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![]() Working with Magic Lantern Raw DNG files, you're looking at a whopping ~20% compression improvement after being run through slimRaw with "Maximum Compression" enabled. Already recorded footage as 'compressed' CinemaDNG, as is default using the latest firmwares on most Blackmagic Cameras? No problem! It can still re-compress those CDNG sequences to save space using either a "virtually lossless" or lossy algorithm, with options such as 3:1 or 4:1 compression ratios. The software also offers some very useful DIT functionality which allows you to securely verify & duplicate to another drive (for backup or archive). What is slimRaw and how does this help our situation? SlimRaw is a post production application, available for both Windows and Mac OS X, that allows you to recompress CinemaDNG files to save space & improve playback performance. The significant improvements during color grading and VFX work is something you need to consider when choosing a recording format, especially when a film may record hundreds of hours of material throughout its production (ignoring post, VFX, etc). As a colorist and VFX artist, I can attest that the exact same camera recording in ProRes and CinemaDNG will always provides a superior result with CinemaDNG. It is a RAW format, similar to RED's proprietary "REDCODE" format, which provides a very high quality image that is highly flexible throughout post-production. Why record in CinemaDNG if it is so large? Well, there are a lot of reasons why you would want to record in CinemaDNG. This massive data rate can eat up your storage space fairly quickly, especially when you have multiple back-ups for your footage. At 2.5K resolution, a single frame of CinemaDNG video (1/24th of a second) can run up to 5MB in size, or ~7GB a minute. ![]() However, to handle this amazing image quality, all Blackmagic and ML Raw cameras record to a the data-intensive CinemaDNG format. No other cameras in that price range ($500-$4000) can capture such high quality imagery at up to resolutions of 4.6K. Most people who know me or follow my blog know I'm a huge fan of the Magic Lantern Raw 'hack' and Blackmagic cameras, not only due to their great price-to-performance ratio but also because they can use the great CinemaDNG format to capture raw video. Update 1/2016: Added reference to new lossy compression feature. ![]()
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