Okay, here we go. First off, Pritchard, your "uncompressed.avi" files are not RAW seeing as it's a .avi, I don't think there is a free animation program that exports RAW, the cheapest out there is somewhere around $200, I think. "RAW" is a category of advanced image file types, for canon they are ".CR2" files, and there something else for Nikon, I don't know exactly what, and other companies such as RED probably have their own raw video or still files. I believe DragonFrame can export in RAW, so Jayko, you will be able to animate using RAW files. What RAW basically is is a much more advanced file (it does not mean uncompressed, that has to do with the pixel dimensions, RAW is completely unrelated the the size of the image as far as number of pixels is concerned), containing a much wider range of information about the image; they contain all of the information that the camera's sensor is able to record. The reason cameras shoot in .jpg at all, instead of just using the full capabilities of the camera, is because most people just don't need that much information when editing photos and RAW images are very very large. They allow you to adjust the white balance in editing, as well as a lot of other color, lighting, and detail aspects that I won't get into now, because there are literally books about it. Other than sports, I do all of my photography in RAW for this reason. As far as animating in RAW goes, there is no point unless you have After Affects, or a high quality editing software that can do batch processing (eg full photoshop or an equivalent, not photoshop elements). If you do have a program along these lines you will be able to do some very nice color correction. However, to reiterate, the big downside to RAW is the size of the files. 130 18 megapixel RAW files is 3 gigabytes; that's eight and a half seconds at 15 fps. You'll be able to use a smaller pixel dimension, but the point is, they're huge, so make sure you have a lot of space for your frames. Hopefully that tells you what you wanted to know; I can tell you more about what RAW allows you to do if you really want.

Last edited by backyardlegos (October 23, 2012 (10:44pm))

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@BackyardLego:

Another quite comprehensive post from you! It might be easier to follow what you're saying if you were to split up the information in multiple paragraphs.

Anyway, I actually will be using After Effects in post, but from what you're saying, it's not worth the cost to file size. Maybe only in some trick shots shooting in RAW would be a good option then.

Well then what would you suggest instead? As you probably know, I am new to the DSLR world, but I am getting to the point where I need to be knowledgeable in image exportantion (I don't want to make any stupid mistakes before shooting that will cost me afterward). Is there a certain formatt that most people shoot in? A certain file size? What exactly is .AVI then?

It's these questions that I'd like to be well versed in. Any help is appreciated!

Alright, so I comprehend the RAW situation.

Also, I realise that I had been using .AVI with Helium Frog so I get what it is now. As for .mpeg4 or .wmv, I'll have to see which one of those formats DragonFrame uses - if not both of them. The big thing is that you can extract the individual frames from them if you need to. I'm assuming you can.

As for the file size itself, what if I were to want to go more than 1920X1080? Can a Brickfilm be shot in 5184X3456? What if, say, I wanted to put it in a local theater one day? Would it be wise to shoot in that size, or would that just cause my computer to explode or something?

Also, when I go into EOS Utility to change the size, beside all the file sizes is a sort of a symbol. I'd show you a screenshot, but I'm not altogether sure how to do that and you may know what I'm talking about right off the bat. Anyway,there seems to be two different symbols that go beside the file size - one sort of looks like a staircase and the other, I guess like a ramp. Do you know what I'm talking about? Are they of any importance?

Sorry for relying on your information so much - it doesn't seem like you mind, though.

But, I mean, just to be safe, I could shoot in 5184X3456 and then worry about exporting the frames later... ?

That brings me to another question. When the picture files are stored in some format such as .AVI they take up less space, right? Well then couldn't I just store all the RAW files like that and then export them later?

I'm thinking as I'm typing right now so please forgive me if I say anything stupid.

There are just a few things I'd like to add, having done quite a bit of research on this in the past....first off, YouTube can handle video much larger than 1080p, there are films in 4k which can be watched in YouTube, just that to see them in their original size you'd need to project the video on a 24 foot screen For this same reason, and because my obsession with high quality is obsessive, I shoot at around 4k, with the hopes that I will one day be able to upload the first 4k Brickfilm to YouTube and welcome the coming era of ultra high definition. Resolution technicalities aside, the complications editing in qualities superior to the standard 1080p HD bring are many. To start off, I have encounters problems because FCP 7, my editing program of choice, chokes on files greater then 1080 px on any side, so editing the original 4k images is out of the game. The video I linked to before explains a work around to this, and I know AE and Premeire do permit editing with 4k files, as well as FCP X, I believe, but always considering that your computer can run programs editing gigantic images in real time. Okay, I just lost my train of thought and I don't think anyone really cares anymore so I'll just stop here...

Edit: Wikipedia just told me that YouTube has stopped supporting 4k as of this year so just ignore that part I guess...
Oh, and please excuse any typos, misspellings or absolutely incoherent sentences, it's late where I live and I'm too tired to reread the whole thing g'night

Last edited by Realm of the Unreel (October 29, 2012 (07:04pm))

Alright then. There has been a new developement on this matter (please excuse the double post).

I did a little experiment and shot 5 frames in RAW with Dragonframe. I then went to the files in My Documents to take a look. When I went to the appropriate folder, I saw that there were two kinds of pictures stored for every frame. One was the actual pictures themselves in Jpeg form. The dimensions of them were 5184 x 3456 and they each took up about 1 MB. The others had this icon of a sort of a flower and took up a whopping 21 MB. I'm guessing they were the actual RAW files.

Anyway I ended up deleting those second ones, just as an experiment to see if the first would stay and still work - and they did. So right now it seems I have a number of pictures with the dimentions of 5184 x 3456 that are only taking up 1 MB each, whereas that size normally takes up 4.5 MB.

...Something must be wrong here, but they seem to work like normal. Can anyone shed some light on this strange phenomenon? There has got to be a downside to it, otherwise I could just shoot all my pictures at the highest dimensions and have plenty of room to spare.