BRAW client review.
No proxies, no transcodes.

The decoder is the obstacle. Blackmagic RAW playback comes from Blackmagic’s own SDK, which lives in DaVinci Resolve and in applications built against it, not in stock media players and not in any browser. The generic clouds do not fill the gap either: Google Drive’s playback list covers consumer formats only, with no camera RAW of any kind, and its player stops at 1080p whatever your storage plan. Share a .braw there and the client gets a download button and a decoder problem, in that order.

Productions work around this four ways: courier a drive, render a viewing copy for a review platform, drop the files on a cloud drive, or stream the .braw natively to the macOS app. Three of those trade away fidelity, time, or custody of your originals. The comparison in full:

The constant bitrate settings are ratios of the unprocessed size of a single sensor frame, so they scale with resolution and frame rate. A Pocket 6K recording its full 6144 by 3456 sensor at 30 fps writes 194 MB/s at 5:1 and 81 MB/s at 12:1, against an uncompressed 965 MB/s. A Pocket 4K at 12:1 is a comparatively light 35 MB/s. Constant quality removes the upper data limit entirely: on the full 12K sensor at 24 fps, Q0 averages anywhere from 289 to 1,200 MB/s depending on the image.

Those numbers decide the workflow. They are why nobody attaches BRAW to an email, why proxies exist for editing, and why storage is the meter to watch on any review platform. Take the published rate for your own recording setting and the rest of this page is arithmetic.

The macOS app supports R3D, BRAW, N-RAW and ProRes on compatible Macs. Playback depends on the codec, hardware, storage and file availability; test a short clip on the recipient’s Mac. For browser review, use a supported H.264, HEVC or AV1 export.

Browser playback depends on codec and profile support, hardware and the connection. There is no universal bitrate that guarantees smooth playback. Use a short H.264 or HEVC export to test the recipient’s setup before sharing an important film.

Uploads take the .braw straight from the card structure: masters up to 5 TB per file, resumable if the connection drops, still running while you work in another tab. Unreleased footage belongs in vault storage: encrypted at rest, password or unlisted links, expiring access, session watermarks, and invisible forensic marks on the stream. Notes come back through the free NLE sync tools, so nobody retypes a timecode.

Rendering a viewing copy locks a debayer, a white point, a tone curve and one exposure interpretation, then quantizes the result down to a delivery bitrate. Highlight detail that sits above the curve’s shoulder in the RAW is flat white in the proxy. Latitude the sensor kept in the shadows arrives as blocked-up noise. Lossy codecs work by discarding detail, more compression discards more, and coarse quantization is the exact mechanism that turns smooth gradients into visible bands.

Send that render to a proxy-based review platform and it gets translated again into the platform’s own streaming ladder. Count the versions standing between the sensor and the screen.