> With its high bit depth and dynamic range, log footage has many of the benefits of raw. But Apple Log is not raw, and not even “straight off the sensor.” It’s still heavily processed — denoised, tone-mapped, and color adjusted.
I wonder if this is because, at the end of the day, it is still a tiny little camera with a small sensor and small lens, and so with none of the processing magic the image would look pretty terrible under most circumstancdes.
RAW video isn’t like RAW photography. The sheer size of raw footage is insane - it’s normal for cameras to be unable to record RAW footage natively without an external recorder.
Thats not to say processing isn’t part of it, but even $2k mirrorless cameras don’t record RAW video internally.
The sensors and lenses are small, and now processors are very fast. And as it turns out, the vast majority of people do not want photos or videos that are "accurate" or "real". They want ones that look good.
So, processing has been the name of the game. It's all about making an image people will like to look at, regardless of how different it is from reality.
Probably true, and I enjoy using my phone for social snapshots. But the way in which everything ends up looking "iphony" annoys me for anything where I care about the image, and so I'm shooting more with my dumber digital cameras that are about documenting what was actually in front of me rather than spinning up a "good looking" image. I like being able to remember what a scene actually looked like, rather than what the AI in my phone thought it should look like ; )
Even high-end cameras that can shoot in Log, like the Sony A7 series, apply some noise reduction on their end. This is important for most compressed formats.
However, most people would be horrified to see how noisy and unsharp the images from top cinema cameras are when most post-processing is disabled.
I wonder if this is because, at the end of the day, it is still a tiny little camera with a small sensor and small lens, and so with none of the processing magic the image would look pretty terrible under most circumstancdes.