eatstoomuchjam

Does any Black Magic camera have autofocus other than single AF? At some point, they'll probably need to implement it, but even their flagship only has single as far as I know (I'd be very pleasantly surprised if someone told me I just hadn't been able to find it - but there's not really anything in the menus and if I press the AF button on the body, it does a really basic single AF - one of the reasons that I rigged mine with a DJI Focus Pro). I wouldn't even care that much if they did full AF - if they just did like Canon's cinema OS and gave little arrow indicators for whether the thing under the focus point was in focus, that'd already be a big improvement). Otherwise, I think a new pocket camera from them under $1k is a longshot. It's not impossible, but they made a big deal about lowering the price of the micro 4/3 BMPCC 4K to $995 in December.

I've been on a buying spree for the last month to prepare for this coming. I think I've bought like a year's worth of camera gear in a month. Guess I also need to think about which vintage lenses I want to order from Japan on ebay since there's still 1 month before the $800 de minimis exemption ends and those get slapped with tariffs too. I wish that the only thing getting fucked by those tariffs were cameras. This is going to drive up the prices of nearly everything - and all that at a time when more than 100,000 people are suddenly unemployed between government cuts and private companies laying people off when their government contract got canceled without warning. Oh, and they cut a bunch of charity funding for food banks and the like so... yeah. ☹️

After a few tries to order the media module from stores who claimed to have it in stock, but didn't, I gave up and ordered a couple of CF Express cards that are on the recommended list when they went on sale. My cheap scrub Sabrent cards were working fine in the few limited tests I did in the house, but I'd rather use some sort of approved media when on a shoot. And then, suddenly, B&H had one in stock - and even better yet, it was used! Usually I'd be pretty iffy about buying used memory modules, but given that the UC 12K has only been in user hands for less than a year, I was pretty confident it would be fine. It showed up earlier today and as far as I can tell, it is! I still need to check if there's a way to display the media age/lifespan on the camera, but to stress test it, I set the camera to something I'd be unlikely ever to use - 8K 16:9 at 168fps in 3:1 compression. Then I set up the camera in another room pointing at a downspout in the rain and let it go. After around 30 minutes, I had to change the battery (even my biggest 220Wh v mounts only last so long, especially with the 26v converter, and it didn't start full). With the second battery in, everything recorded fine until I stopped it with 1 minute remaining. Conformed (in camera) to 23.98p, this left me with approximately 7 hours of footage. At the end, the media module was mildly warm to the touch and the camera's top handle (the fan exhaust vents upward) was uncomfortably warm. Not bad for having spent about 40 minutes writing 3 GB/second of footage. The heat sink on the media module (and on the CF Express module) is substantial and I'd guess the airflow is well-designed to flow over it. I threw it on a timeline to have a play - looks really nice and while it isn't exactly a challenging scene, the raw files seem very flexible. My biggest lesson learned was that unless BMD release a cheaper media reader, plugging the camera into 10gE is really the only way to edit stuff in situ - and the only reasonable way to offload footage. I tried it via USB and what I learned is that instead of just working as a media reader, the camera exposes a fake network interface over USB. Network properties in OSX show it as 100 megabit per second. Trying to edit that way in Resolve means a delay of more than a second when you scrub anywhere on the timeline - and playback is like ~1fps. Wifi was a little better with a slightly more responsive timeline and like 1-6fps. When I plugged into 10gE, I could edit in real time. If the cheap version of the camera (which I bought) came with a power cable, I could presumably just offload overnight with one of the slower methods, but since I'm running entirely on batteries, that's just not a good option. Anyway. Here are some water drops falling from my broken rain gutter with rain falling nearby.

It would be interesting. One thing that I got from the Shane Hurlbut video was that one of the reasons that they built their own media module for the UC12K is that with the UMP, especially in 12K mode, they got lots of complaints about dropped frames due to media not keeping up. It's a little surprising since the data rate at 8:1 isn't all that crazy and in my testing so far, my pretty basic Sabrent CFE cards kept up just fine, but I don't know if I'd have that confidence when shooting for a full day. Anyway. The 9K mode on the UC12K is fantastic. Instead of the 12K UMP sensor, I wonder if they'd do a 9K S35 cut-down UC sensor for it. If they did that with a mirrorless mount (and ideally built-in ND's), then Black Magic would have their second camera I was interested in after the original BMPCC.

I don't know if the 16TB media module for the Ursa Cine series has been officially announced yet. If not, I'm sure it will be there. Though I'm not completely sure who the target market is - people who really want to cry when they 15 hours of footage to a media failure? Along those lines, a hope is that they'll announce a smaller media module reader for an individual module - one that costs less than like $1k. Right now, when using the media module, offload options are USB to the camera, 10gE to the camera, or the expensive rack-mounted media module reader. I think a lot of people are hoping that they'll announce a 6K or 8K camera using a cheaper variant of the UC 12K sensor.

This depends entirely on the camera. If 3200 is the second native ISO, it'll look great (and probably better than 2000 or 2500). I'd even go to 4000, 5000, or in the case of like an FX3, 12800 if that matched a native ISO.

Part 1 of a "first look" of the UC12K featuring Shane Hurlbut is up:

DJI just dropped prices for the Ronin 4D series. The 6K version is now $4,999 (down from $6,800) The 8K version is now $9,999 (down from about $13,000) The raw license just went from $979 to $1. Wish I hadn't bought it just a few months ago, but that's great news for existing owners who haven't bought it yet. Note that with the base 6K package, the RAW license is likely to be useless without buying an overpriced DJI ProSSD ($800 for 1TB). https://www.cined.com/dji-ronin-4d-price-drop-raw-license-now-1-instead-of-979/ If I'm guessing, I'd say that DJI are both aiming for a big sales bump with all of the press the R4D has been getting lately (especially with Adolescence) as well as finally undercutting the Komodo-X, C80, and Ursa Cine 12K. I'd still say that it wouldn't be my choice if I only had one camera, but since I got it, it's been to set with me for every short film that I've worked on and I've used it every time. The image from it is really nice, especially from the 8K.

They pulled the launch video because of some unspecified mistake in the processing of the camera's footage. If I had to guess, I'd say they exported at the wrong resolution and then included it in the video, but that's just a guess.

The Alt Cine folks have been posting on the cinepi boards for the last little bit that they are building some cameras around cinepi with some software tweaks/additions/add-ons. Today, they announced them - all based around a super 16 Starvis sensor. Looks like they can record raw up to 4Kp60 in 12-bit readout, 4Kp30 in 16-bit readout, and 1080p90 in 12-bit. Media is cf express type b. Interface is 4" touch screen. "Eve" has a c mount and is the most affordable option, battery mount is swappable, they mentioned np-f or v-mount, though it seems like the mount is non-integrated so power will be by dc barrel only - sells for about 450-480 GBP and you need to BYO Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB) "Elite 16" has similar specs to Eve, but a nicer/more robust body (which fits the Kondor Blue V-Raptor cage) with better I/O and has integrated v-mount as well as the DC barrel. It has a Micro 4/3 mount which may or may not be electronic depending on licensing - sells for about 950 GBP and includes Raspberry Pi 5 The footage looks pretty nice (with the caveat that they're still tweaking the output). Once they're a little further along, if things are looking good, I'll probably pick up the Eve. Could be a fun camera to use with my old Super 16 lenses. The price of the Elite 16 is, I think, a good reflection of the time and effort they put into it, but for me, the body size and cost are a bit more than I'd be excited to pay for a super 16 setup.

I have multiple types of raw available to me here (Canon, BM Raw, PRR, and Red). They're all very nice and if you spend time working with them, you can get very good results. A lot of times, the perceived secret sauce seems to be in how nice the images look immediately after import and before adjustments are made - and that's how I perceive it. The Komodo-X has it, the Komodo has it (but a little less). The Ronin 4D has it. The C70 has it (maybe I'll miss mine now that I traded it in). The Ursa Cine 12K... might have it? The one time I took it out was inconclusive since the weather here has been a bit shit for the last couple of weeks. The sunset I shot looked nice, though. The GFX 100 II has it, but less than some of the others. The EOS R5 does not have it. The raw that comes from it is totally fine. You can work with it and get nice results. Skin tones are generally very nice SOOC. I don't think I ever once, though, have imported files from mine and thought "Wow, that's amazing."

This is why I standardized on Arca-Swiss a long time ago. They're available in all kinds of sizes, native on a bunch of different tripod/monopod heads, converter plates for them are plentiful and cheap (for those that don't natively accept them), and there are even some that have feet. They're also available in a bunch of different lengths - from little Peak Design square models to great big 6+ inch plates - and the same goes for the receivers. I use the ones with feet on bigger/heavier cameras where they don't change the weight meaningfully and it's nice to be able to set them down without them tipping one way or the other. Also, for some tripod/monopod heads that don't natively use Arca-Swiss, there are sometimes converter kits available - I converted a couple of my older Manfrotto heads with kits from Hejnar.

To be clear, the only "complaint" is that it's in a bulky $3,000 camera that probably won't produce an image that's better than a smaller/lighter camera that I can buy for $800 which has the same sensor and can, I assume, record the same raw codec if I connect it to a VA 12G. Keep in mind also that "mediocre" does not mean "bad." I'm using it in the context of middle-of-the-pack. It's also hard to judge from some random clips that somebody on a forum might choose to show something - especially when you have no idea of the conditions in which a clip was exposed. Like with a lot of things, it's best to do the test for oneself. And if you have no real interest in the camera and in testing it for yourself, that's totally valid too.

Oh! I have absolutely no idea! Seems plausible, given frame rates, etc. I have no personal experience with either, though stuff I've seen shot on the original S5 has looked very nice (and outside of YouTube, I've not seen much shot on the II). "Looks a bit better than a $1800 camera" is still not a great selling point for a $3,000 camera, though. 😅 There's nothing wrong with Pyxis and it even has some great additions like doing power+display over USB-C for the monitor - which also apparently means that I can get a pretty nice touchscreen monitor with camera control for my Ursa Cine for $300 (if I don't want to use the fold-out screen that's already the same size)? That's pretty cool. Though I think that I need to give the camera 26v to deliver power over the front monitor port. Yes. And now that I go to look at their site to understand it, I see that there is the "Pocket Cinema Camera" line-up which contain M43 and S35 sensors with the "Pro" at the top of the lineup. And then I see that there's a "Cinema Camera" which is full frame. I guess that since none of the cameras could possibly fit in a pocket (Matt Granger excluded!), the "Pocket" must refer to the size of the sensor? Anyway. Without meaning to, I'll forget all about that now so apologies in advance for the lack of clarity when future me calls the full frame the "Pro" again.

Evil boss: "Now... we're going to kill you with these lasers. We have the best lasers. Elon made the lasers. Folks, nobody has ever even seen lasers like these. And the best part is nobody knows you're here." Henchman: "Sorry, boss. I accidentally included the other agent who escaped on a text message chain about the execution and gave lots of details about the location and time. You know how you sometimes have a contact, but it has somebody else's number attached to it" Evil boss: "I'm sure they didn't notice. Everybody makes mistakes." (After Bond escapes yet again with the help of the other agent) Evil boss: "I never said anything about lasers. I don't even know what a laser is. Biden probably left that laser on when he left."