GRADE EFFECTS IN DAVINCI RESOLVE

InCamera take advantage of Blackmagic's BRAW format to grade the flame and smoke elements for their Second World War bomber scene

We shot a lot of fire and smoke elements for our setups, so to isolate the takes that we liked and wanted to use, we first do a colour correction or grade on our element footage. This gives us the opportunity to prepare the elements so they are already suitable for overlaying our miniature shots within Fusion.

During this process, we’ll set the black level to a custom amount to allow just the areas of fire and smoke to be visible. Likewise, we’ll be adding an animated/keyframed mask to isolate the area of interest, as well as remove any unwanted areas of the sides of the frame.

We shot our elements with the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K, using their own RAW video format. BRAW, as it’s known, was designed as an alternative to the ubiquitous CinemaDNG (CDNG) and Apple’s ProRes RAW formats, but holds considerable advantages over both of those.

CDNG is essentially an image sequence, with the footage made up of a series of high-resolution stills. This means enormous file sizes and therefore storage requirements. It also adds extra steps to post workflows as transcoding is required before exporting to your edit.

Blackmagic’s BRAW format avoids this as footage is treated as a regular video file. It’s also incredibly efficient in terms of quality to bitrate, resulting in the same quality, bit depth, dynamic range and controls as RAW, but with smaller file sizes.