As you may have seen recently, Canon and Atomos have teamed up to enable 8K ProRes RAW recording from an EOS R5 via HDMI to the Ninja V+. Considering reports – including documentation from Canon itself – that the R5’s 8K recording options are quite limited due to overheating, the ability to now record Raw 8K externally should change the equation for anyone looking to take advantage of this feature.
Carl at ProAV TV was among the lucky few to test this feature out early and determine whether the claim of 8K with no overheating was true. Plus, it’s worth checking out how the ProRes RAW 8K format holds up in terms of image quality.
If you are looking to do this yourself and already have the different pieces, you will first want to update your firmware. The R5 needs to be on version 1.4.0 while the Ninja V+ requires AtomOS 10.68.
This will enable full-frame 8K Raw or cropped 5K Raw. You can still record internally at the same time, however, you will still have your regular recording limits. If you set the Standby to low res and then only hit record on the Ninja V+, you should see unlimited recording times.
A big question is how the internal Raw recording compares to the external Raw recording. Canon uses their own proprietary Canon RAW Light while Atomos uses the Apple ProRes RAW codec. Per Carl, the quality between the two was basically the same. That’s good enough for me. Both are “raw” formats.
Image Credit: Atomos
The real question is whether overheating is solved. Well, that looks really good as well. In the studio tests, they let the camera run and continually swapped out the SSDs to keep on recording when it filled up.
The combo reached an hour and a half without issue, filling up 1.5TB of storage and burning through two Canon batteries without flinching. That sounds super usable.
So, if you are looking to move to greater than 4K capture with maximum quality from the Canon R5 then this combination is just what you need to unlock the full capabilities of the camera.
[source: ProAV TV]
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