A serious consideration for BRAW Footage

Mohammed_Anis wrote on 8/14/2020, 7:57 AM

No, I don't own a black magic camera. No, I'm not desperate to have VEGAS PRO incorporate it and I would prefer the devs focus on the current roadmap then commit to a sudden switcheroo to accomodate braw and neglect other much needed fundamentals.

I do, however, acknowledge that the market is growing with new and upcoming entrepreneurs who pick up video marketing or artists who decide to pick up music video making on their own as an efficient solution for their career. Their research will more often then not yield black magic, for better or worse.

Unfortunately, you can't expect a market to be rational, especially when its enthusiasts that are generating considerable sales.

That being said, I looked into BRAW and apparently, its SDK is actually quite accessible.

There are independent programmers out there that have made BRAW Studio, a plugin which works with Premiere Pro.

As a person who barely understands the nuances of coding, I am tempted to ask - how difficult would it be to implement a plugin to make this bridge, if a native BRAW editing workflow is still far down the roadmap.

Comments

VEGASDerek wrote on 8/14/2020, 10:58 AM

This is high on our priority list. We do not have a timetable for when we will be able to implement it, but BRAW is definitely on our radar.

vegemite wrote on 8/14/2020, 8:09 PM

I do have a Blackmagic camera and, like many thousands of people around the world shoot Braw (because the pictures are so beautiful). I was disappointed to find that it was not included in Vegas 18, especially as Blackmagic gives away the coding (I think) free. Please do not remove it from your priority list, as I would much prefer to edit my material in Vegas.

Former user wrote on 8/14/2020, 8:50 PM

BRAW was designed around having GPU compute to a lot of the decoding/reading work, massively reducing the power requirements placed on CPU, and it works amazingly well on Resolve, but last I checked with Premiere Pro It still mostly uses CPU and not the cpu/gpu(compute) mix the way it's supposed to. And for that reason it's actually much slower than other codecs.

So it seems implementing the GPU side of the read/decode is quite difficult, but a mostly CPU decoding version easier, but not really something you want, although I"M sure you'd most likely like that over nothing. To show how well BRAW can work, this is on Resolve on a slow 4 core I7 playing a 4K50P file at full resolution playback. buttery smooth full 50fps playback and only 56% CPU, although you also see the massive amount of GPU COMPUTE it requires, and if it can't access that, it then punishes the cpu extremely hard. If Adobe can't do it right I don't think Magix can either

Mohammed_Anis wrote on 8/15/2020, 12:18 AM

BRAW was designed around having GPU compute to a lot of the decoding/reading work, massively reducing the power requirements placed on CPU, and it works amazingly well on Resolve, but last I checked with Premiere Pro It still mostly uses CPU and not the cpu/gpu(compute) mix the way it's supposed to. And for that reason it's actually much slower than other codecs.

So it seems implementing the GPU side of the read/decode is quite difficult, but a mostly CPU decoding version easier, but not really something you want, although I"M sure you'd most likely like that over nothing. To show how well BRAW can work, this is on Resolve on a slow 4 core I7 playing a 4K50P file at full resolution playback. buttery smooth full 50fps playback and only 56% CPU, although you also see the massive amount of GPU COMPUTE it requires, and if it can't access that, it then punishes the cpu extremely hard. If Adobe can't do it right I don't think Magix can either

But Adobe's GPU utilization doesn't really favor mainstream commercial GPUS. When I say mainstream, I mean 2080tis and such, when compared to Resolve. Its alot to do more with them being so big, they expect manufacturers to optimize their gpus for them rather then the reverse. (Quadro Series)

Also, it depends on the engine under the hood and not necessarily the team size.

FXhome barely has over 8 developers, as far as I'm aware. Yet, their products (which are VEGAS IMAGE and VEGAS Effects) are the strongest in terms of using GPU processing power. The short explanation is that it uses algorithms that are usually found in gaming, which explains why high tier cards like the Quadro series offer lesser performance.

Fundamentally, coding ANYTHING is easy. This much I know. Adobe certainly isn't stupid and inept that it cant make BRAW work the way it does - the bigger question is, how well does this integrate with the architecture in place?

I'd argue that VEGAS has a better shot, simply because the GPU Acceleration/Decoding model is fairly new.

Former user wrote on 8/15/2020, 12:47 AM

Fundamentally, coding ANYTHING is easy. This much I know. Adobe certainly isn't stupid and inept that it cant make BRAW work the way it does - the bigger question is, how well does this integrate with the architecture in place?

I'd argue that VEGAS has a better shot, simply because the GPU Acceleration/Decoding model is fairly new.

There's also political reasons. Apple Final cut Pro doesn't support BRAW, Is it because they want ProRes Raw to succeed instead. For years people with apple products could not watch Youtube videos above 1080P resolution because Apple refused to turn on VP9 gpu decoding. It sounds like maybe you're saying something similar with Adobe , they don't want BRAW to have success, they are also behind ProRes Raw

We do know Apple allows Prores encoding on Adobe products but not on Davinci Resolve. If it is political, and not technical , then Magix doesn't have a 'dog in the fight' (I think expression) so maybe right

fr0sty wrote on 8/15/2020, 6:43 PM

It's worth noting that the VEGAS team has confirmed that ProRes RAW support is in the works, pending apple's approval process. I'd imagine BRAW is being investigated as well.