Nikon Z8/Z9 Video Format / Bitrate / Compression ratio | NRAW | ProRes | ProRes RAW | H.265

The Nikon official site didn’t provide the birate for ProRes / ProRes RAW, I did some test my self, here’re the results. I only tested fullframe (FX) in ~4K resolution.

ProRes Raw 12Bit

ProRes Raw has a very low compression ratio of 2, which suggests that it might be lossless compressed, which takes more spaces than Nikon’s lossy N-RAW, 2.5x of the high quality and 4.5x of the normal quality!

ProRes HQ 422 10Bit

With compression ratio of 5.2, ProRes is still 2x the size of the normal quality n-raw! Though the former one has 1.5x number of pixels to deal with (YUV422 vs Bayer).

I hope Nikon could provide more options for ProRes via firmware updates. A 10x~12x compression ratio version (ProRes LT 422) will be very useful to balance between quality and disk space.

H.265 420 10 bit

For H.265, there is no option for all-intra, and only in 420. Compression ratio is much higher given long GOP. One thing to note, that bitrate is variable depend on the content, i.e. very dark scene will have a much lower bitrate (<100Mbps for 4K60).

NRAW High Quality 12 bit

First of all, given 4.5 compression ratio, NRAW is definitely a lossy codec. Interesting thing is that 8K’s compression ratio is higher than 4K’s. 4.5 vs 3.7.

NRAW Normal Quality 12 bit

For normal quality, the compression ratio is even higher, reaching 7.5:1 which is not bad for all-intra.