alt Hacker News"Flat" is a bit of a misnomer in this context. It's not flat, it's actually a logarithmic ("log profile") representation of data computed by the camera to allow a wider dynamic range to be squeezed into traditional video formats.
It's sort of the opposite of what's going on with photography, where you have a dedicated "raw" format with linear readings from the sensor. Without these formats, someone would probably have invented "log JPEG" or something like that to preserve more data in highlights and in the shadows.
I said “flat” because I didn’t feel like going into “log” and color profiles and such but I’ll admit I’m leaning hard into over-simplification, because log, raw, etc. gets messy when discussing profiles vs codecs/compression/etc. In video we still call some codecs “raw,” but it’s not the same necessarily as how it’s used in photography. Like the Red raw codec has various compression ratios (5:1 tends to be the sweet spot IME) and it really messes with the whole idea of what raw even is. It’s all quasi-technical and somewhat inconsistent.