“That’s just crazy..!”

       The Making Of Hose.

RAW v JPEG. PSD v TIFF v EPS

There are several ways that the camera can capture the image. RAW files are essentially Original Camera Negative, they are unaltered, uncompressed bits of data that come directly from the sensor. Most applications can’t handle RAW files, so they have to be converted into something more accessible to editing programs. This allows you to decide how you want the files to appear. You can alter a lot using a batch processor like the one found in Photoshop. You can specify what format you want the final file to be – a compressed format like JPEG, which will take up less space and is a 8bit file, or a PSD file which is much larger than even the original RAW file, but contains a lot of data and can be 16bit.

Creating a duplicate file from the RAW is actually a really good thing as you always have the unaltered original RAW that you can go back to.

The camera can capture as JPEGs (even simultaneously), but these are compressed and only 8bit. Doing both doesn’t make any sense as it just takes up space and time.

We chose to convert the files to 16bit PSD files – that’s the proprietary Photoshop file type. We chose this format as it was most compatible between all the software we were going to use. After Effects 6 PRO could not handle 16bit TIFF files (only 8 bits) and was not compatible with EPS files.

JPEGs are 8bit so that ruled them out – we wanted to end up with a 10bit uncompressed HD file and any 8bit element would effectively bottle-neck the process. If you output one JPEG and a PSD of  the same file and compare them you can clearly see the difference, the JPEG appears washed out as a result of the lower bit rate and the compression. The PSD files we outputted were 46mb each, the equivalent JPEG was 2mb. In the beginning we had the Batch Processor output both a JPEG and a PSD. The JPEG was used to quickly assemble an After Effects sequence to create a QuickTime that we could watch. We soon realized that the system could process the PSD files without any problem and making both formats was wasting time.