We had leaned out of the window with a 
speculation by Techradar about an 8K ProRes
RAW recording by Nikon and tried to find out more about it afterwards.
But shortly afterwards EOSHD confirmed wants to have confirmed: The documentary about the Nikon ambassador Ami Vitale, who photographs in Kenya, was shot on RED Monstro in 8K by cameraman Mark Toia of ZOOM Film and Television.
And news shooter also reported on location: "The demo material were beautifully taken pictures of Africa, taken by Mark Toia on RED Monstro 8K cameras. Although RED has announced that there will be accelerated support for R3D-RAW files directly in FCPX and Resolve, it's still a long way to go, so we had to work with ProRes 4444 XQ files here."
So the demo material from Africa at the hands-on was transcoded to ProRes 4444 XQ and therefore no ProRes RAW! This also makes sense because this demo material was even used on an 8K Resolve system on site and Resolve doesn't support ProRes RAW (news shooters wouldn't have missed anything else as a local sensation). Pictures with the alleged RED documentary material from the keynote exist for example here or here.
The clips shown on the photos under Resolve are definitely the same clips that were shown on the keynote. There, however, on a Final Cut Pro X Timeline and presented as ProRes RAW.
So if these are Mark Toia's recordings from a RED Monstro 8K, then there must be something like a RED-RAW to Pro Res RAW converter. But why should anyone take the trouble to convert RAW to RAW, or to develop something like a rebayering? For a presentation? Can you imagine how much effort the development of a clean RAW to RAW conversion takes? And how little one can commercialize such a development? Nobody needs a rebayering converter. And even Atomos or Apple doesn't scrip something like that in a few days for a few Democlips. Extremely unlikely.
But there's also a statement that we officially got from Atomos press agency. So says Eric Nielsen of Step3:
"You wondered if the 8K camera used was a Nikon. It was actually a Canon. (...) What I know is that for the behind the scenes footage that showed her at work we worked with Canon to capture the 8K footage that Apple showed. What she used to shoot stills or the documentary I'm unsure."
But even if it had been Canon, this raises questions: First, the material used on WWDC does not look like footage that Ami Vitale shows at work. And second: What was the material from Africa that came from a RED Monstro 8K and was available as Pro Res 4444 XQ? And why was there no ProRes RAW as demo material for the newsshooter hands-on but only ProRes 4444 XQ?
Something doesn't quite fit together here in our eyes. Maybe it's just the summer heat that prevents us from adding up one and one. But in the end there are only three contradictory explanations to solve the inconsistencies:
The used 8K ProRes RAW images don't come from Mark Toia/RED Monstro but from Canon and were converted to Pro Res 4444 XQ for the following Hands On.
The material in the Final Cut Timeline of the Keynote was from RED and Apple has an R3D-Rebayer converter for ProRes RAW.
Or the RED material in the FCPX Keynote timeline was 8K ProRes 4444 XQ.
We'll probably never get the right explanation, but fortunately, there are more important things we're going to do now...
;)
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