zephyrnoid

Nearly Perfect Bullet List! Allow me to make one small observation/correction. RE:"8. Better troubleshooting Blackmagic personally assisted the previous sensor supplier with improved quality control, and if any similar problems crop up this time they will be armed with the knowledge to solve them relatively quickly."   All true. My observation is that prepayment funds for BMCC V1.0 (The Beta) were used to finance what is likely this, the BMCC public release. My point is that companies like Black Magic and to an extent, RED, need to stop fleecing prepay customers to finance thier R&D, and instead, hold off on releases and finance thier own R&D through legitimate investor funding channels. What BlackMagic did in 2012 was at best, unethical. After all, prepay customers are not the same as vested investors, unless BMCC is planning to hand out dividends :D

So to reiterate +1.... :) "I’d have preferred to have seen a black box with a lower centre of gravity and equal weight distribution. The Blackmagic Production Camera remains narrow, unlike the cube-like Epic, Scarlet and KineRaw Mini. All the ports are on the left of the camera – not good for shoulder mounted shooting. Finally I’d have preferred to have an Epic like articulated LCD panel which is powered by the camera and some physical controls for aperture, shutter, etc. on the camera body instead of a giant screen. The rear of the camera still more resembles a media player than a camera. It was an opportunity to break with the quirky 1.0 camera but Blackmagic chose to maintain compatibility with existing Cinema Camera rigs and accessories. A mistake in my view."   And thank you Andrew for this. You are a stand up guy fo sure ! "One final thought. These cameras MUST be delivered. Blackmagic’s reputation cannot afford another BMCC 2012 situation. If they tell their dealers and customers July, it must ship in July and ship in large quantities."   Now for heaven's sake can someone please give it to us as Andrew has outlined here? What is so damned hard about it??

Why are they still putting out betas? Hopefully Nikon will accelerate thier DX cameras or some one will gett he formfactor right and toss in a DX sensor

Works on the same principle as my la gondola stabilizer/gimbal. So finally someone gets it, that the camera belongs BELOW the balance point, NOT above it! LOL just watch all the wrongheaded solutions end up on e-bay in the next year or so.

Note:"The sensor is Super 35mm sized and one heck of a beast too. It is quick becoming apparently that development on the sensor side is far outpacing what image processors and media can handle despite the advances in cooler running CPUs, GPUs and SSD drives." Virtually nothing in dedicated Video HD is coming out in anything but Super 35mm, though I feel that DX is a good contender if they can advance the sensor technology up a bit. Nikon? Are you Listening?

The Future of Television is BETTER and More ENDURING content :D 2K is plenty if it's good stuff, cheap and readily accessible on multimple devices. The past is Couch Potato TV at any resoluytion and in any dimension. Hey remember when Holographic movies were supposed to become mainstream> Yes. It's today and we're still way happy with 1080p - 2K Win Win I say.

Fabulous. I will save the interview till when I have some time. That Autoportrait with Leica M3 is precious. Love the watch too- looks lime a Cimier, Elgin or Better. What a stylish guy peering out. So much like so many stylish guys now but oh! ...the out of the box imagination. Now we have mostly copycats :wacko:

"1) It doesn’t really fit in the Cinema EOS line as that is moving towards 4K and this only does 1080p. 2) It doesn’t really fit in a DSLR because it doesn’t do stills and it has a 16:9 aspect ratio."   1) you missed the point, BIG Juicy pixels will produce a better image even at 1080p. 4K is a file size not automatically a measure of image quality. 2) Who needs stills? I have 10 year old point and shoots for that. "and it has a 16:9 aspect ratio" . Well that's where it's at. 4:3 is DEAD!

I hate to be annoying but in all honesty, only split screen shots are worth comparing of we decide to pixel peep. The visual cortex accomplishes too much 'leveling' for consecutive takes to be easily sortable. So from now on, I'm only going to look at split screen comparos where absolute quality is being discussed.

jharding finally nails it, where I seemed to have failed. "Sub sampling = spatial resolution of colour channels. There are three colour channels in digital video. Uncompressed is R G and B, all at full resolution. Sub-sampled is Y (black and white, or luminance), Cb (blue) and Cr (red). 4:4:4 all channels are full resolution. 4:2:2 the colour channels are half resolution. 4:2:0 the blue channel is half resolution, the red channel is quarter resolution. This is not a mathematically perfect way of describing it, but it's conceptually sound for most of us in practice. It's as much as we need to know." Let's get the DSLR makers to stop repackaging or wrapping thier compressed streams and we'd have something you can gradee in post. Or at least, they must abandon misleading terminology

Clipped has always meant CLIPPED when it comes to Nikon digital ;)

I just spoke with Panasonic RE the GH3 and had a similar gripe for them. In a nutshell this statement applies to all consumer and some pro divisions of the big camera companies. They don't give a hoot about REAL users. They are looking at customer trends and sales numbers and the marketing/strategy folks drive the whole product development process ( right into the ground IMHO). I built my day job around the user centricity movement of the late1990's It's a tragic story. All the resources are there for appliction of Kaizen & Gemba in prosumer camera gear manufacture, but the marketing/strategy guys are IN THE WAY. RED Digital comes out and tries to be the hero and they succeed just in time to see Sony steal thier concepts and no doubt, put them out of business. meanwhile, The big camera companies are only half listening to us. The solution begins with a revolt (doesn't it always?) We must STOP buying the beta releases and let the manufacturers know we are deliberately holding our money back till they get this stuff right. At the very least, we need modular and upgradable systems. not disposable DSLR's or MFT products. If they want to know who to call to put it all together for them, they can call ME.

Mixing them up is exacty what I'm not doing. Show me Lossy 4:4:4 COLOR? The resolution of an image may suffer from all manner of Block compression( JPEG/MPEG/TARGA etc etc etc)  but if the RAW (sampled)  color space is 4:4:4, then there is NO COLOR loss. That's my whole point. Color Compression and dimensional compression are separate if you maintain bit depth. When the manufacturers start messing with 'wrappers' that's a polite way of saying they are scamming us into buying into a delivered product that's been mangled to keep file sizes down and throughput high. I spent too much time working on MPEG2 and DSL protocols to put up with all this nonesense. You notice that Andrew is scratching his head as to why 'Clean HDMI' to a recorder is very very marginally better than internal encoding. The reason is that the color space call outs are lies.

Excellent and level headed review. Thanks "We’re getting closer – but no cigar!" Indeed!

I'm begining to wonder if folks undestand the principles behind file compression. No time for a long tutorial here but basically: Full Resolution Capture Files are RAW UNCOMPRESSED at certain bit depths. Color compression invloves applying algorythims that consolidate the gamut of a full 24-64bit image essentially minimizing the nuances by lumping pixel colors by like kind using a CLUT ( Color Look Up Table) to reduce the gross file size from color differentiation (think of a bucket of colored blocks, where you toss out the burnt umber and sienna ones and replace them with blocks that are a brown mix of the two. Resolution compression is a straight line reduction in pixel density Exotic compression schemes like JPEG, MJPEG, MPEG, GIF and TIFF involve a combination of color and resolution compression with some exotic edge compressions as well. The fundamental law is that you cannot really retrieve data that has been eliminated during capture of a digital image, in post or at any point in the DSP chain ONCE IT HAS BEEN ELIMINATED . You can fake a partial retreival of color or resolution density but it's never that close to the original. It just looks good in product features declarations. That's why the best Chroma Key demands RAW capture or a data stream that's parsed to an authentic 4:4:4 file. That's also why so many tests I've seen of HDMI vs 'native' capture do not demonstrate a quality difference when you burry your nose into the images, that is commensurate with the cost of the external recorders out there. The difference is simply not there for movies. Basically, the recorder makers are taking us for a ride and they know it. It's the camera companies that are also fooling us by playing this semantic game with terms like "Clean Output over HDMI" , even "Uncompressed HDMI" and now, fake color spaces.  

Please explain a lossy 4:4:4 sampling of the color data in a file. Especially in reference to this ecellent reference pulled from Wikipedia

"You can also get 4:4:4 from just scaling down a high res 4:2:0 file." But that's the whole point, it's FAKE 4:4:4 once you toss the data at capture to record a 4:2:0 the color gamut is compressed and the original gamut NOT retreivable. It's the same as uprezing file resolutions. FAKE. This is why the only guaranteed format for recording 4:4:4 is RAW UNCOMPRESSED. All this 'gobbeldy gook' shell game that manufacturers play with consumers is ridiculous.

I have to read rthe rest of the article later but have this to say so far: "Unfortunately there’s still no 1080/60p and one of the D5200′s strongest features for video – the articulated screen – has been banished as is sadly all too common on high end DSLRs!" C'MON NIKON! 1080/60p is a token at this stage. we need it now! Articulated screen has been one of my fav Digicam feature for 10 years BUT, I know the risks involved. I broke one off accidentally on a shoot and it halted production for that day ( no backup camera) Articulated screens pose a much greated risk of damage and I therefore sympathise with the omissions on 'Pro' cameras. I would not mind seeing dedicated external screens or at least WiFi sync with tablets and smartphones as an option

I don't even understand why the question is so difficult to answer. If the 'capture format' is known that defines the outer limit of the color space, 4:4:4 being 100% uncompressed. Minute that you apply compression you can bet that color compression is going to be one of the losses, thus 4:2:2, 4:2:0 etc. Unless your dealing with fully uncompressed color space there's not much point in talking about Chroma Key. Let's focus on the overall look to the eye and the vectorscopes for grading in post. Based on the side-by-side with the GH3 the D5200 footage looked visibly better in most shots with less obvious macroblocking in the deepest values. We've been through this exact discussion before, when the Nikon D800 was first released. Bottom line is we're looking for RAW out of HDMI.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7JYZDnenaGc

"The sensor size is approximately Super 35mm due to it being an APS-C camera with 1.5x crop" Well Andrew. You KNOW how I like the sound of that ;) , since I'm a Super35mm evangelist. The small battery is of no consequence if there's an adapter or DC POWER in plug for third party LiPo batteries to plug in. The frame rates are a bit of a mess and no slo mo gives the GH3 an edge there (Grrrr). I'm proud that Nikon has made this breakthrough. So it looks like small form-factor video has now truley added Nikon as a force to be rekoned with.  If they can bridge the features gap with the GH3 and resolve some of the bugs... we shall see what NAB reveals

Excellent article. All I would add is that it's not just Canon, but Panasonic, Olympus and Nikon that really need to meet in a giant strategy session to layout a prosumer roadmap for the future. I have stated in the past that the vast majority of Mirrorless cameras and DSLRs are merely overpriced 'beta' for what should be a line of legacy cameras that will last longer than two years on the 'shelf'. The key to this will be standardization and modularization so that sensors can be upgraded, along with other components of a 'core' system. I am also convinced that Prosumers do not need Four brand lines. Two at most and they should be standardized. That's why I've come down hard on dark horses like BMCC and to a lesser extent, RED Cinema.  

Good review. More helpful than Philip Bloom's rather nebulous sample vids plus self engrandizing diatribe ;) Not to be a bitch,--- it's not bad form to use technical teminology so in the spirit of brotherhood, the correct term for the quoted sentence is not 'engine', it's algorithm . RE: MJPEG  ..."It is based on the same compression engine as JPEG for stills."

Indeed, it should improve the image as reduction uses a lens or series of lenses that converge rays rather than expanding them. Since the focal length and focus point of the host optic is unchanged, it should also preserve DOF characteristics of the host. The sceptic in me wants to see some comparison rez charts before I can fully believe that something important isn't being changed (introduction of pincushion distortion for example, or that moire isn't being accentuated). But are the NEx systems delivering what people want otherwise? Can this adapter be used on other cameras too?

You watch. Best Compact HD Video of 2013 will be in a category of its own, like the BMCC but with a forward looking strategy. BMCC sensor choice and the fact that SSD's will esentially go away and CF card sized SSD drives will be the next big thing. The big question is which company is going to introduce the 'next dark horse'I am totally clueless who it will be. When the Panasonic GH3 was rumored in Early Summer of 2012, I PRAYED hard it would not be an upgrade to the GH2 but rather a new camera concept. Nope! Egg on Panasonic's Product Devlopment team's face! They had better get it right in 2013 or Panasonic will be relegated to making lenses only after that ;)