I was recently on set with a Phantom Tech who told me that he does all his Raw Phantom and Raw Alexa transcoding on his iMac...

I was surprised because I know some Red DITs who have to purchase a very expensive graphics card,Red Rocket, in order to transcode and debayer their raw footage, otherwise it would take days...

So what's the difference, isn't raw footage all the same? Shouldn't 1TB of raw footage from a Red camera take just as long to transcode as 1TB of raw footage form a phantom or Alexa?

Also, why does the Red camera need a special graphics card to do so, yet not the Alexa or Phantom?



Dezzy

No RAW format needs special hardware for debayering - all can be done in software, in real-time if the correct software and PC/Mac system is used.

However, not all RAW debayering is the same!

The quality of the final image can very enormously from system to system...
You have to check and re-check any debayering system to make sure it is the best, and is not introducing unwanted artefacts, as many do - including some of the better known systems!

It has been proven many times that debayering RED via the Red Rocket card is not as good as the best software debayering for example.

And then some software systems are very slow at debayering, whole others are very fast (real-time) and still the highest quality.

Steve

So what are these software debayering systems? Which ones are reputable?

That's a more difficult question... We use Mistika as it has proven to have the best debayering capabilities of any system we have tested - and all real-time.

But, there are others out there.