Treasured's Movie Repair Guide -- Blackmagic RAW


Blackmagic RAW is a RAW digital cinematography format, unveiled by Blackmagic in 2018.

Looking back at Blackmagic history, this is the third video format that the company proposes to its most demanding customers:

Ten years ago, the Blackmagic decks could already record to Uncompressed YUV and RGB formats, but the huge bitrates for real-time recording required very expensive storage systems.

In fall 2012, Blackmagic Design unveiled the Cinema Cameras, that allowed to record in CinemaDNG video format. Despite support by Adobe, and being an open specification, this format failed to become mainstream.

Finally, in fall 2018, Blackmagic Design present its own RAW video format, designed in-house with the ambition of becoming an industry standard:



Detection

Treasured can detect Blackmagic RAW footage in recovered files since version 4.4, and also in cards and in hard disks.
Treasured has a built-in preview function, and shows Blackmagic RAW thumbnails that help identify the content of the corrupted media..


All flavours of Blackmagic RAW (from 3:1 to 12:1), all resolutions are supported.

Failure modes

The causes of failure reported by Blackmagic RAW users are:

Repairability and Pricing

Corrupted Blackmagic RAW media can usually be repaired without major problem.
The only failure mode (see list above) that is very challenging to fix is the insufficient card writing speed. This can cause some frames to be only partially written, and those frames will have to be skipped in the recovery process.

Huge Blackmagic RAW files (hundreds of GB) are not a problem for Treasured and our remote repair system, since only around 200 MB of data need to be sent via Internet. With a small sample, we can figure out the repair technique and send the repair program to the customer.

Aero Quartet engineers develop a Repair Kit with the following features:

Blackmagic RAW repairs are only available through our 4K and Cinema plans.

Bitstream Analysis

Blackmagic RAW is an open source codec, so we can dive deep into gory details:

Free Preview of corrupt Blackmagic RAW videos with: