So last weekend, I carried out an experiment shooting in RAW and in h264, mp4 that the original canon eos cameras record in.

Unfortunately, due to some technical difficulties, I could not get the camera to record in RAW for some reason. I’ve tried following the steps provided by online tutorials on youtube, forums, suggestions, tech geeks, all over the web, but to no avail, the camera would lag and stop recording after a couple of seconds after I hit the record button.

There are several factors that could lead to this problem. One being the camera’s abilities to cope with the amount of data that’s it’s taking in. In other words, it’s writing speed. From my extensive research, my Canon 650D, has the capability of writing at 40mb/s, and the SD card inserted into the camera is a class 10, 32GB, and it’s able to read/write at 80mb/s. As far as I know, the card is more than capable of doing this, however the camera might be a little on the slow side for recording in RAW especially for a FHD 1080p video. On another forum that I’ve read, it suggests to tweak the video resolution down to 480p while maintaining 24fps. This method works, however, the image is literally cropped down to accomodate the 480p, hence capturing very little visuals on an already very small cropped sensor. And, with very little luck, it would automatically stop recording after I hit the record button for a few seconds, but still longer than the previous settings.

Ultimately, I decided to just go along with recording in Canon’s stock h264 video mode. This format is well known for its notorious compression, though it being able to record in FHD 1080p, you will lose details in highlights and blacks. Another cool feature of the magic lantern interface, is that it allows you to apply zebra patterns on the screen to show you what is getting blown out in exposure. I’ve set the zebra patterns percentage to 75%. And tried to keep the zebra patterns low in the image while I was shooting various shots.

When I’ve imported the footage into Premiere, and did some editing, before moving on to grading the shots, my assumption was right about losing a lot of detail from the heavily compressed h264 mp4 format straight out of the camera. This led to some disappointment, as there was really very little room to grade before the image gets grainy.

The learning point from this whole experiment would be, if you can’t shoot in RAW and your only option is to shoot in the heavily compressed h264 mp4, your exposure has to be dead right to prevent any crushing of the highlights or blacks. It can’t hold a candle to recording in RAW, but I guess that’s the best way to get out of a dslr. Another alternative, that may incur heavy cost would be to record on an external recorder such as an Atomos Shogun, or Ninja. This fine products record in any format you desire from h264 mp4, to Apple ProRes, or RAW formats. From my experience and understanding, people tend to overlook the importance of video codecs and formats and just look at resolution to judge image quality, which is really quite a pity. The container that will be holding all your data and information is just as important as the pixels that goes into them.

The video below would illustrate how bad the compression does to the picture, even with low ISO and FHD recording.