressed h.26... codec.

There have certainly been advances in the last few years. The LONG GOP 4k @ 160mbps looks so damn good on the Canon C70s. It's pretty hard to tell the difference between the two.

[TomTheDP]

3 minutes ago, BenEricson said:

There have certainly been advances in the last few years. The LONG GOP 4k @ 160mbps looks so damn good on the Canon C70s. It's pretty hard to tell the difference between the two.

I think it has more to do with processing than the codec itself. Of course motion will generally look better with ALL-I vs Long GOP due to the nature of the compression. But everything else comes down to processing. 

I would think aside from the manufactures choice in processing that H264 ALL-I at 200mbps in HD would match Prores 422 HQ at HD which is around 200mbps. 

[BenEricson]

9 minutes ago, TomTheDP said:

I think it has more to do with processing than the codec itself. Of course motion will generally look better with ALL-I vs Long GOP due to the nature of the compression. But everything else comes down to processing. 

I would think aside from the manufactures choice in processing that H264 ALL-I at 200mbps in HD would match Prores 422 HQ at HD which is around 200mbps. 

The motion is kind of all garbage on the C70. It might be the DGO. I don't know. It feels a little funky.

There have also been advancements in sensors. For example, the C70 looks better in Long GOP @ 160 than the C300 Mk2 does in 400mbps. The new sensor is cleaner, sharper, with less artifacts, etc.

[TomTheDP]

26 minutes ago, BenEricson said:

The motion is kind of all garbage on the C70. It might be the DGO. I don't know. It feels a little funky.

There have also been advancements in sensors. For example, the C70 looks better in Long GOP @ 160 than the C300 Mk2 does in 400mbps. The new sensor is cleaner, sharper, with less artifacts, etc.

Yeah that is probably true in regards to sensors. The motion cadence thing is definitely confusing. I am not sure how the DGO would affect it, as the Alexa does the same thing. But I guess it's more processing hence more room for issues. 

[kye]

22 hours ago, newfoundmass said:

I haven't used h.265, but I've heard it's pretty easy to edit. 

Only if you have a seriously powerful computer.  A quick google gave me two sources that said that h265 requires 5-10x more processing power than h264.

2 hours ago, TomTheDP said:

I think it has more to do with processing than the codec itself. Of course motion will generally look better with ALL-I vs Long GOP due to the nature of the compression. But everything else comes down to processing. 

I would think aside from the manufactures choice in processing that H264 ALL-I at 200mbps in HD would match Prores 422 HQ at HD which is around 200mbps. 

It likely is the processing, but unfortunately you don't get to choose any/enough options on that.  Most cameras that offer Prores treat the image with respect and most with h26x do not, so the codec acts as a proxy for the intended market and therefore the level of molestation the image will have gone through.

[mercer]

3 hours ago, BenEricson said:

There have certainly been advances in the last few years. The LONG GOP 4k @ 160mbps looks so damn good on the Canon C70s. It's pretty hard to tell the difference between the two.

I'm sure there has been. I don't do video for a living, so my upgrades in camera, lighting, audio and post happen at a snail's pace as needed per project. So, @TomTheDP is partially correct in that RAW and ProRes are a lot easier on my computer, with ProRes being a native file in FCPX making my post processing very simple but I'm also a one-man-band shooter, so having the leeway to correct my mistakes while worrying about a dozen other things on set offers a huge appeal as well. But in the end, raw and ProRes both have a thicker image to my eyes and the motion cadence seem more cinematic to me.

[j_one]

3 hours ago, BenEricson said:

The motion is kind of all garbage on the C70. It might be the DGO. I don't know. It feels a little funky.

You feel that way about Long GOP or all codecs?

[M_Williams]

I probably draw the line around 600-800 mbps, which would be 4.5 to 6GB per minute.

I prefer BRAW whenever possible - better than ProRes RAW - and of course it's internal on my BMPCC 6K Pro and BMPCC 4K. I generally shoot Q5 on both, which can average around 5-7GB/min on the 6K and about 2GB/min on the 4K. If I'm doing something that needs green screen work or anything like that, I might shoot Q1 on the 6K, which is a whopping 11-12GB/min or Q0 on the 4K which is about 8GB/min. But that's better than ProRes 422 HQ which is 7GB/min on the 4K.

I reviewed the GH6 recently and while ProRes is a great feature to have, it takes up a ton of space, especially if you shoot the open gate 5.8K. Much prefer to just shoot 200mbps H.265 LongGOP (in 5.7K DCI or 5.8K open gate), which is a lot nicer than ProRes 422 HQ which clocks in at 1522mbps (both 23.98p). For 4K DCI I would use the 400mbps All-I H.264 4.2.2 - I wish Panasonic had at least offered H.265 All-I 4.2.2 for the 5.7K DCI and 5.8K open gate, instead of just 4.2.2 All-I ProRes. Supposedly they did this since H.265 is heavy on computers, but my Mac Studio can easily handle it - even my Mac Mini M1 doesn't have a problem with it.

For me, I use BRAW whenever possible. It's the best compressed RAW codec out there outside of REDCODE RAW. Smooth as butter to edit and of course seamless integration with Resolve. CinemaDNG provides little benefit for me and produces massive files that are simply unwieldy to deal with.

ProRes is more of the a convenience thing than an actual efficient codec. It just works smoothly on a lot of computers without top of the line specs, but once you get beyond 1080 HD, it becomes simply too much storage.

I edit off a few SSDs in RAID 5 configuration, then I have some regular HDDs in a NAS for archival storage.

Hopefully more compressed RAW options open up in the near future once RED loses their patent in this Nikon suit - at least that's what I predict will happen. It will also be hilarious to me if Nikon, the company that has historically never cared about video or filmmaking, is the one to invalidate their stupid patent.

(keep in mind, everything I shoot is narrative film, so high-quality video is necessary - so I'm willing to tolerate higher bitrates, though not excessively so)

[Yannick Willox]

Another heads up for BRAW. The quality and flexibility you get (even white balance can be completely changed afterwards, ISO basically does not exist, except for the dual gain choice one has to make, carefully !) is great, while being more data efficient than the comparable prores.

For me it is most often Q5 for 6-10 cam shoots, which typically are 2x 1.5 hours. That usually gives around 3TB of footage in 4K.

Q5 BRAW 4K DCI at 25 fps typically gives something between 200 and 300 mbit/s if I am not mistaken. 400 mbit max for wide shots with movement and much detail.

[Andrew Reid]

8 hours ago, M_Williams said:

I edit off a few SSDs in RAID 5 configuration, then I have some regular HDDs in a NAS for archival storage.

Very nice, but doesn't it get expensive over the years as masses of material builds up on the NAS?

8 hours ago, M_Williams said:

Hopefully more compressed RAW options open up in the near future once RED loses their patent in this Nikon suit - at least that's what I predict will happen. It will also be hilarious to me if Nikon, the company that has historically never cared about video or filmmaking, is the one to invalidate their stupid patent.

Nikon are not the saviour, they are a very naughty boy.

If you look at arch rival Canon, internal compressed C-RAW, and the only one RED doesn't seem to have a problem with.

Nikon will be after a similar deal to Canon.

Likely a technology and patent swap deal.

I can't see the patent rolling over quite so easily at this point, but Nikon's approach to use the original EOSHD Forum argument about why the patent is invalid is certainly novel 🙂

The only way I see this being resolved is for somebody to eventually buy RED. Perhaps Apple, Nvidia, DJI, Canon or Sony, and for the RED codec to be licensed to earn some money before the patent expires.

DJI would probably be most interested. Whether RED is up for sale, let alone to the Chinese is another matter.

[scotchtape]

I was annoyed that FX6 only had no lower bitrate options, I think 24p is 400mbps

Hasn't been as annoying as I thought after the initial SD card purchases. Working projects on SSD or M2 and archived on HDDs..

B-roll and B cam is A7SIII XAVC-S 4K 60fps 200mbps.  24fps is 100 I think, wish it was higher oh well.

200 or 250 is good but 400mbps isn't terribad if you have lots of 256gb cards.

[M_Williams]

15 hours ago, Andrew Reid said:

Nikon are not the saviour, they are a very naughty boy.

Why?

Quote

 I can't see the patent rolling over quite so easily at this point, but Nikon's approach to use the original EOSHD Forum argument about why the patent is invalid is certainly novel 🙂

What? I don't know what this means.

Quote

The only way I see this being resolved is for somebody to eventually buy RED.

Nikon's response to RED's lawsuit is a legitimately valid argument and stands a good chance of invalidating the patent. Why no one else ever used that argument (except JinniMag) is beyond me. And notice how RED quietly dropped their lawsuit against JinniMag.... no deals were made there.

RED's patent never should have been granted in the first place. But Nikon has a strong argument legally as for why it's not valid.

[M_Williams]

15 hours ago, Andrew Reid said:

Very nice, but doesn't it get expensive over the years as masses of material builds up on the NAS?

I mean, once projects are finished and in the rear-view, they just get stored on hard drives that aren't connected to anything, in two separate locations. The NAS is just used for backup of current projects (and for sharing files between my computer and my roommate/filmmaking partner) plus storage of anything that I need access to occasionally (music, stock footage, whatever the hell it may be), as well as all of my photography stills. So no, not really. Regular 3.5" HDDs are cheap as dirt these days.

I don't shoot events or documentaries or anything that has hundreds of hours of footage. i just do narrative filmmaking, so it's not like there's an insane amount of data. I guess if I were to purchase all the hard drives at once it would seem expensive, but over time it's not a big deal.

Now if I shot 2,000mbps RAW 8K or something like that... might be a different story. That's why I'm happy with 6K. Enough resolution to have some latitude in post for reframing/digital zoom/stabilization and still have a 4K file, but not so much that the storage or computing power becomes an issue.

As such, I was VERY happy when the X-H2s was announced with 6.2K - and open gate at that! (why no one else, other than Panasonic, will do open gate is a mystery to me). I've been disappointed that everyone skipped right from 4K to 8K (as far as hybrids go), except for the Canon R3. BMPCC6K, RED Komodo, Z-Cam E2-S6/F6, X-H2s, GH6... that's what I like. I was kind of disappointed that the Ursa 12K didn't do oversampled 6K, which was surprising since that would be a perfect 2:1 oversample. But it made sense when I found out the sensor is RGBW with 1:1:1 RGB pixels, so a clean oversample is 3:1 (which is why it does full sensor 4K, but only Super 16 6K).

Anyway... yeah I'm a huge fan of 6K haha.

[M_Williams]

16 hours ago, Yannick Willox said:

Q5 BRAW 4K DCI at 25 fps typically gives something between 200 and 300 mbit/s if I am not mistaken. 400 mbit max for wide shots with movement and much detail.

Yeah it would be around that. 187 to 450mbps, but you'd rarely be anywhere nearly 400 unless you had a lot of movement and whatnot like you say. Generally about 2 to 2.5GB/min in my experience.