Autokroma BRAW Studio Now with Apple M1 Support

Software Update

by Georg GilsteinAugust 27^th, 2021

Autokroma updated their BRAW Studio plugin for Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Media Encoder for Apple M1 support.

Autokroma BRAW Studio was the first plugin enabling you to use Blackmagic Design’s RAW format in Adobe Premiere and After Effects. With the release of BRAW in September 2018, Blackmagic rolled out support for DaVinci Resolve as it’s their own NLE. Their official Blackmagic RAW 1.5 SDK with Premiere and After Effects support only came out a year later. Autokroma took their chance and quickly created their plugin to help BRAW users.

With the new 2.5.1 update, BRAW Studio runs on Apple Silicon Macs now. The new Apple CPUs are based on the ARM architecture instead of x86 like previously. Thus, software producers need to adapt their programs to work flawlessly and make use of the benefits of the new architecture. FYI, BMD’s own Blackmagic RAW SDK already has supported Apple M1 Macs for a bit over two months by now.
The new version also supports MFR (Multi-Frame Rendering) in the beta versions of After Effects 2022.

In the previous July update, Autokroma added support for Nikon Z6II/Z7II and Panasonic Lumix S1H/S1/S5 BRAW clips captured by a Blackmagic Video Assist.

What’s the difference to Blackmagic’s official RAW SDK?

Of course, it’s a valid question, why you should use BRAW Studio instead of BMD’s free official RAW SDK utility, which also adds support for Premiere and After Effects. My colleague Jakub Han wrote a detailed comparison in an article last year.

But to sum it up here: BRAW Studio features a lot of functions like global presets, a panel for easy and quick grading, and Metadata. Autokroma claims that BRAW Studio runs smoother and offers support for their plugins.

Autokroma also has a blog post on why they recommend using their plugin over the official one, you can find it here.

Blackmagic’s plugin is quite minimal with not a lot of settings. They are obviously focussing on DaVinci Resolve and the symbiosis with BRAW.

Who is BRAW Studio for?

I’d say BRAW Studio is ideal for people who don’t want to work with DaVinci Resolve, but still want to use BRAW to the best of its capabilities.

The plugin is available on their site for 69.50€, you can also download a trial that allows playback of 500 frames.

Find more info on the official Autokroma website.

Would you use BRAW Studio over the Blackmagic RAW SDK? Let us know in the comments.