GH5S ProRes RAW workflow - advice on HDMI and ISO

R

rc444

Well-known member
Hi Everyone,

I paired my GH5S with the Atomos Ninja V and recorded in 4K in ProRes RAW for the first time. It took a while to load the various firmwares and register the Atomos, but I got there.
I have three observations:

-- I noticed ProRes RAW said my estimated filming time was around 46 minutes for a 1 TB Samsung SSD.
This means for long-form film projects, ProRes RAW is probably not cost or space efficient, so I will likely stick with the cameras internal 10 bit, or output 10 bit to ProRes 422 on the Atomos. ProRes RAW might be good for experimental projects or ultra short projects however. Probably not short films, or projects that require multiple takes.

-- The ISO when filming in ProRes RAW defaulted to AUTO ISO, so I changed it to ISO 320

-- My gold plated $80 Atomos HDMI cord wouldn't send any picture signal from my GH5S to the Ninja V, so I replaced it with an HDMI cord from my Nintendo Switch and that worked much better. There were a couple of times the recording cancelled, but I was surprised at how much better the Nintendo Switch HDMI cord was.

Could anyone recommend the best ISO for me to set when filming in ProRes RAW? The lowest I can go is ISO 320.
Does anyone have any advice on the best HDMI cords? They all seem to be of varying quality, some work while others don't.


Thanks
David
 
Rather than think about the amount of data, what is your impression of the comparative image quality of the ProRes Raw vs the other options? Did you spend time with it to see how the editing and color corrections workflows would work for you and what the resulting differences in downstream image manipulation would be? Were you recording at 24p?
While it is a lot of data to handle, on most 'long-form' projects my guess is that you would be shooting a maximum of 3 or 4 TB of Raw a day - which seems like a lot, but with high speed transfer systems and a good data wrangler may not be all that bad.
Almost 10 years ago I shot a feature with the F3 recording 1080/24p 4:4:4 to an uncompressed Gemini recorder -- I think it was just over 80 minutes of footage per TB. We had data transfer time issues because drives and transfer rates were much slower back then. But the IQ of the end result was more than worth the pain when we worked with the footage during the final color correct.
Of course the bigger question if shooting in ProRes Raw is your post workflow - and whether you will need to use a high end color correction system - which will probably mean Assimilate Scratch.
 
The amount of data is not really much of a concern for most people these days (as you noted), but it's just that the GH5S' sensor can only take you so far with ProRes RAW.

The format is not going to greatly improve DR and/or make the IQ much more noticeably nicer, and because it's still limited in its flexibility and because you have to record externally, it's not really worth it for most, IMO.

The camera's 400Mbps offering is solid and if you shoot well and grade well, there is very little to gain from ProRes RAW right now, IMO. And that opinion is formed from watching hundreds and hundreds of PR RAW videos from different cameras on YouTube/Vimeo (the destination for everything).

With that said, if it was internal and if it offered a nice 10 setting panel like REDCODE RAW does where you can change exposure, contrast, saturation, tint, etc all at once in seconds then I'd definitely use it, especially because of my love for FCP.
 
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