RAW has become way more normalized the last couple of years, and I get why—I've shot most of my career in RAW, including my feature film Above the Knee in BRAW 8K on the URSA Mini Pro 12K. I love the flexibility, but I also got tired of the hassle, and for me it mostly comes down to file sizes. On Above the Knee we filled up around 20TB, and that also has to be backed up. I remember early YouTube days where I literally had to delete old footage because I couldn’t afford more drives. Then I bought a used Lumix S5 for around $1,000 and started shooting H.264 4K 4:2:2 10-bit. The files are small, the workflow is cheap, and honestly the image quality holds up really well—good enough that I don’t think the difference versus my 12K RAW workflow is worth the extra cost for most people. I also talk about the viewing reality: YouTube/Instagram/Netflix compression (and even many cinemas projecting in 2K) means a lot of that extra RAW “information” never reaches the audience anyway. My main takeaway is simple: if you’re a beginner, a hobby filmmaker, doing YouTube/social, or making low-budget features and docs, you probably don’t need RAW. Expose correctly, set white balance, don’t push your grade into oblivion, and you’ll be fine. RAW has its place—big-budget films, heavy VFX—but I think it’s overused for budget filmmaking.