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On iPhone I’d see the practical route as DNG/ProRAW or RAW burst → custom linear/Metal pipeline → H.265/HEVC, with a much flatter, less processed look than the stock camera. Not ProRes RAW. The limitation is that iOS does not expose continuous Bayer RAW video in the same way Android Camera2 can expose RAW streams, so an iPhone version would likely be AVFoundation + Metal: RAW/DNG stills or bursts, plus a controlled HEVC mode with custom tone, colour, highlight rolloff and IT8/LUT calibration. I don’t have an iPhone to test on right now, so I can’t promise it yet. But the idea is definitely interesting. First I want to finish and publish the Android version and see if people find it useful. If the feedback is positive, I’ll try to look into an iPhone version — probably DNG/ProRAW or RAW burst into a custom Metal colour pipeline and then H.265/HEVC, rather than ProRes RAW. For me the goal is to do as much as possible directly on the phone — capture, colour, calibration, encoding, maybe even basic editing/export, Davinci style. On the PC I’d rather have a voice-driven movie editor, where you can just say what you want to cut, move, translate, subtitle, shorten or colour-match, instead of digging through endless panels. I’m also working on PocketCAD for Android and a customised WearOS/Android smartwatch project, so it’s all part of the same direction: practical tools on small devices, with more voice control and less dependence on big desktop workflows.

But but but but the Z6iii doesn't have a 4 inch rear LCD 😜

2K compressed RAW is no problem on the Motorola Edge 50 Pro, but at the moment I’m not sure how to make 4K work reliably. RAW has a nicer rendering than the GPU pipeline, especially in the highlights. I’ve implemented 3×3 color matrices, TRCs, and 1D IT8-based correction for both GPU and RAW/RAWC modes. I think I’ll drop the H.265 mode that goes through the ISP and only keep GPU H.264 for social media compatibility.

I think you'll find that you are expected to pay disproportionally (/a lot) more money for a slightly better feature set. 😉 How else are manufacturers supposed to bridge the gap in pricing between an individual vlogger's camera (2000€) and cameras made for cinema and TV network productions (30k€-300k€) where 50-100+ people are listed in the credits and their salaries total much more than the equipment used in the production? This apparent gap in prices is likely due to the fact that there are so many vloggers (a low price can be offered due to the large volume and stills photographers using the same cameras) and a small number of studios and networks with very specific needs and completely different production workflows (so a small number of units with very specific needs are made, at high prices). How this gap between product categories is covered is likely a significant challenge, and will always cause some customer unhappiness. For gimbal use, and extended arm use (vlogging with person shooting and talking to the camera) the small size and low weight, combined with a large display of the ZR are probably ideal. What such a user needs a R3D RAW workflow for, is a bit of a mystery for me. 🙂 I imagine productions using RED cameras as main cameras might be happy to use the ZR for situations where the RED camera is too large to fit, or too expensive, such as mounting on cars, etc. they can then more easily color match the footage from the different cameras. The larger the camera and the heavier it is, the larger the gimbal needs to be, and hand-holding a gimbal gets tiring quickly if the setup is heavy. For this purpose I would imagine the ZR is good, provided that one can handle the data. I find the Z8 with 24-70/2.8 internal zoom and RS 5 would be too heavy for me. Nikon does offer better h.265 and other codecs in Z8 and Z9 (with no excessive noise reduction in log footage), for example, but no R3D NE. Here the color matching is good between traditional Nikon stills camera color science and the video, rather than that of traditional video and cinema camera manufacturers.

N-RAW Normal at 25 fps should be below 1000 Mbps. If I calculated correctly, N-RAW High Quality (which is similar to R3D NE) has a compression ratio of approximately 1:4 compared to uncompressed raw video (which is not available on the ZR, for obvious reasons). N-RAW Normal is about 1:8. RED's own codecs (not TicoRAW) in the (not Nikon) RED cameras range from 1:2 to 1:22 depending on settings. I suspect Nikon didn't implement the lower quality TicoRAW in the R3D NE codec (although both Normal and High Quality are available in N-RAW) because of the additional quality loss, and as a matter of protecting the quality expectations associated with the RED brand. They could be simply trying to impress. The ZR body is quite lightweight and slim, and adding more heat sink materials, a fan etc. to enable better quality compressed codecs would have made it larger and heavier, as would adding more hinges and mechanics to make the back LCD screen more flexible in the angles that are offered. I can imagine a bunch of things that could be wanted, such as full size HDMI, SDI, XLR, etc. connectors. THe ZR is probably as small and light as Nikon could make while enabling long recording times and R3D NE recording. Rather than focus on the data rates, I am puzzled at the lack of fully featured software support for the raw video formats. Some formats (R3D NE) reportedly offer a good visual match between what you see on the camera LCD with LUT applied but if you want to apply distortion corrections, a separate transcoding utility need to be applied to convert the footage to Prores. With N-RAW you can get lens profiles applied in Davinci Resolve, but the color doesn't apparently look like how it was on the camera display (?). If you use Premiere, N-RAW is shown with RED's Log profile, which then is different from what you see on camera in the view assist mode. People complain that you cannot cut the R3D NE and remove parts and rewrite the edited footage in the R3D NE format, instead it has to be transcoded into something else before the trimmed footage can be stored (if it is stored in R3D NE format the file does not get smaller). With N-RAW you can cut parts out and store it in N-RAW, so why is this different for R3D NE? Or did I get I could have gotten some parts wrong but to me it seems the software support is as much missing as the camera firmware, and the raw video is sort of an experimental feature at this point. Some comment and seem to think that to get the maximum quality is essential but then complain that the resulting files are too large, even though they are compressed at 25% of original data size, and further compression visibly reduces the image fidelity. I think for video there has to be a realization that you cannot get still-camera like detail and expect small file sizes. A compromise needs to be made. I like using Prores 422 HQ 4K on the Z8 as it allows the distortion profiles to be applied based on lens type and still looks fantastic to my eye, while avoiding the 8K. I can immediately tell the h.265 (which in Nikon's case is always 4:2:0) does not have as rich color on textured, colorful clothes as the 422 codec. Absurd in-camera file sizes, almost as big as 6K RAW? Yes, but it just looks gorgeous and is easy to edit. I delete the original files once I'm done with editing. I can't imagine shooting 8K RAW but with a 6K camera the RAW option is a possibility, once storage costs go down. At the moment the cost of a fast external SSD I got 3 years ago is three times as high as it was in 2023! Hard drives seem less affected and are a possibility for long-term storage, but for editing the SSDs are better. About your lens preferences, the 50-150/2.0 is 4599€ here, quite pricey! Although a set of f/2.0 primes would also be expensive, and together would be heavier, I still would choose the primes for their smaller size in hand, or use the 70-200/2.8 as a classic choice which is available on all major mounts. But I can see that a portrait and event-oriented photographer might prefer the f/2.0 zooms over primes or the f/2.8. I don't think the f/2.0 zooms will become mainstream though, as the f/2.8 are very high quality, lower priced, and have greater range.