Today’s Blackmagic Camera 6.2 update, which is free to download now, adds support for Blackmagic RAW to the Pocket Cinema Camera 4K. Blackmagic RAW offers all the benefits of RAW with the ease of use, speed and file sizes of traditional video formats. Furthermore, it features extensive metadata support, highly optimized GPU and CPU accelerated processing on the desktop and more.

Blackmagic RAW update combines the quality and benefits of RAW with the ease of use, speed and file sizes of traditional video formats. Blackmagic RAW is a smarter format that gives customers briliant images, impressive performance, cross platform support and a free developer SDK. Another of the benefits of the free update is that the user doesn’t need to spend money on extra equipment or an upgraded model.

With the Blackmagic Camera 6.2 update, customers using the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K now have the power to record images using Blackmagic RAW for the first time. This allows them to capture the best possible quality images in smaller files, giving them much longer recording times. For example, customers can record over 2 hours of full cinematic quality Blackmagic RAW footage in 4K on a single 256GB SD UHS-II card. With Blackmagic RAW 12:1 you can record 4K DCI images to an SD card, giving you cinematic quality images on incredibly small and affordable cards. In addition, Blackmagic RAW gives customers an even faster, more fluid and higher quality editing and color correction workflow in DaVinci Resolve than ever before.

After the successful update, users can choose a range of 3:1, 5:1, 8:1 and 12:1 constant bit-rate recording or between constant quality Q0 and Q5 recording. with this option the image quality or file size can be prioritised. The constant bit-rate encoding options give customers incredible images at predictable and consistent file sizes. Blackmagic Design Generation 4 Color Science is used for superior imaging that results in extremely accurate skin tones and gorgeous, lifelike colors. Blackmagic RAW images are encoded using a custom non-linear 12-bit space designed to provide the maximum amount of color data and dynamic range.

In addition, Blackmagic RAW features extensive metadata support, highly optimized GPU and CPU accelerated processing on the desktop and more. Traditional RAW codecs have large file sizes and are processor intensive, making them hard to work with.

Blackmagic RAW solves these problems, giving customers the same quality, bit depth, dynamic range and controls as RAW, but with much better performance and smaller file sizes than most popular video codecs. Once files are brought into DaVinci Resolve, additional GPU and CPU acceleration make decoding of frames incredibly fast, so customers get extremely smooth performance for editing and grading.

The update is available on Mac OS, Windows and Linux. This SDK takes care of all the work for developers, so adding support for Blackmagic RAW to third party software applications is easy and fast. Developers get access to GPU and CPU accelerated algorithms for decoding files, along with unique information about the camera’s image sensor so their applications can accurately decode and display the files.

The SDK features highly descriptive and flexible metadata options designed to support today’s modern workflows. Metadata is embedded directly in the .braw file or it can be stored in a .sidecar file. Metadata is important because it contains the Blackmagic RAW settings along with information for the slate, iris, focus, focal length, white balance and a lot more.

Blackmagic Camera 6.2 update is available today as a free download from the Blackmagic Design website.

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