How to edit ProRes RAW in DaVinci Resolve — including making mezzanine files for a Cloud workflow
Harry 
title
Hey there, I'm PhotoJoseph and this is the final
video in a four-part series sponsored by both OWC and Atomos where I shot a microdoc slash interview
of a new local bar-cafe called BrewPub. I shot the interview on the Lumix GH7 in ProRes RAW
internally using the super fast OWC media and the new Atomos Shinobi II monitor with touch camera
control. The other three videos in this series are the interview itself, a deep dive into the OWC
media and a complete tour of the Atomos Shinobi II. This final video is to show you how you can
work with ProRes RAW media in DaVinci Resolve, which of course doesn't support ProRes RAW. This
video is in two parts.
The first part is quick and easy; how to convert ProRes RAW to a format
that Resolve can edit from. That'll only take a couple of minutes to show. The second and much
more complicated part is how to use that converted media in a DaVinci Resolve cloud remote workflow.
Regular viewers of the channel will know that I'm a big fan and user of the BMD cloud workflow and
even did a really extensive video on that last year.
This ProRes RAW solution somewhat breaks
the cloud workflow. So I'm going to show you how to work around that. But first, let's just get
some ProRes RAW into Resolve. First let's just take a look at the ProRes RAW media. If I take one
of these shots, open it up in QuickTime Player, we can see that this is in fact ProRes RAW.
I'll do a get info on here and there we go, Apple ProRes RAW. Alright, so first thing's
first, let's take a look at what happens if you try to import ProRes RAW into DaVinci Resolve.
I'll go over here to my external hard drive, my OWC Express, and there's my ProRes RAW footage
and you'll see here that it shows up just as audio because all that Resolve will read is the audio
file from that.
If I import it, that's all I'm going to get is audio files. So there is no way to
bring the ProRes RAW video in without converting it first. So the tool that we use to convert it
is called RAW Converter. It's actually free to download the app and you have to buy individual
modules for the cameras that you're going to be working with. So let's go ahead and get the app
first. I'll open up the App Store and search for "RAW Converter" and here it is. Within RAW
Converter, if you scroll through the information, click on More, you'll see a complete list of
all the cameras that are supported.
And I'll tell you from experience that if you shoot with a
camera that is not yet supported by RAW Converter, reach out to the company. They will likely ask you
for some sample files and then they can actually build a conversion so that you can purchase that
for yourself. Anyway, let's get back to it. I of course already have this installed so let's go
ahead and open up RAW Converter. Now first thing I want to show you is what happens if you add a file
that you don't have support for. I'll go ahead and bring this one in from the Lumix S5 Mark II and
you can see that it says that it's missing but that 300 frames can be converted. So that's a nice
thing. You can actually do a trial conversion up to 300 frames of a file from any camera that they
support before you purchase the module. Then once you're ready to buy it, you can see the modules
are there.
The modules are typically either 75 or 80 dollars. Let's go ahead and bring in all
the footage that I need. Here's my ProRes RAW shot on the GH7. I'll just drag all that in. And
now you can see these all have the OK License. Tap on any one of these to preview the file. From here
you can play it, scrub through it, review what it is and so on. At this point all you need to do
is choose your quality. The quality range goes from no compression up to a 7:1 compression. If
you look on their website, they'll explain these different compression levels and they'll also
tell you what I'm going to tell you right now; it's worth trying the different compression
levels to see if you really need a higher or highest quality. There's a huge difference in the
sizes between the different ratios so there's no reason to make a bigger file if you don't actually
need it. What I would encourage you to do is to actually run some tests on your project, run them
at the different compression levels and see if you can even tell the difference and see at what point
it's worth not going any bigger.
So anyway, once again we choose the compression format. I think
I did 5 to 1 for mine. You choose a destination folder and off you go. Just click the convert
button and it'll do its thing. Here's a chart showing comparisons of my own media, showing how
long it took to convert various files into various file formats and of course their final sizes just
so you can get an idea of what that looks like. I've already converted all my files so let's go
ahead and have a look at what these come out like. You're converting them to CinemaDNG and you'll
notice here instead of video files you now have folders and inside of each folder there's a series
of DNG files. We'll look at it by list and you can see that there's going to be a lot of them.
There
is a DNG for every single frame of video. That's how the CinemaDNG format works. And if we go to
the very bottom of this list you'll see that there is in fact an audio file. There it is. So you do
get the audio file from your ProRes RAW footage. You can even shoot 32-bit float internal audio
on the Lumix GH7 and this tool will extract the 32-bit float file. Now when I shot this project
they didn't support that yet so I didn't do this project in float but that support is now there.
Now let's get some of this CinemaDNG media into Resolve.
If I go to the folder here on my drive
there's all the folders that we just saw and if I take this entire CinemaDNG folder and drag it
into Resolve then what's going to happen is we're going to actually have a bin here for every clip
which is pretty tedious because you probably don't want every single clip inside of its own bin. So
instead of doing it that way go back up here in the media tab and just select all of the folders
themselves not that top level folder and then when you drag that in now they're going to each come
in as individual video files and you don't have to have the extra bins.
As you can see in here as we
look at each one of these files the file name is the name that it was before but then there's this
extra part of the name here that shows how many frames it is. So it's frame 0 up through frame 59…
up through frame 14,135 and so on and of course the .DNG at the end. Now that we've converted
ProRes RAW to CinemaDNG let's take a look at what RAW capabilities we actually do have inside of
DaVinci Resolve. I'll sort these by name and grab all of these clips and add them to a timeline.
Now let's jump over to the Color room and see what we've got. So of course there is the video clip we
were just looking at. To edit the RAW metadata you simply go to the Camera RAW tab and you'll see
here the options that we have. Now by default you're not going to have access to any adjustments
and that's because we are decoding using the Project Settings.
So let's talk for a moment about
the difference between the setups here. If I go to Project Settings then everything that is set
up in the Project Settings under the Camera RAW tab is what we're going to be looking at here.
Now this interface I will admit is a little bit confusing. If I click on each one of these, let's
say I set this to ARRI, you might naturally think that I am now going to try and decode all these
RAW files as if they were ARRI or if I was to go back in here and switch this to say Nikon RAW
then suddenly I would be trying to convert all these using Nikon RAW.
That's not the case. This
is just a pretty bad interface to be honest. What this actually means is when you choose each one
of those RAW settings you are then changing the settings underneath it for those RAW profiles.
Watch. If I go to ARRI and I change absolutely anything in here it's not going to make a single
difference to these clips because these aren't ARRI clips. What I would do is go over here and go
to Cinema DNG, and then make changes. So if I was to change something in here, let's go to a Project
Settings here and just like say Highlights, change the shadows and so on in here, and then I
switch this over to ARRI and I do the same here. Let's go to Project Settings, make some changes.
These settings here are specific to ARRI. When I go back to my CinemaDNG there's the settings
for that. So these settings here are specific to the RAW profile chosen at the top not necessarily
saying that every RAW clip in here is going to get converted with that RAW profile settings.
Again,
just a bad interface. I'll go ahead and revert this and if you wanted to you could go in and
change this to Project and then make changes for every file that comes in. So for example, I could
take the exposure for every shot and automatically under expose it. So we'll go ahead sne set this
to 2.03 we see that that is now going to be the default and as soon as I click Save you're
going to see every clip on here get darker. So now they're all under exposed by those couple of
stops. I can override that though by simply going into the Camera RAW settings and saying Decode
using Clip Settings and now each clip has its individual settings. All the settings that we saw
before in the Project level are now available at the clip level. So from here I could say, "Oh, you
know this one wasn't really two stops under, that was only one stop under", so I'll fix that here.
But you saw that it had that same 2.03 exposure drop. Now there's one adjustment here that you
might notice appears to be missing and that is ISO.
ISO is not missing. ISO doesn't exist. ISO is
a construct. Let me explain this. Camera sensors have what's called a base ISO. This is what the
sensor is tuned to. Then the manufacturer might say that base ISO is 640, might say it's 5000,
whatever they choose a number to go along with the sensitivity that they've dialed in. When you
go above or below that ISO, you're not changing the ISO, you're just gaining the sensor up or
down making it essentially brighter or darker. It's largely the same as under or over exposing
it.
So what you have here in DaVinci Resolve as far as RAW decode goes with non-Blackmagic files
is no ISO slider but you have an exposure slider which is the same thing. So the fact that you
don't have ISO doesn't matter. If you're shooting with Blackmagic cameras, then you will see an
ISO slider and that's because they're Blackmagic cameras on the Blackmagic software. They have
control over that ecosystem.
They're doing it their way. But here you're not losing anything.
You have the same power and the same control even with the CineDNG files shot on the Lumix GH7. And
at this point, that's all you need to know to work with ProRes RAW footage in DaVinci Resolve. Just
get that RAW Converter app, purchase the module for whatever camera you're working with, convert
to CinemaDNG, import, and off you go. So the next part of this is where things get complicated. If
you're not working with the DaVinci Resolve cloud workflow, then this doesn't matter unless for any
reason you would rather not have the RAW files on your timeline until the very end, in which case,
keep watching. To understand the problem, first I need to explain how Resolve's cloud workflow
works.
There's two components to a cloud workflow, or any workflow really; the Resolve project itself
and the media. When you work in a Resolve cloud workflow, the project lives in the Blackmagic
Cloud. This is a paid service, but it's only five bucks a month per library and a library can
have virtually unlimited projects. Then any editor anywhere in the world — whom you grant access
to — can work on your project. The media is handled separately. You could FedEx a drive full
of media to your editor or upload it to any cloud service for them to download. However you want
to get it to them; that's up to you. But if you want an easy, seamless back and forth workflow
where the editor automatically gets the media they need, you can use either Dropbox, Google
Drive, or now Blackmagic's own cloud storage, which I have to say is the smoothest workflow
and the path of least resistance. As long as you're only syncing proxy media, then it's really
affordable to have enough cloud storage to have the media from several projects online at once.
So what's the problem? Well, think about the media you use in a video project.
You have your
video of course, shot to ProRes, HEVC, H.264, whatever. These are your big originals. These
you can make proxies of and upload the compressed lower resolution proxy versions of easily. But not
all media can be proxied. Audio files, graphics, photos, and so-on don't get a proxy file. The good
news is that Resolve understands the difference between a proxiable and a non-proxiable file
and automatically uploads all of your original audio files, graphics files, photos, and so on to
the cloud. Since they're relatively small, this works out great. The bad news is that these fancy
CinemaDNG image sequences that we just made from our ProRes RAW originals are just DNG image files.
Even though Resolve knows when importing them that these DNG image sequences are meant to be treated
like a video file, the cloud and proxy engine does not. This in my opinion is a bug and I've already
filed it with Blackmagic.
But until they resolve this, as it stands as a Resolve 19, when you
import a DNG image sequence into a cloud project, all of those original DNG files will get uploaded,
even though you've told Resolve to only upload proxy files. Resolve doesn't even automatically
make a proxy file from these DNG sequences, although you can force it to make one and that
proxy will be uploaded, but so will all the original DNG files. So the solution is to make an
interim original file to use for the cloud editing workflow, then swap that out towards the end of
the project with the DNG sequences. This interim file is called a Mezzanine file, or it could also
be called a Digital Intermediary, or DI, although technically I think DI really refers to a workflow
that started in film.
When working with digital RAW files as we are and making an interim high
quality compressed file to do most of the editing from, that's called a mezzanine file. Whatever
you call it and for whatever reason you use it, the mezzanine file acts as a stand-in for the
RAW files where working in RAW isn't convenient or possible as in our cloud workflow. So here's
the order of events. First you make the mezzanine files, probably ProRes. Import those ProRes files
to your cloud project and edit like normal. You'll have access to the ProRes mezzanine temporary
originals and your remote editor will have access to the proxies that Resolve makes from those
ProRes files just like in any cloud workflow. When you're ready to finish the project, move it out of
the cloud, then replace the ProRes files with the RAW files through a process called conform.
It's
pretty straightforward. So let's get started. I'm going to start by creating a new cloud project and
when you're creating a new cloud project, you have to choose a location for your project media. So
I'm just going to put this on my external drive here and then under these options, you'll see you
have the choice to share the project with multiple users, so allowing multiple simultaneous users or
set it to single user, usually want it on multiple simultaneous. And then the important part here,
synchronize storage with Blackmagic Cloud. You can not sync the media, you can sync only the proxies
or you can sync the proxies and the originals. Of course, what we want to do is sync just the
proxies. If we sync the proxies and the originals, then no matter what we put in here, everything
goes to the cloud and that's going to take up a lot of space. But if we only want the proxies,
then we choose proxies only. That's all I need to do. Hit Create and now I've got my new project.
Let's start by adding one of the CinemaDNG files so you can see what happens if we do add an actual
DNG.
I've got one here that I've labeled as small, so it's a nice small one. Let's go ahead and drop
that in. As we saw before, it does get recognized as an image sequence and there is the video clip.
However, if I look down at my cloud settings, you'll see that it is currently uploading
every single DNG. So as you might imagine, with a big project, this could fill up your
cloud storage space very, very quickly. As I also mentioned before, you don't automatically
get a proxy file, but that is easy to fix. You can just right click on the video clip and choose
Generate Proxy Media. At that point, it'll go ahead and render out that proxy file for you. And
if we check the status, we'll see that the proxy is getting uploaded as well. There it goes, proxy
uploaded.
So that's happening. And then over here, we can see that we have full cloud sync. So
everything has now been synced to the cloud. But of course, this is exactly what we don't want
to have happen. All right, I'm going to go ahead and get rid of this video clip here. And let's
get out of Resolve for a moment and open Apple's Compressor.
Compressor is the tool that I'm going
to use to create these mezzanine files. Remember, we need something that will read the ProRes RAW
files. Since Resolve won't, we can't use Resolve to create these mezzanine files. Enter Compressor.
I'll go ahead and take all of my ProRes RAW files, select those, drag them into Compressor. And
from here, you can choose what format you want. If you want a really high quality image at this
point, then go ahead and do a ProRes 422 HQ. If you really are just using this for scratch and
you're definitely going to replace it later, then save some space. Just go for 422 LT. That
totally depends on you and your workflow and what you intend to do with these files.
For example,
if you're doing a bunch of green screen keying, then you're probably going to want to have
that highest quality file. For general editing, just use the LT. Go ahead and drag that preset in.
It'll apply to all of them. Choose a source where you want them to go. I'm going to go ahead and
put this into a new folder on my OWC Express 1M2 drive. We'll just call this ProRes files and click
Choose. You'll notice that it has the Apple ProRes 422 LT name automatically appended to it. That's
convenient, but it actually doesn't matter. You can have these files named whatever you want.
When
it comes to conforming the project back to the RAW files, to the CinemaDNG files, all that actually
matters is the timecode. And the timecode is going to be maintained throughout this entire project.
Once you're ready to go, just click on Start Batch and that will render away. Of course, I've already
got this done. So if we go back to my OWC drive, you'll see that I have this ProRes 422 LT folder
that's got all my media in it. So this is the media that I want to bring into Resolve and edit
from. So let's go back to Resolve. There's my 422 LT media. I'll just go ahead and import all
of that, and now we have all of those video files ready to work from. You can also see that
Resolve is automatically generating the proxies and syncing those to the cloud already. And once
again, those are of course only going to be the proxy files.
In fact, if we check this out right
now, you can see that it is uploading the proxies for each of these, but not the originals. Great.
So now let's go ahead and do a basic edit. I'm just going to grab a few random clips in here so
we have a bit of variety and drag those onto the timeline. And we're just going to pretend that
this is edited. I'm going to drag a few pieces around in here just to have something different.
And away we go. So let's just say for the sake of the demo that this is now our completed
finished project. This is of course edited with that ProRes 422 LT or in the case of our
remote editor, they were using the proxy files, but I back home have access to that ProRes 422
LT footage.
But now I'm ready to conform this. I want to bring this back to my RAW files. So
here's how this works. Step one is to get the project out of the cloud library because if you
leave it here and you do the conform process, immediately all those DNG files are going to
start to upload. So that's step one. Here's how we do it. Go into the Project Manager, choose
your new project, and then this button here is the "Copy Project to…" button. Click on that and
choose where you want to copy it to. In our case, it's going to go local and I'm going to put it in
my resolve library 2024.
Click copy and it copies that project over. Once that's done, make sure you
actually do switch back over to the local library, and there's the project. One of the extra benefits
you get from copying the project over is that you now have a backup. You still have that one in
the cloud and we're going to be working on the one that's local. So if somehow you mess this up,
you can easily go back to the one in the cloud. You could also do another backup from here if you
wanted to. I'll open up that local project and to reconform a project, there's a couple steps I have
to do. First, I need to select all of the media on the timeline or at least all the media that you
want to reconform. So this is actually important. If you were mixing this with media that is not
going to be reconformed, say you've got other file projects in here, then you only want to select the
files that you are going to replace. I don't think it would really matter if you selected everything
because it's not going to replace a file that it can't find a match for, but to be safe, I
would say try to select just the media that you actually want to replace at this point.
We're
going to right click on the clips in the timeline and choose the option Conform Lock Enabled. You
can see that it is currently selected. So if I click it now and look at it again, that is now
deselected; so Conform Lock is not enabled. Now I'm going to import the original DNG media. So
here's my CinemaDNG. Let's go ahead and create a new bin for this called "RAW files" and I'm
going to select all of these, drag them in, and now there's all my CinemaDNG files. Ever
since we're not in a cloud project anymore, these files aren't being uploaded. Now let's go
back to that timeline, right click the timeline, go to the timeline's menu and choose Reconform
From Bins. Going through the choices in here, it says "Attempt to reconform > All Clips, or
Selected Clips — we're going to go ahead and leave it at all clips. "Set clips to Conform Lock
Enabled after conform"; that's a good idea. That just relocks the clips once they've been conformed
and then you choose where it's going to conform from.
You don't want to have everything selected.
You want just your raw files bin selected. Then, the conform options. How is it going to conform?
There's a lot of different options in here that you can match to, but the only thing that we
need is timecode. Click OK and that's it. There is no confirmation. It just happens. Now, if
I open up this timeline, we'll see that we're actually looking at the raw media. Now, how do
we know we're looking at the raw media? Well, first of all, we can see here on the timeline
that the file names have the .DNG sequence. So that's a pretty good indicator right there. But
of course, we can also go into the color room. Notice that we do have access to Camera Raw and
sure enough, there's our Camera Raw settings and we can change these however we like. So that's
it. It really is pretty straightforward. This whole conform workflow is fantastic. It's designed
for the film industry, right? For people working on really big fancy projects, this is just
a YouTube video, but I shot it in a format that Resolve does not support, converted
it to a file format that Resolve supports, the CinemaDNG, but kind of gets in the way of
my cloud workflow.
So created this intermediary file called a mezzanine file and that's what we're
working with. So that's all there is to it. Pretty straightforward and a pretty cool way to work with
ProRes RAW footage inside of Resolve. Let me know what you think and if you have any better ideas
of how this could be improved even more, please let me know in the comments. I'm always anxious to
hear from the community how I can be doing things even better than I've shown you here.
Take care
of yourselves. We'll see you in the next video..
