This is the oneplus 7 pro and it's been my phone for the past two years or so this video is not
sponsored by oneplus it's been a pretty good phone for me though when it was released it got
sort of mediocre reviews on its camera which focused primarily on its use of computational
photography but this phone has something else and that makes it a little more special
well honestly most smartphones have it it's the ability to shoot raw dng files
what that does is it removes all the software rendering and just shoots straight to the sensor
and then outputs it in its raw format now when you take this file you can edit it and pull the
lights and shadows all around and edit the colors to your liking and it's just less noisy
less blocky there's no artifacting it just ends up being a much much better result now if you
clicked on this video it's either you're wondering what cinema dng is or you know
what cinema dng is and you want to see it done we're getting there but this is like my 12th
take on this video because of various reasons so i need to explain things so bear with me first of
all back to the phone now when oneplus released this phone it came with a sony imx 586 sensor
i can never remember those model numbers but what it does is it's a 48 megapixel mega pencil
it's a 48 megapixel sensor that down samples down four times to take four pixels
and mush them into one so you get a 12 megapixel image this sub sampling allows you to get a little
bit better results because bigger pixels are less noisy now even though that it only shoots in 8
bit it still does a pretty good job of its color representation now more clarity on the 8-bit it's
8-bit per channel for the rgb channel so 8 x 3 equals 24 bit color also this phone came with ufs3
memory so that means that it can read and write at much faster rates than traditional flash
memory and is pretty much the standard now when it comes to smartphones and it allows for a total
write speed of 410 megabytes a second this number is important we'll return to it later okay back
to cinema dng so we already established that dng is a raw file format for photos it's not
technically raw raw is a different type of format but dng just removes a little bit more metadata
than raw but it's pretty much of the same quality it's just a different type of file format and dng
itself stands for digital negative and if you come from the film world you know that negatives are
well the actual film cinema dng is basically just a sequence of those raw pictures
smooshed together into a video file sometimes i don't even think the cinema dng always comes
as a video file sometimes it's just the sequence of frames that you put into and process together
which is what i did for this experiment i wanted to see what it would look like from a phone from
the raw data how good the video could actually look if it was in cinema dng and like normal dng
raws being able to edit footage that is completely raw for video means that you can get way more
dynamic range you can play with the colors a whole lot more it's just much more editable
and also less noisy with no chunky artifacts that you're used to seeing in mobile phone video
time to get to the process well we already established earlier what the write speed of
this phone is with the ufs3 storage the problem is my dng files from my phone when i shoot at a
12 megapixel photo is they are 22 megabytes each on average now 22 times 24 to get the
desired 24 frames a second means that we're talking about 528 megabytes a second
which is over the 410 megabytes per second write speed that is the limitation of the storage and
that's understandable that's an insane amount of storage that's the same amount of data to be
written at one time and not to mention that the camera itself cannot take more than one or two
photos per second so basically i have to resort to what would essentially be a time lapse granted it
wouldn't be the traditionally like super fast time lapse it would be a little bit sped up
footage so in order to get consistent footage i would go out with the camera and set everything
to manual depending on the scenario most of the time i would set the focus to infinity because
i was primarily shooting landscapes and things that weren't super close then i would adjust the
shutter speed to be the appropriate settings for being outside and the iso as low as possible and
i also kept the white balance consistent too because we didn't want it to change color
temperatures and bounce all around just like we wouldn't want the exposure to change every frame
because then would just be like the strobi flashy effect it would be terrible so once i shot all my
sequences i had hundreds and hundreds of photos traditionally we would take all that footage and
edit it in premiere pro but premiere pro didn't like working on my dng files and ended up with
like this red blank screen and it just fell apart even though like the the few frames that did work
looked great and you know adjusting them with lumetri colors and putting on luts looked
fantastic it was so crispy clear it was promising but i have to find another way to make it work so
since they're photos i just dragged all of them per sequence into lightroom and started working
on the edits there so for each sequence i would take one frame that was a good representation
of that scene and then edit it accordingly i would take the highlights raise them lower them whatever
they need to be done color correct add clarity all that and then apply it to the entire sequence once
i was done with that i would export it in the highest quality format i could that wasn't dng
then i took all those frames and dropped them into premiere put them at two frames per image so that
it would end up being about 12 frames per second in a 24 fps timeline i chose two frames per image
because uh in an animation a lot of times they would work on twos which meant that they would
have two frames per one image to sort of stretch it out a little bit and it worked out a little bit
better it helps slow things down at least a little one of the other issues i ran into since a lot of
this footage was handheld there was a decent bit of shake so with a little warp stabilizer you can
help it out at least a little bit the other problem was that it's still kind of fast and
sometimes that can look okay but sometimes it's just kind of jarring so i wanted to see
if i could stretch things out even further by bringing them into after effects and applying
time warp now what time warp does is it helps make in-between frames by using vectors and sort
of stretching it out and sort of figuring out what the image is and what would look good in between
problem is at this speed didn't work out so good and it had some pretty trippy results even though
like some of these shots took like 16 hours to render i really tried hard to make it work but
it's not really intended for this use you of course could probably try optical flow but
that's only going to give you limited results but if you can forgive the fluidity of the shots
you can pause it and see just how clear these images are and being able to edit them like this
is impressive for a smartphone again there's only a few cameras that actually shoot in true
cinema dng and being able to see what video would look like if you push the sensor to its limits
was in the end pretty satisfying for me do i think they'll implement this in phones in the future
depends how far into the future we're talking again the write speeds really need to be
a lot faster for this to be achievable and even though the maximum storage in phones is increasing
it's going to take a lot to be able to use this practically
if they made a smaller sensor maybe an 8 megapixel sensor which is a little bit closer to 4k at least
traditional UHD i think the file sizes of the dng would drop below the ufs storage
write speeds then maybe we're talking i think the processors are good enough to handle this
the fact of the matter is whether i like it or not this is a very niche thing to be into
so i don't think it's really gonna be a thing the ability to make an app for a phone that could
support such a thing now that might be something but for now i'm gonna have to stick to just what
i got and if anyone else is interested in trying this i would love to see what you come up with
i guess what i learned is that i still don't know how to properly end a video