Not an update to the Pro Apps, but great news from six third-party companies who have announced that their products will support ProRes RAW. A year on, the video format is gaining traction!
It was year ago that Apple surprised everybody with the announcement of ProRes RAW at NAB 2018. At the start, third-party support was limited to two manufactures, Atomos who make the standalone camera recording units and DJI, the leading drone manufacturer.
365 days later and that number now stands at 8 and will no doubt not stop there either. We know ProRes RAW is coming to Adobe Premiere (Due to the gaff on their website) and this will be published before we attend Blackmagic's press conference for the launch of the (ahem) 'revolutionary' Resolve 16.
Just as a benchmark, at the year end 2018, ProRes codecs had an 80% share of the camera recording market.
But back to what we do know, so let's run through he six.
Assimilate
SCRATCH provides all the tools and streamlined workflows for DITs and post-production artists, from dailies through the entire post-production process including, conforming, color grading, special effects, compositing, finishing and mastering.
Jeff Edson, CEO at Assimilate, explained, “Apple’s ProRes RAW announcement is significant for a number of reasons. The ProRes codec is the most widely used compression format for acquisition, editing, and delivery, worldwide, because it simplifies the camera to delivery process. At the same time, numerous RAW camera formats are available today, which work well for in-depth analyzing of data for their specific product line. Currently all camera manufacturers write their own SDKs for their proprietary RAW formats.
There is potential for ProRes RAW to become a ubiquitous camera format, which means camera manufacturers would no longer need to develop the variety of SDKs, resulting in significant cost savings, lowering the barrier to entry, and streamlining the camera workflow. This would also be advantageous to all DITs and post artists who would benefit by streamlining their workflows by working with a ubiquitous file format rather than the large variety that exists today, thus saving time, money, and enabling faster time to market.”
“It’s a priority for Assimilate to provide timely support for the latest camera and file formats to ensure our SCRATCH user base has access to all the latest digital media content, so we are very pleased to be among the first to support ProRes RAW,” added Edson.
Colorfront
The Academy, Emmy and HPA Award-winning developer of high-performance, on-set dailies and transcoding systems for motion pictures, broadcast, OTT and commercials.
Filmlight
Baselight and Daylight, the industry-leading professional color grading systems are transforming film and video post-production and setting new standards for quality, reliability and performance.
“Our philosophy has always been to provide the tools that our users need,” said Wolfgang Lempp, CEO at FilmLight. “Apple ProRes RAW is a powerful, very high quality, standardised way of handling raw camera outputs that is ideal for high- dynamic-range (HDR) content creation, and controlling the colour from set to post is extremely important to production and post pipelines. We naturally wanted to provide native support as soon as possible.”
This is of interest as their colour grading tools are a direct competitor to Blackmagic's DaVinci Resolve. You can find demos on SL4105 from Monday.
MTI Film
The CORTEX software family of products provide high quality, powerful and secure workflow solutions which offer comprehensive solutions for dailies processing, media management, deliverables and more for on-set and post-production.
Randy Reck, MTI’s Director of Development, said, “We believe the industry is ready to adopt ProRes RAW as a standard for acquisition, naturally building on the success of the ProRes codec family”. CEO Larry Chernoff exclaims, “We are very proud of our integration of outstanding technologies like ProRes RAW, and we are excited to be able to continue the development”.
Telestream
Switch, a multi-format video player and encoder with advanced tools to inspect and correct files.
Grass Valley
“Edit Anything, Fast”, EDIUS is an outstanding real-time editor for professional filmmaking. Grass Valley is announcing ProRes RAW and ProRes support in EDIUS 9.4 with a planned release date of May 2019.
No doubt we will hear a lot more about ProRes RAW at the show.
I am the Editor-in-Chief of FCP.co and have run the website since its inception ten years ago.
I have also worked as a broadcast and corporate editor for over 30 years, starting on one inch tape, working through many formats, right up to today's NLEs.
Under the name Idustrial Revolution, I have written and sold plugins for Final Cut Pro for 13 years.
I was made a Freeman of Lichfield through The Worshipful Company of Smiths (established 1601). Though I haven't yet tried to herd a flock of sheep through the city centre!
Current Editing
2020 has been busy, the beginning of the year was finishing off a new property series (cut on FCP) for Channel 4 called The Great House Giveaway. I also designed and built the majority of the graphics as Motion templates. It has been a great success and the shows grabbed more viewers in the 4pm weekday slot than any previous strand. It has been recommissioned by C4 for 60 episodes, including prime-time versions and five themed programmes. The shows have also been nominated for a 2021 BAFTA.
Although both were postponed to later in the year, I worked again on ITV's coverage of the Tour de France and La Vuelta. 2020 was my 25th year of editing the TdF and my 20th year as lead editor. The Tour was the first broadcast show to adopt FCPX working for multiple editors on shared storage.
BBC's Snooker has played a big part in my life, I've been editing tournament coverage since 1997. I'm proud to be part of a very creative team that has pioneered many new ideas and workflows that are now industry standard in sports' production. This is currently an Adobe Premiere edit.
Covid cancelled some of the regular corporate events that I edit such as trade shows & events. I was lucky however to edit, from home, on projects for Amazon Kindle, Amazon Black Friday, Mastercard and very proud to have helped local charitable trust Kendall & Wall secure lottery funding.
As for software, my weapon of choice is Final Cut Pro and Motion, but I also have a good knowledge and broadcast credits with Adobe Premiere Pro, MOGRT design and Photoshop.
Plugin Design & Development
I'm the creative force behind Idustrial Revolution, one of the oldest Final Cut Pro plugin developers. It hosts a range of commercial and free plugins on the site. One free plugin was downloaded over a thousand times within 24 hours of release.
I also take on custom work, whether it is adapting an existing plugin for a special use or designing new plugins for clients from scratch. Having a good knowledge of editing allows me to build-in flexibility and more importantly, usability.
FCP.co
Now in its 10th year and 4th redesign, running FCP.co has given me knowledge on how to run a large CMS- you are currently reading my bio from the database! Although it sounds corny, I am pretty well up on social media trends & techniques, especially in the video sector. The recent Covid restrictions has enabled live FCP.co shows online. This involves managing a Zoom Webinar through Restream.io to YouTube and Facebook.
The Future
I'm always open to new ideas and opportunities, so please get in touch at editor (at) fcp.co. I've judged film competitions, presented workflow techniques to international audiences and come up with ideas for TV shows and software programs!
