My journey into the mysterious and often unhelpful world of video research has had some solid advances and plenty of set backs, but I am making my way.
A breakthrough for me was discovering the benefits of RAW in video or more specifically B-Raw, which actually made the process and processing easier not harder and give me the sort of freedom I have been after for a long time.
B-Raw also has levels of quality, something that makes it practical for me on many levels.
Video is very similar to stills in that you can take very good footage straight from the camera, mobile phones prove that, but creative freedom resides in the unprocessed RAW core of it all.
My choice has been to use Panasonic cameras fed out to Black Magic 12g video assists, which give me some of the benefits of the cameras (flexibility, stabilising, AF, image quality, EVF) and some down sides (bulk, cabling, rigging generally, some processing limitations).
It looks the goods and after a settling process, it actually is, a lighter option looses some capabilities.
One down side above the ones I knew about before I went in was right there in front of me, but thanks to my lack of full understanding of how it all worked, I missed it.
When recording from my Panasonic cameras, the GH5s, S5, G9II, there are limited RAW output size choices, meaning that for relatively low output deliverables, like 1080/.Mov/25p, I have to shoot 4-6k B-Raw in granted, a choice of quality settings, but always 4k at least.
I have had several 700Gb jobs so far using multiple cameras for an hour or more.
Even at 8:1 or Q5, this can come in at hundreds of GB for relatively small jobs, just for that low quality output (often only single digit GB output files). I can deal, because with many projects, the capture quality is for me alone, something I can create a smaller master from and dump the original, but this strains everything on the processing pathway.
Even some simple test footage turns into a dozen GB.
If I had a BM camera, I would have the option of 1080/B-Raw native, but to what ends as I will still likely shoot multiple cameras, so multiple BMPCC4k’s?
I can handle the big capture files now, I just need a good down sizing work flow.
There is also the option of shooting ProResHQ/422 in 1080 to an SSD (G9II) or the BMVA (even a 3G model), but when compared, the quality takes a small hit even at higher comparable storage rates.
Serviceable 4k/12bit/B-Raw/12:1 is 34 MB/s, while 1080/10bit/ProRes/422/HQ is 28 MB/s, so less colour and bit depth and much lower resolution for almost the same storage.
This is a problem that is not really a problem I guess as I have become a “shoot 4k and crop/stabilise/Ken Burns the frame for 1080 output” convert, but coming from a stills background where I can do a two week trip on 32 GB, it is sobering.