While the future of ProRes RAW looks perfectly secure, regrettably, the same cannot be said for Blackmagic RAW. Concerning which, in his review of the Sigma fp L, Gerald Undone reports that the “4K image recorded over HDMI RAW is a soft, artifacty, aliased mess, and doesn’t look anywhere near as good as the CinemaDNG recorded either internally or via external SSD”.
As for Sigma’s partner in the L-mount alliance, Sherif Mokbel prefers the ProRes RAW implementation over BRAW in Panasonic cameras, saying, “At present I would personally choose ProRes RAW over Blackmagic RAW with no second thoughts.”
If you want to add either flavor of RAW to a Nikon, on top of having to purchase an external recorder, SSD, cables, batteries and a cage, you’ve got to ship your camera to the manufacturer and pay an extra $200, a real nuisance.
Shipping by FedEx or any other method can be prohibitively expensive, too, not to mention customs here, which would probably try to extort even more. So, we can cross Nikon off our list. hehe
Users are also reporting huge color shifts in the Blackmagic Video Assist. Blackmagic released a firmware update enabling calibration, but the process is subjective and awkward to perform out in the field.
And what must be the only instance where someone really thought that it’d be a good idea to shoot video with a medium format camera, a Fujifilm GFX100 owner complains that when recording BRAW, the image displayed on the Video Assist 7″ 12G is far too contrasty.
No PQ mode for HDR in the Video Assist is yet another nail in the coffin as far as we’re concerned.
The reason the rollout of ProRes RAW and firmware updates have been so much more consistent than Blackmagic RAW is because monitor/recorders are Atomos’ specialty, whereas they’re nothing but a sideline of Blackmagic.
In sum, we’re not seeing BRAW as a viable alternative to ProRes RAW.
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