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:
- Format is open source and cross-platform. Blackmagic provides a SDK for developers and expects camera and software vendors to step in.
- Codec is designed for multi-core CPUs, for GPU-acceleration, with the goal of real-time processing on inexpensive PCs.
- Codec capable for acquisition, post-production and finishing
- Profiles ranging from 12:1 (baseline quality) to 3:1 (high quality), and constant quality profiles from Q5 to Q0, with bitrates enabling use of existing cards and disks
- Supported from day one by flagship camera URSA Mini Pro

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:
- Device was turned off during recording (clip not finalized)
- Accidental deletion or formatting
- Drive or card filled up and stopped recording. It didn't finish wrapping the .braw file
- Drive or card can't keep up writing at the required bitrate
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:
- Repaired footage has same quality as originally recorded
- Repaired footage is compatible with edition and post-production workflows
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:
- Footage is stored in .braw containers, which are modelled on QuickTime .mov containers: One track for Blackmagic RAW video, one track for audio, one track for timecode, and a metadata atom
- Codec fourccs is 'brlt'
- Frame header contains some metadata atoms:
0000: 00 00 01 00 62 6d 64 66 length of header 0x100, 'bmdf' marker followed by atoms srte, shut, innd, gain, aptr, expo, fcln, dsnc, wkel, wtin, isoe
0100: 62 72 61 77 00 11 30 00 01 08 08 1F 12 20 07 A0 (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (1) 'braw' marker (2) picture length in bytes (32 bits) (3) columns and rows (here: 8 and 31) (4) picture width (16 bits) (5) picture height (16 bits) 0110: 00 40 00 04 00 10 01 0E 02 0C 03 0A 04 81 02 DE (6) (6) height of slice in pixels (16 bits) 0140: 02 40 02 40 02 40 02 40 02 40 02 40 02 50 02 50 (7) (7) Eight slice widths (16 bits each) Sum of the widths is picture width. 0180: 00 00 12 00 00 00 27 40 00 00 38 18 00 00 48 E0 0190: 00 00 59 E0 00 00 6A E8 00 00 7B C8 00 00 8C 98 (8) (8) Offset of 7th slice (32 bits) The table contains 248 offsets (8 columns x 31 rows), one per slice. Offsets are counted from 'braw' position, and indicate where the slice data is stored