Canon RAW Light is a RAW digital cinematography format, unveiled by Canon in 2017 on new C200 camera.
This video codec intends to provide the flexibility of a RAW format in terms of color grading and dynamic range, while keeping storage and transfer demands reasonable.
Compared to Canon Cinema RAW codec introduced in 2013 on then flagship C500 camera, the new RAW Light format addresses the issues that have prevented its successor from taking off:
- Same quality, at up to one fifth of the size, enabling use of high-speed CFast 2.0 cards for 4K recording
- Use of .CRM file container for video and audio, much more workflow-friendly that previous single-file-per-frame .rmf storage
- Format supported from day one by leading NLE vendors (Final Cut, DaVinci ...)

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

Canon Cinema C200, first camera to record in Canon RAW Light format
All flavours of Canon RAW Light (12bit and 10bit), and all resolutions are supported.
Failure modes
The causes of failure reported by Canon RAW Light users are:
- Device was turned off during recording (clip not finalized)
- Accidental deletion or formatting of CFast card
- Card filled up and stopped recording. It didn't finish wrapping the CRM file
- Drive or card can't keep up writing at the required bitrate
Repairability and Pricing
Corrupted Canon RAW Light media can usually be repaired without major problem.
Huge CRM 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:
- Repaired footage has same quality as originally recorded
- Repaired footage is compatible with edition and post-production workflows
Canon RAW Light repairs are only available through our 4K and Cinema plans.
Bitstream Analysis
Little is known about the internals of Canon RAW Light encoding. Although Canon provides a SDK to developers, the codec remains proprietary.
- Footage is stored in .CRM, which are modelled on QuickTime .mov containers: One track for Canon RAW Light video, one or several tracks for audio, one track for timecode, and a metadata track
- Codec fourccs is 'CRAW'
- Video frame header contains a pyramidal structure of 12 bytes atoms:
0000: FF 01 00 08 00 28 1E B0 00 00 00 00 FF01 is top-level 000C: FF 02 00 08 00 0E 69 28 08 00 00 00 FF02 is secondary level (4 instances) 0018: FF 03 00 08 00 00 66 18 00 20 00 01 FF03 is tertiary level (10 instances) 0024: FF 03 00 08 00 00 52 00 10 20 00 07 0030: FF 03 00 08 00 00 4E 90 20 20 00 03 003C: FF 03 00 08 00 00 4E 98 30 20 00 03 0048: FF 03 00 08 00 01 0D 78 48 20 00 06 0054: FF 03 00 08 00 01 12 08 58 20 00 01 0060: FF 03 00 08 00 01 08 A8 68 20 00 03 006C: FF 03 00 08 00 03 7D 00 78 20 00 04 0078: FF 03 00 08 00 03 A9 30 88 20 00 04 0084: FF 03 00 08 00 02 C5 90 98 70 00 01 0090: FF 02 00 08 00 0A 0B B0 18 00 00 00 FF02 (second instance) ......... 10 more FF03 instances ........ 0114: FF 02 00 08 00 06 20 48 20 00 00 00 FF02 (third instance) ......... 10 more FF03 instances ........ 0198: FF 02 00 08 00 09 89 90 38 00 00 00 FF02 (fourth and last instance) ......... 10 more FF03 instances ........ 021C: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 20 00 3B End of pyramid after 1xFF01, 4xFF02, 40xFF03 0228: 40 9D D6 5D E0 00 23 9D 00 E3 F6 24 Payload of first of 40 slices