Essentially, with RAW you can be more creative and push and pull your footage before it starts to fall apart (i.e. That means you can adjust things like color, exposure and white balance far more aggressively - or “non-destructively” as some say because those changes to the original RAW footage are then saved in a sidecar file and not made to the image itself. The files are much larger than their JPG counterparts (for video: h.264, XAVC, etc.), but the upside is you get far more information to work with in post production. Think of it as the video equivalent of capturing RAW photos. So what’s the advantage of capturing video using Blackmagic RAW? braw clips which you can use to test in Premiere Pro (or DaVinci Resolve – which has supported BRAW from the outset). In addition to the above plugin go to Blackmagic’s RAW product page and there you’ll find some downloadable. If you’re curious to see how it all works but don’t own a Blackmagic camera you can still test it out and see how you like working with compressed RAW files (hint: it’s great). Just download it and install on your Mac or Windows PC and off you go. Here’s a link to the free Blackmagic RAW plugin (scroll down the support page and look under “Latest Downloads”).

At the IBC conference Blackmagic Design announced an updated version of its Blackmagic RAW plugin (v1.5) which now includes native support for Adobe Premiere Pro editing software. Good news for Premiere Pro users who shoot on Blackmagic cameras. UPDATE : More good news for Premiere users and I believe the industry at large (the more compressed RAW formats and choices, the better) as Adobe confirmed native ProRes support will be soon coming to a future release.

Blackmagic raw