Daniel sent us this prompt about shooting RAW video on Android, and he's asking the practical questions — how big are the files, what does the editing workflow look like to get something downloadable at a reasonable size, and if you've never done RAW editing before, are there online platforms that make it easier. This is actually a really good time to be asking this, because the tools have shifted a lot in the last year or two.
They really have. And the first thing to understand is that shooting RAW video on Android is fundamentally different from shooting RAW stills. With stills, it's basically a solved problem — every flagship phone does it, the file sizes are manageable, you can edit in Lightroom Mobile. Video is a whole different beast. The data rates are enormous, the processing pipeline is more demanding, and until fairly recently, Android didn't even have a proper API for it.
That's the part that surprised me when I started looking into this. I assumed RAW video on a phone would be like RAW photos — just a setting you toggle on in the camera app. But it's not even close to that.
No, and here's why. The standard Android camera pipeline — what every default camera app uses — processes the sensor data through the image signal processor before it ever becomes a video file. Demosaicing, white balance, noise reduction, sharpening, tone mapping, compression. By the time you see the footage, it's already been interpreted and baked in. RAW video means bypassing all of that and capturing the raw sensor readout directly. And for a long time, Android simply didn't expose that capability to third-party apps in any usable way.
A few things. The biggest one was an app called MotionCam, which came out of a developer named Mirza who basically reverse-engineered the camera stack on a bunch of devices to pull RAW frames directly from the sensor. This wasn't using an official API — it was tapping into the hardware at a level that Google hadn't intended. Later, Android added the RAW stream capability in the Camera2 API, but it was limited. MotionCam Pro, which is the paid version, supports RAW video on a pretty wide range of devices now — mostly Snapdragon-powered phones, because Qualcomm's architecture gives more direct sensor access.
This isn't something you can just do with the stock camera app on a Pixel or a Galaxy?
The stock camera apps do not shoot RAW video. Some of them have a "pro video" mode that gives you manual controls and a flat log profile, but that's still a processed video stream. It's not RAW. If you want actual sensor-level RAW video on Android, you need MotionCam or something similar — and there aren't many alternatives that actually work.
Let's talk file sizes. This is the question that I think scares people off before they even try it. How bad is it?
It's bad in the way that makes you reconsider your life choices. Let me give you some real numbers. A standard compressed video — say, H.264 at 4K, 30 frames per second — runs about 400 to 500 megabytes per minute. That's what you'd get from your stock camera app. RAW video, depending on the sensor and the bit depth, can run anywhere from 6 to 12 gigabytes per minute.
So a ten-minute clip could easily be 80 to 100 gigabytes. If you're shooting at 8K, which some of these sensors can do, you're looking at even more. The Sony Xperia phones with the Cinema Pro app can output RAW-like formats, and those files are similarly enormous. This is not something where you casually shoot an hour of footage and figure it out later.
You're saying my 128-gigabyte phone is good for about twelve minutes of RAW video before it fills up completely.
If you're lucky, yes. And that's before you account for the operating system, apps, and everything else on the device. Realistically, if you're serious about shooting RAW video on Android, you need a phone with at least 512 gigabytes of storage, or you need to be dumping footage to an external drive constantly. Some phones support USB-C SSDs for direct recording, and that's really the only practical way to do it for anything longer than a test clip.
Which phones support direct-to-external recording?
The higher-end Samsung Galaxy devices — the S series and the Z Fold line — support USB-C video output and can record to external storage with the right app. Some of the gaming phones from ASUS and Nubia have it. But it's not universal, and you definitely want to test it before you show up to shoot something important. MotionCam has a setting for direct external recording on supported devices, and that's probably the most reliable path.
Okay, so you've filled up your external SSD with a hundred gigs of RAW sensor data. What does the workflow actually look like to turn that into something watchable that doesn't require its own zip code?
This is where the learning curve gets real. RAW video is not like opening a JPEG — it's sensor data that hasn't been interpreted yet. The file is essentially a matrix of luminance values from each photosite, with a color filter array pattern overlaid. Before you can even look at a proper image, you have to debayer it — interpolating the missing color information at each pixel — and then apply a color space transform, white balance, exposure adjustments, and a tone curve.
That sounds like something you don't do on a phone.
You can do some of it on a phone, but it's not ideal. MotionCam records in a format called CinemaDNG, which is an open standard for RAW video originally developed by Adobe. Some phones can also output in a format that's compatible with Adobe's DNG specification for stills, but as a sequence — essentially thousands of individual DNG frames that you then assemble into a video. The first step in the workflow is usually to transcode this into something an editor can work with efficiently.
What does that transcoding step look like?
Typically, you'd bring the CinemaDNG sequence into a program like DaVinci Resolve. Resolve is kind of the standard for this — it's what professional colorists use, and it handles RAW formats natively. There's a free version that does probably 95 percent of what you'd ever need. You import the footage, and Resolve automatically recognizes it as a RAW sequence. From there, you have full control over the debayer settings, color science, exposure, white balance — everything that was baked in by the phone's image processor in a normal video is now a slider you can adjust.
This is where the advantage of shooting RAW actually shows up, right? You're not just dealing with enormous files for the sake of it.
The reason you tolerate the storage nightmare is the flexibility. In a standard compressed video, if the white balance was wrong, you can nudge it a little, but you'll get artifacts and banding pretty quickly. In RAW, you can change the white balance as if you were setting it on set. If the highlights are blown out, you can often recover detail that simply isn't there in a compressed file. The dynamic range you can pull out of these phone sensors in RAW is genuinely impressive — some of them can capture 12 or 13 stops of dynamic range, which is approaching what you'd get from a dedicated cinema camera five years ago.
Five years ago being the key phrase. But still — that's a phone.
That's a phone. The sensor in something like a Galaxy S25 Ultra or the latest Xperia is physically small, but the technology has gotten remarkably good. When you strip away the heavy-handed noise reduction and sharpening that phone cameras apply by default — which is often what gives phone video that over-processed, slightly artificial look — the underlying image is actually quite clean and organic-looking.
You import into Resolve, you do your color work, and then what? How do you get from a hundred-gigabyte RAW sequence to something you can actually send to someone?
And this is where you make the choices that determine your final file size. Resolve gives you a huge range of codecs and settings. For something that needs to be high quality but reasonably sized, you'd typically export to H.265 — also called HEVC — which is much more efficient than the older H.At 4K resolution with decent quality settings, you're looking at maybe 200 to 400 megabytes per minute for the final file. So your hundred-gig RAW source becomes a couple of gigs for a ten-minute video. That's entirely manageable.
That's a compression ratio of what, fifty to one?
Something like that. And the beauty is, you've done all the creative decisions in the RAW space — the color, the exposure, the look — and then you're just using the final compression as a delivery wrapper. The image quality holds up much better than if you'd tried to do those adjustments on already-compressed footage.
Let's talk about the second part of the prompt — online platforms. If someone has never touched Resolve, never color graded anything, is there a way to do this in a browser?
This is trickier than it sounds. The fundamental problem is that RAW video files are enormous, and uploading a hundred gigabytes to a web service is not a casual act. Most online video editors — and there are quite a few now — don't handle CinemaDNG or RAW sequences at all. They're designed for compressed footage from cameras and phones. You upload an MP4, you trim it, you add text, you export. That's the model.
The answer is basically no?
The answer is mostly no, with one interesting exception. There's a platform called Blackbird, which is a fully browser-based professional video editor. It was originally developed for newsrooms and broadcast workflows, and it runs entirely in the browser with a proxy-based system — meaning it uploads a lightweight version of your footage for editing, then applies your edits to the full-resolution files on the server side. It's impressive technology, and it does support some RAW formats. But it's not a consumer product — it's priced for enterprise, and the learning curve is significant.
If you're a beginner, you're basically looking at downloading Resolve and learning it.
I think that's the honest answer. And the good news is, Resolve has gotten much more approachable. The free version is full-featured. There are excellent tutorials on YouTube — Blackmagic Design, the company behind it, has their own training series that's free. The color page looks intimidating, but for basic RAW processing, you really only need to understand about six controls. The rest is optional.
What are the six controls?
You need to understand the Camera RAW tab, which is where you set the debayer settings — color science, white balance, exposure, and color space. Then on the color page, you'll use the primary wheels for lift, gamma, and gain, which control your shadows, midtones, and highlights. Maybe you touch the contrast and saturation. That's it. You can go much deeper, but those basics will get you 90 percent of the way to a good image.
The barrier isn't really the software. It's the storage, the transfer, and the initial setup.
The biggest practical hurdle is getting the footage off your phone and onto a computer with enough storage and processing power to handle it. A 4K RAW timeline in Resolve benefits from a decent GPU, but you don't need a monster machine. Any computer with 16 gigs of RAM and a dedicated graphics card from the last few years can handle it, especially if you use Resolve's optimized media features, which generate lower-resolution proxy files for smoother editing.
Let me ask you something. Is this actually worth it for someone who isn't doing professional work?
That depends on what you mean by professional. If you're shooting a short film, a music video, something where you want to do significant color grading and you care about image quality, then absolutely — shooting RAW on a phone can produce results that are indistinguishable from much more expensive cameras in good lighting. If you're shooting a vlog or a talking-head video for YouTube, probably not. The file sizes and workflow overhead don't justify the marginal quality improvement for content that's mostly viewed on phones anyway.
That's the thing about RAW — it's a tool for post-production flexibility, not for capture convenience. If you nail your exposure and white balance in-camera, a good log profile or even a well-exposed standard video can look excellent. The RAW advantage only materializes when you need to fix something in post or when you want to push the grade into a specific look.
That's the distinction that gets lost in a lot of the YouTube camera reviews. They'll show side-by-side comparisons of RAW versus compressed and the difference is visible at 400 percent zoom on a calibrated monitor. But on a phone screen, with YouTube's compression, the difference largely evaporates. The real value of RAW isn't sharpness — it's latitude. The ability to rescue a shot that was two stops underexposed, or to match the color between two cameras that have different sensors, or to create a heavily stylized grade without the image falling apart.
It's essentially an insurance policy and a creative tool rolled into one, with a storage cost that makes you weep.
That's the summary, yes.
One thing I haven't heard you mention is audio. When you're shooting RAW video on Android, what happens to the sound?
That's an excellent question, and it's one of the weirder aspects of this workflow. In a normal video recording, the audio is multiplexed with the video stream — they're in the same container, synchronized by the camera app. When you're shooting RAW with something like MotionCam, the audio is recorded separately as a WAV file. It's not embedded in the CinemaDNG sequence. So when you bring the footage into Resolve, you have to manually sync the audio with the video.
That sounds like a nightmare if you're shooting anything with dialogue.
It's not as bad as it sounds, because Resolve has a waveform-based auto-sync feature. You just select the video clip and the audio clip, right-click, and hit "auto-align based on waveform." It works surprisingly well. But it is an extra step, and it's the kind of thing that can trip up a beginner who's expecting the audio to just be there.
What about external microphones? Does the RAW recording path support them?
Generally yes, if the app supports external audio input. MotionCam can use external USB microphones or the phone's internal mics. The quality is the same as any other recording app — it's just capturing a WAV file. But you do want to make sure you're monitoring levels, because there's no automatic gain control in most of these RAW recording apps. They give you manual level control, which is great for quality but means you can absolutely record unusable audio if you're not paying attention.
The whole thing is very much a manual-everything experience. Focus, exposure, white balance, audio levels — you're flying the plane yourself.
And that's actually part of the appeal for the people who are drawn to this. It's the opposite of the computational photography approach that defines modern phone cameras, where the device is making dozens of decisions per frame to produce a pleasing image automatically. RAW video is saying: give me the sensor data, I'll make the decisions.
Which approach is philosophically closer to how dedicated cameras have always worked. A cinema camera doesn't try to guess what you want — it captures what's there and assumes you know what you're doing.
And there's a certain kind of satisfaction in that, even if the results aren't always better. It's the difference between cooking from scratch and using a meal kit. The meal kit is faster and the results are consistent, but you don't learn anything about how the dish actually comes together.
I like that analogy. Let's talk about a specific use case that I think is actually quite practical. Say you're shooting in mixed lighting — you've got daylight coming through a window on one side of the frame and warm interior lights on the other. In a standard phone video, the auto white balance is going to freak out and you'll get that shifting color temperature as the camera tries to split the difference. With RAW, you set the white balance once in post and it's consistent across the whole shot.
That's exactly the kind of scenario where RAW earns its keep. Mixed lighting is the nemesis of automatic white balance. And the thing is, you can't really fix it after the fact in compressed footage because the color information has already been interpreted through whatever white balance the camera chose at the time of recording. You can shift the overall temperature, but the relationship between the different light sources in the frame is already baked in. With RAW, you're starting from the sensor's native color response, so you have much more control over how those different temperatures render.
Another scenario: you're shooting outdoors and the sun goes behind a cloud. Your exposure changes by a stop and a half in half a second. In a compressed video, that exposure change is locked in, and if the camera overcompensated, you've got a visible brightness jump. In RAW, you can smooth that transition in post because the dynamic range is there in the file.
Yes, though with the caveat that you do need to be mindful of where you're placing your exposure. RAW gives you more latitude to fix things, but it's not magic. If you clip the highlights — if the sensor well fills up and the data is just pure white — no amount of RAW recovery is going to bring that back. The general rule with digital sensors, whether it's a phone or an Arri Alexa, is to expose for the highlights. Protect the bright parts of the image. You can lift shadows in post much more successfully than you can recover blown highlights.
That's the opposite of what most people do with their phone cameras, which tend to expose for faces and let the sky blow out.
And that's a creative choice that the phone's auto-exposure makes on your behalf. With RAW, you have to be thinking about where you want the exposure to sit. Some of the RAW recording apps give you a histogram or a waveform monitor on screen, which is enormously helpful for this. You can see exactly where your highlights and shadows are falling and adjust accordingly.
Let's circle back to something you mentioned earlier — the CinemaDNG format. Is that still the standard, or has anything changed recently?
CinemaDNG is still what MotionCam uses, and it's widely supported. But there's been an interesting development in the broader industry. Apple pushed ProRes RAW pretty hard, and Blackmagic has their BRAW format. On the Android side, there's been some experimentation with encoding RAW into a compressed but still RAW container — essentially applying lossless or visually lossless compression to the sensor data to reduce file sizes without discarding the RAW flexibility. Some of the newer phones with more powerful image signal processors can do this in real time.
The file sizes we talked about — 6 to 12 gigs per minute — could come down with better compression?
If you're doing lossless compression on the RAW data, you might get a 30 to 50 percent reduction without any quality loss. Visually lossless compression — which is what most cinema cameras use — can get you even more. But this is highly dependent on the hardware encoder in the phone's chipset, and it's not something that's widely available yet on Android. It's one of those things where the capability exists in the silicon, but the software support hasn't caught up.
That feels like a theme with Android RAW video generally. The hardware is capable, the sensors are good, but the software ecosystem is held together by one determined developer in a basement somewhere.
That's not far from the truth. Mirza, the MotionCam developer, has basically been carrying this entire category on his back for years. He's active on the XDA forums, he takes bug reports, he adds device support one phone at a time. It's impressive, but it also means that if he stops working on it, the whole thing could stagnate. There's no Google-backed RAW video API, no Samsung first-party solution, nothing from the major players.
Which is weird, because the camera is the main thing people upgrade their phones for.
It's incredibly weird. The marketing for every flagship phone is 80 percent about the camera system, and yet none of them offer a first-party RAW video mode. Part of it is that computational photography is their competitive advantage — the AI-powered processing, the multi-frame stacking, the semantic segmentation that knows what a face is and exposes for it. RAW video bypasses all of that, and it would expose the sensor's raw performance in a way that might not be flattering.
There's a disincentive for them to expose it.
I think so. When you see a RAW still from a phone sensor next to the processed JPEG, the RAW often looks flat, noisy, and unimpressive. It takes skill to make it look good. The phone manufacturers want the out-of-box experience to be stunning without any user intervention, and that means leaning hard into the processing pipeline. Giving users a RAW video mode that produces muddy, desaturated footage would generate more complaints than praise.
Even though that muddy, desaturated footage is exactly what a colorist wants to work with.
The flat profile is a feature, not a bug, if you know what to do with it. But most people don't, and they'd just think the camera was broken.
Let me ask you about another online platform angle. You mentioned Blackbird, which is enterprise-grade. What about something like Adobe's web-based tools? They've been pushing into the browser space.
Adobe has a web version of Photoshop and a browser-based Lightroom, but neither of them handles RAW video sequences. They're still-image tools. Adobe Premiere Rush, which is their simplified mobile and web editor, doesn't support CinemaDNG or any RAW video format. Adobe does have a product called Frame.io, which is a cloud collaboration platform for video, and it's now integrated into Premiere and Resolve, but it's for review and approval, not for editing RAW footage in a browser.
The online editing dream for RAW video is basically not here yet.
It's not here, and I'm not sure it's coming soon. The bandwidth requirements alone make it impractical. Even if you had a service that could handle the processing, you're still looking at uploading tens or hundreds of gigabytes before you can start working. For most people's internet connections, that's an overnight upload at best. The local editing workflow with Resolve is honestly more practical, even though it requires installing software and learning a new tool.
What about the export side? Once you've graded your RAW footage in Resolve, are there any online platforms that are good for sharing the final product at high quality?
That's a different question, and the answer is yes. Vimeo has always been the platform of choice for filmmakers who care about quality — their compression is noticeably better than YouTube's, especially for content with fine detail and subtle gradients. io, which I mentioned, is great for sharing work-in-progress with collaborators or clients. And if you just need to get a file to someone, services like WeTransfer or Google Drive work fine for the final compressed export, which should be a manageable size.
The summary workflow is: shoot RAW in MotionCam or similar, transfer the massive files to a computer, import into DaVinci Resolve, do your color work and editing, export to H.265 at a reasonable bitrate, and then share via whatever platform you normally use.
That's it. And I want to emphasize something about the transfer step, because it's the part that trips people up most often. If you're shooting to internal storage, getting the files off the phone can be surprisingly slow. The USB-C port on most phones is not as fast as you'd hope — even if it's technically USB 3, the actual transfer speeds often top out around 100 to 200 megabytes per second. For a hundred-gigabyte shoot, that's ten to fifteen minutes just to copy the files. And if you're on a phone that only supports USB 2, which some budget and mid-range devices still do, you're looking at much slower speeds. This is why shooting directly to an external SSD is such a game-changer — you just unplug the drive and connect it to your computer.
Do you need a special kind of external SSD, or will any USB-C drive work?
Any decent USB-C SSD should work, but you want one with sustained write speeds of at least 500 megabytes per second to handle the RAW data rate. Something like a Samsung T7 or a SanDisk Extreme Portable. Don't use a cheap USB stick — they often have terrible sustained write performance and will drop frames. The drive also needs to be formatted in a file system that Android can write to, which usually means exFAT. Not NTFS, which Android doesn't natively support without additional software.
That's a detail that would ruin someone's day if they didn't know it ahead of time.
You show up, you format the drive on your Windows machine as NTFS because that's the default, you plug it into your phone, and nothing happens. Or worse, the phone says it's formatted but can't write to it. exFAT is the safe choice — it works on Windows, Mac, and Android.
Let's talk about something I haven't seen discussed much. What's the impact on the phone itself when you're shooting RAW video? Does it overheat? Does the battery drain in minutes?
Both of those are real issues. RAW video recording is extremely processor-intensive and storage-intensive simultaneously. The sensor is running at full resolution and full frame rate, the data is being written to storage as fast as the interface allows, and the phone's CPU is managing all of this without the benefit of the hardware-accelerated video encoding pipeline that handles compressed video. The result is that the phone gets hot — sometimes hot enough to trigger thermal throttling or even shut down the recording.
You might not be able to shoot continuously for long periods.
On most phones, you'll get maybe 15 to 20 minutes of continuous RAW recording before heat becomes an issue. This varies by device — phones with better thermal management, like gaming phones with active cooling fans, can go longer. But it's a real constraint. And battery drain is significant. You're looking at maybe 15 to 20 percent battery consumption for ten minutes of recording. If you're shooting anything substantial, you want to be plugged into external power.
We've got storage constraints, heat constraints, battery constraints, and a manual-everything workflow that requires learning new software. Why is anyone doing this?
Because when it works, the results are stunning. There's a quality to properly graded RAW footage from a good phone sensor that looks nothing like phone video. It has a cinematic texture, natural highlight roll-off, and color depth that you normally only get from dedicated cameras costing thousands of dollars. For independent filmmakers, students, or anyone who wants to learn color grading without buying expensive gear, it's a remarkably capable entry point.
There's also the creative control aspect. If you have a specific look in mind — a particular color palette, a film emulation, a moody grade — RAW gives you the latitude to achieve it without the image breaking apart. That's not just about quality, it's about intentionality.
And I think that's the right note to end the technical discussion on. This is a tool for people who want creative control over their image, who are willing to trade convenience for flexibility. It's not for everyone, and it's not meant to be.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: The longest recorded Turkish oil wrestling match took place in 1868 in Réunion, lasting 14 hours and 23 minutes before one wrestler finally pinned the other by exhaustion.
I have so many questions, none of which I want answered.
Réunion feels like an unexpected venue for that particular milestone.
It really does. This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop for the fact that will haunt me.
If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review wherever you listen — it helps other people find the show. We're at myweirdprompts.com for everything else. I'm Corn.
I'm Herman Poppleberry. See you next time.
