Shooting Raw in Production on my Mark III

[mcpfilms]

I am considering using the ML raw full time on my 5D Mark III. Other than workflow adjustments and the additional space requirements, are there any other considerations to going all raw? Before I shell out the cash for the memory cards I want to know if I am missing something.

Also I noticed many of the raw sample videos the camera is stationary or there is very little movement in the shots is this done in purpose? Can I shoot an action movie in raw?

I shoot shorts and webisodes.

[Midphase]

No built-in audio, additional post-processing, considerably more media hard drive space, the occasional file error, inability to accurately review footage in camera, some learning curve.

[ChadMuffin]

I have used the 5D3 ML RAW in the field before. Midphase makes great points. If you are worried about capturing moments that cannot be redone, I would not recommend shooting RAW. If I had to guess, I get a stopped recording about 1 in 50 shots. If you have a ton of footage, expect at least a day just to convert footage to a usable format. So, if time is of an essence, I wouldn't shoot RAW either. If you aren't familiar with using proxies and have a not so powerful computer, you will be ripping your hair out with load times. I would recommend getting cards at least 64 GB, that is about 10 min of footage. I would also look into your workflow in the field with transferring data to an external hard drive or the alike. You need to transfer things fast. USB 2.0 will be very slow and you will be waiting on your cards to dump to your storage device. USB 3.0 will transfer 64 GB in about 10 min, which is time efficient. All of this can be worth the quality you get but, you don't need to shoot RAW all the time, if it is a controlled scene, you can get by without shooting RAW and with proper editing, pixel peepers would have trouble telling with YouTube compression. Nonetheless, practice, test, research and come up with an efficient workflow before you get in too deep. MLV is looking promising, I would look into it and maybe wait for it to be finalized.

[bnvm]

Can I shoot an action movie in raw?

I just shot a little short with my daugher taking a walk. Lots of running, jumping, chasing her with a steady cam, etc... so action is definitely no problem for raw. For me the biggest issue with raw was the post process end of it all. Raw requires post processing and I think it requires color correction as well even with perfect exposure out at the scene. At this point there is no audio and it has to be synced up manually. It is a massive amount of data to deal with so everything just moves along much slower. In the end what would have taken me a day using h264 probably took a week with raw, but the raw looks soo much better and has soo much more latitude. Some of the benefits of raw may be lost on youtube though.

Also this is alpha software so you could still get corrupt frames, pink frames, dropped frames etc... Sometimes a shot will not write as quickly as the others and it will buffer out early. The camera doesn't know when it is about to run out of memory on the card so you can get a corrupt recording if that happens. Lots of times most of the recording can be recovered but not always, and the occasional WTF moment.

To put it another way raw video is like a supermodel, it's great to look at but can be a bitch to work with.