From the course: Shooting with Blackmagic Cinema Cameras

Advice for shooting Blackmagic RAW files

From the course: Shooting with Blackmagic Cinema Cameras

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Advice for shooting Blackmagic RAW files

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- Your Blackmagic camera may offer the ability to shoot raw. If it's the older cameras, these are the CinemaDNG raw formats, newer Blackmagic cameras use the B raw, or Blackmagic raw format. Now, there are a few things to realize about these formats. First, they're big. They require a lot of disc space and likely won't be able to shoot them to a standard SD memory card. You can probably get away with it for a time lapse clip where you're not shooting a high frame rate and that's fine. But if you're trying to shoot standard video, you're not going to pull it off using just a regular SD card. You're going to need to step up to the CFast cards or use an SSD, which have higher speed recording, faster disc speeds to write those larger files. Let's go into the menu here, and under the record tab, you'll notice the ability for the Blackmagic raw. We discussed these briefly before, but I wanted to go over the key differences. If you want to make sure that you are getting no fluctuation in data rates, particularly useful if you're doing something like keying or compositing, then stick with one of the constant bit rate options. You can choose something that is less compressed, like three to one, which would do an excellent job for green screen or compositing materials. If you just need raw but more flexibility, then you can use the eight to one or 12 to one format to record video that's raw that will be useful for documentary or running gun type situations. On the other hand, the constant quality option here, offers some useful presets that you can choose between. Depending upon which one you use, you'll see it has a significant impact on the file size, so 1600 minutes versus 4,800 minutes. Now some of this is going to be affected depending upon the different frame rates and the resolution that you choose. Remember, the recording size you choose here, will affect things. All right. What's really important here is, once we get ready to run these and we've dialed in the settings, make sure you give the card a test. Let this run for a good 30 seconds and see that nothing drops. You'll want to make sure under the settings here, that you've chosen the option to stop recording if card drops frames. If you're able to continuously run for a good 30 seconds or longer, it's likely that your memory card is rated for raw video. Remember, Blackmagic has a list of recommended cards that they've tested on their website for both CFast and SSDs. If you want to use raw, make sure you step up to these higher quality recording media formats, so you get the right results. And I do suggest you stick with the recommended recording options because these have been tested by the manufacturer. If not, be sure to test the card thoroughly yourself by doing some of these shooting tests and if it does have problems, consider dropping to a more compressed flavor of raw which will likely let you shoot on a card that doesn't have optimal performance.

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