EditReady now supports Canon RAW and the new ARRI ALEXA 35 camera

David Shapton -

July's 22.3 release adds the popular Canon Cinema RAW Light format as well as support for ARRI's new ALEXA 35 camera

A quick recap on RAW

RAW video retains the complete information from a camera's sensor. But there's a price to pay: huge files, complicated processing even to see the images, and even more processing to view the full dynamic range in a colorspace that looks right.

If you've got the time and money for an end-to-end RAW workflow, it's a good option. But in the real world of tight budgets and deadlines, you'll want to convert camera RAW footage into a more efficient, edit-friendly "mezzanine" format, also  known as proxies (See our Explainer on Mezzanines). EditReady takes you through the process smoothly and efficiently, giving you great-looking, easily usable video files to edit and grade with.


Our focus this year has been on adding comprehensive RAW support to EditReady's already long list of supported formats, and our latest arrival is Canon RAW. Also, we've expanded our existing ARRI support with the new ALEXA 35 and considerably sped up our Blackmagic RAW transcoding.

Canon RAW (CRM)

Canon's camera range includes "traditional" cinema cameras like the C200, C300 Mk 3, and the C500 to the "DSLR shaped" mirrorless R5 and R5 C, which can capture in 8K. That extensive line of cameras means that many filmmakers have been calling for EditReady to add support for Canon RAW, recognizable as .CRM files. That's now done, and we think it will be a big deal for the Canon filmmaking community.

Colloquially known as Canon RAW, its actual name is Canon Cinema RAW Light - but there's nothing light about it in any way, except that it reduces the bulk of uncompressed RAW files by 60% - 80% without significant visual quality degradation. The format has proved popular amongst commercial filmmakers and anyone whose budget doesn't stretch to the expensive "big name" cameras and likewise expensive storage arrays that you'd need for less compressible formats.

As ever, EditReady is obsessive about quality and converts Canon RAW to a format of your choice with Canon's own color science to preserve maximum accuracy and authenticity.

ARRIRAW

ARRI, the century-old (!) cinema camera company, is as much a staple part of a movie maker's vocabulary as Panavision and Technicolor. ARRI has been a mainstay of digital filmmaking since the release of its ALEXA camera twelve years ago. Sporting the by now legendary ALEV sensor, the ALEXA and its derivatives showed that digital could look like film, even in previously "difficult" areas like highlights and skin tones. But of course ARRI doesn't have a monopoly in the digital cinema space and has its peers amongst brands like Sony, RED, Blackmagic, and Canon.

However, with the recent arrival of the ALEXA 35, ARRI upped the ante. There is now a smaller camera with a brand new sensor capable of an eyebrow-raising 17 stops of dynamic range. That makes it a strong candidate for HDR production - although earlier ALEXAs also have a pretty respectable dynamic range. But what's completely new is 4K resolution in a 35mm sensor - a first for ARRI, which, until now, has not had a native single 4K sensor.

With HDR workflows, getting feedback from post to the set as quickly as possible is essential to ensure the final look matches the original artistic intent. EditReady lets you do this quickly and cleverly - always making sure that your results look terrific, even if you've left the settings to "default", by using ARRI's own color science to produce accurate colors and HDR. On top of that, EditReady now also supports ARRI's new LogC4 and ARRI Wide Gamut 4 color science.

EditReady converts ARRI RAW files into an edit-friendly file format

With the release of EditReady 22.3, we've added the new ALEXA 35 to our existing ARRI support. These are expensive cameras, and because of that, they're an extremely popular choice from rental outlets. They're accessible to lower-budget independent filmmakers, shooting conventionally or in an LED volume space.

Codex HDE

For those shooting ARRIRAW, Codex is part of their lives. Back in 2020, Codex invented a process to shrink .ARI files by 40%. This lossless conversion, dubbed High Density Encoding, happens during offload, through the Codex driver and Hedge's Codex copy engine.

With the release of the ALEXA 35, HDE is now also available in a clip-based form, as HDE-encoded MXFs. It's early days, so there are still some unknowns with this workflow. We're in close touch with ARRI and Codex to add support for this in a coming update.

Release 22.3

EditReady 22.3 is available immediately, and a free update if you extended or bought your license less than a year ago. If not, just start a trial: download EditReady.