Faster, smaller, easier Cinema Raw Light Explained
Shooting advantages Brett Danton, Director/DOP
My name's Brett Danton, I'm a commercial director and DP I’ver shot with all the cameras used that use Cinema Raw Light
In fact, I shot with the very first one,
which was the C 200, which I'm using to record this on.
And then I'm lucky to have the other two
flavours in the range to use that use cinema RAW light.
I've got the C300 Mark III
and the C500, both of them using internal cinema RAW light, obviously the C500 is full frame
so records 5.9K image, giving you a little bit of flexibility in post and
then the C200 and the C300 record a DCI file which gives you a little bit of
extra on the sides if you want to use inside a 16:9 crop.
If I can, I'm always going to use RAW.
I mean, I view it like a digital negative, is what I call it.
You want to extract as much information out of that image as you can.
You then you can turn around and
manipulate and do what you want in a post side, so it gives you much more flexibility.
You're not baking in a look you know, when you take it into the NLE,
you decide if you want to be in Log 2, Log 3.
They all have different ways but you have
full control over what you can do with that, with that image at a later date, and
especially with the way things are changing. All the NLEs support Cinema RAW light.
You can also work inside a proxy workflow as well.
All of these cameras produce proxy.
I use an XFAVC proxy.
What's nice now is you've got the same flavour
of RAW in the three cameras, you know the three Canon Cinema RAW Light cameras.
So, you know, you've got consistency as well
so you know that you can match those files together.
The other thing that I see is the colour renditions.
The colours seem to have it, I don't know,
that have more of a depth and more of a richness to them.
When we're doing our final post work
everything's really punching off the screen.
When I did the Jaguar commercial in New Zealand we had all sorts of weather
issues. Mountains were all supposed to be showing in the background
and we arrived there and it's pouring with rain and it's mist
and I can't see any of the background.
So we still had to shoot the car, we had no choice.
So what I did was we marked where the
camera was and went back a few days later and re-shot some background plates.
The post house took the two files,
Actually I think I ended up at three and joined them together.
So working inside that RAW workflow they were able to layer the shots. If you want the
ultimate image quality, that's what I would shoot.
Workflow benefits Ollie Kenchington, Senior Colourist
From a post-production point of view and from a colourist's point of view
Cinema RAW Light is a fantastic codec to actually work with.
There's just so much data inside of it. It's incredible.
You can really push the signal wherever you want to go.
But the key thing is it's, at the same time
also a very low CPU load codec, which means that it can play back very easily.
You can scrub through it very simply,
even on a laptop, which is kind of incredible really.
The those two things are kind of the Holy
Grail, lots and lots of data, but lightweight enough to edit with a laptop.
So we've really got a codec that opens up
a lot of avenues to us in terms of the amount of data inside it.
We've got quite a few key, sort of,
indicators, if you like, that indicate that this is a codec that we can push
quite far if we need to, which opens up all kinds of creative avenues if we want
to really push a heavy look into the footage.
So, for example, this is proper Bayer
pattern information straight from the sensor, even though it's Canon RAW Light
it is still the RAW information from the sensor at full RGB so 4:4:4
no chroma subsampling whatsoever.
No spatial compression, no temporal compression.
The footage that you get from drones and
GoPros is much harder to edit and work with than Cinema RAW Light. It's 10- or 12-bit
and to give you some idea, we're talking about 1 billion if it's 10-bit or
68 billion if it's 12-bit colours available to us.
So Canon's Cinema Gamut is bigger
than the actual human eye can see in terms of colour response.
So we've got a huge number of colours that
we can capture within a very large gamut, which means that we can go anywhere.
It's much larger than Rec.2020, it's much larger
than obviously Rec.709, P3 and any other gamuts that we might be delivering to.
So we're capturing a huge, huge amount of data.
This really large gamut gives us any number of options for deliverables, from
SDR to theatrical to HDR, Rec.2020 and beyond, because who knows what might come in the
future, what standards might come along. With capturing such a large gamut here and
so many colours, we're to a certain extent future-proofing ourselves, depending on
what deliverables might be an option in the future.
So there's a huge amount of colour information inside these Cinema RAW Light
files, but at the same time, they're a third to a fifth of the size of the
uncompressed RAW that you might get from a Codex recorder for example.
So we're still talking about very lightweight codec that has a low CPU load.
It doesn't take much power to playback this file.
So we have this kind of odd mix where we
have a huge amount of data, a huge amount of colour information, but actually a
lightweight file that we can even work with on the laptop.
Depending on the scene we might choose to use a different gamma.
There's obviously Canon Log 2 to unlock
the maximum dynamic range of the file, but there's Canon Log 3, which brings up
the Black Point and retains the same amount of highlight information.
That's the more gentle CLog, which would
be more appropriate to a lower dynamic range scene
and of course, there's also wide DR, there's the standard Rec.709.
We have all the options available to us.
We have additional options once we get
into post with this Cinema RAW Light file. So you can get a look at the type of
post-production workflow that Cinema RAW Light unlocks for you.
So let's start with this shot here, the first thing I want to demonstrate is just
how quickly and easily you can scrub through this. A very, very easy to play back
and post-production friendly codec, which is great.
There's actually a grade on this shot.
If I disable the grade, this is the RAW file as it was captured from the C200.
This is the graded image that we have on the end. We've actually got some effects here.
There's a slight bit of skin softening with a beauty effect on the end here.
We've got four other nodes that are just working together with this grade.
So, you know, not a complicated but then also not a straight forward grade.
And that's all happening at the same time
and we're still getting this real-time playback.
Now, another thing that we can do is we can go into our camera RAW settings.
So inside of Da Vinci Resolve, we have a separate area to make what known as first light
or one light adjustments, which are adjustments to the RAW level of the file.
If I come in and set the decode quality to using full res Canon and then set it to
clip, that will open up all of the various parameters that can be adjusted
and very importantly, here we've got
colour space and gamma so we can alter the colour space depending on our delivery.
If we're going out to HDR, if we're going
To SDR to broadcast TV, to theatrical P3, we can change our gamut and we can
change our gamma as well, depending, again, on what we're trying to do, what
kind of information we've got within the scene.
This particular shot here, it's got a huge amount of colour detail inside the shadows
and in these areas down in the bottom right-hand corner
and then it's got these bright, clipped highlights around the sun here.
This is a very high dynamic range scene
and so Canon Log 2 is absolutely the right curve to use here.
But let's say we were happy to sacrifice
some of that shadow detail, but we wanted to maintain the highlight detail.
Canon Log 3 would be the ideal curve to use in that particular instance
and the fact we have that choice, we can
make those gamma adjustments after the image has been captured is one of the huge
benefits of RAW and one of the huge, huge benefits of Cinema RAW Light.
So there you go,
hopefully you can see the post-production options that this codec unlocks for us are
vast, and if you have a Cinema EOS camera that is capable of recording Cinema RAW Light but
you haven't so far, hopefully this has slightly demystified it for you, showing
you that it's a relatively simple codec to work with and also hopefully has got you
excited about the options that it unlocks for you in your post-production workflows.