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Comment by Joeboy | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately my enthusiasm for BMD is muted by the extreme non-freeness of BRAW.

What? It’s free. Perhaps you should read the history around Red as a patent troll, how they price gouge their media, etc.

It's free as in beer (for regular consumers anyway), but (unless you know different?) only available via obfuscated binaries, with no documentation of the actual file format. Correspondingly, it's the only video format I know of that I can't use industry standard open source tools like ffmpeg with.

I'm very aware of the manifold ways in which RED suck.

Edit: There's a certain irony about it. RED took a bunch of free stuff and pretended it was proprietary. BM created a proprietary format and pretended it was free.

Then I'll give you another one: ProRes RAW. Just the same as Braw, but even worse documentation.

Blackmagic sold their cameras with support for CinemaDNG advertised, and removed that support after the fact, leaving only BRAW that more or less locked you into Resolve.

This is a deal breaker for anyone using OSS processing pipeline, since 1) BRAW isn’t lossless, AFAIK and 2) it was impossible and to this day is problematic to convert BRAW to something raw development tools understand (DNG).

Luckily, I noticed that just before I bought a unit (!). Now I’m a happy owner of a Sigma fp, which not only is sold with CinemDNG support—shows that BM did have some choice, after all—but is also technically superior.

If I ever do something where their gear is required and someone leases it, sure, but I don’t see why I would give my personal money to BM after how they handled this.

As a fellow fp enjoyer, I will point out that I believe the fp's CDNG support avoids patent issues by only supporting output to USB drive. RAW video to internal media is where Nikon ran into trouble. It's also a bit of a bummer how terrible the fp's h264 encoder is, but the CDNG makes up for it, I suppose.

Not true. I record to SD card these days, the only downside is no 4K (presumably due to speed limitations), but for 1080p 60 fps it works just fine.

You must get a top spec 64GB (larger capacities are too slow, smaller capacities have not enough space to record anything). Sigma publishes a list of known compatible SD cards.

If you suffer from the shadow flicker issue, let me know. I couldn’t truly enjoy fp until I worked around that.

Oh wow, you’re absolutely right! I guess I should read my manuals more carefully. :) I’ll have to give that a shot next time.

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