The digital negative: shooting in Cinema RAW Light

Filming in Canon Cinema RAW Light produces significantly smaller files – between a third and a fifth of the size of standard RAW footage – without sacrificing image quality or colour fidelity. The Canon EOS C200 allows you to capture 4K images internally, recording to a CFast 2.0 card; the Canon EOS C500 Mark II enables Cinema RAW Light recording internally onto CFexpress cards at 5.9K; while the Canon EOS C300 Mark III supports continuous recording up to 120fps in 4K Cinema RAW Light, also onto CFexpress cards.

Cinema RAW Light does not record in the frame-by-frame structure of the traditional RAW format. Instead, the information is compiled into a single RAW Movie file, giving filmmakers all the data they can squeeze out of their cameras, recorded at the highest quality.

"I think of RAW as a 'digital negative'. You're grabbing as much information as you can and you have full control over what you can do with that image at a later date, which makes it possible to go back and repurpose what you've shot," explains Brett. "For example, Netflix wants HDR content, so if it's interested in a documentary you shot in RAW, you can regrade it – you're not constrained by how you shot it. And for me, the colours are richer and have more depth."

"The data that you've got opens up all kinds of creative avenues," adds Ollie. "We're talking about a billion colours if it's 10-bit, 68 billion if it's 12-bit. And not only do we have a huge colour palette, they're encapsulated in a huge gamut as well. Canon Cinema Gamut is bigger than the 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. To a certain extent we're future-proofing ourselves depending on what deliverables might be an option in the future."

Shooting Cinema RAW Light

Because there's no need for external recording units, the shooting process is largely the same as with a compressed codec, although Brett exposes differently in Cinema RAW Light. "With RAW, I'm looking to gather as much information as possible rather than trying to expose for a predetermined look. We decide on the look in post," he says.

"If you're working to finish in HDR, you don't want to blow out highlights. If you've got a subject with a lot of contrast, you've still got to decide where you want the shadow area to sit. Ideally with RAW, you want to lift the shadows a little and not have them sit on the very bottom, because that's where noise can come in. I use my waveform to check I haven't blown highlights in the brightest part of the image, then see if that puts a lot of important stuff into the dark area. Then I might clip the highlight a little more."

Ollie encourages filmmakers to always shoot a colour chart and to get the white balance right on every shot. "People might think getting exposure and colour right doesn't matter with RAW, but it's useful information," he says.

A key advantage of filming in Cinema RAW Light is that the file sizes are small enough to edit. Brett still generates proxy files – an exact copy of your footage in a smaller file size – but mostly uses them for clients to view on set. "I've used all three of the Canon cameras that shoot Cinema RAW Light," he says. "When the Canon EOS C200 came out, we did a proxy workflow and edited those files," says Brett. "Now I only use proxies to upload as rushes with a LUT dropped on, so clients can have a look."