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Blackmagic Design threw us a curveball at this years IBC. We interviewed them at IBC 2018 to find out what this new Compressed Raw business is all about!
If you decided to switch off your computers and all connections to the internet for a nanosecond today you might have missed a teeny weeny announcement from Blackmagic Design. One that could well truly change the way we think about working with raw video.
Wait what?
Now we know what you are thinking. Didn't we say all this when ProRes RAW was announced? Okay, we grant you that, but there's a lot more going on here with Blackmagic's new codec, and it's very significant indeed. It all boils down to being open, and, importantly free to use just for starters. Any developer can download the SDK and program software that will display files recorded with the new codec system consistently, without any need for a license fee. Not only that, but Blackmagic has considered the full workflow and has examined precisely what is missing from existing raw workflows.
The company has kept pretty quiet about all this until now, and it would be all too easy to say that it is simply a response to ProRes RAW. However this is not the case. The Blackmagic Design codec has been in development for quite some time now, and what we are seeing is the result of that development period.
It's fast
The new codec offloads a lot of the de-mosaic processing to the camera itself, which means that by the time it reaches the post production workflow the machine you are using to edit with is a lot less taxed when it comes to processing. In other words you won't need a top end desktop machine to work with the files quickly and effectively. You could be using this on a laptop out in the field and be moving these files around like any other.
This is, of course, just the tip of the iceberg as far as what is going on. Watch our video below to get the full lowdown on what makes the new codec and recording method so special, and different from other raw workflows.
Tags: Production
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