Blackmagic New Products Update - 13th April 2024 17:00 BST

[eatstoomuchjam]

2 hours ago, Clark Nikolai said:

The Z-Cam one and most of the Portrays EVFs are just small LCD monitors with loupes. The Oeye-Red EVF is more like what I'm thinking. 

The Oeye is the Portkeys that I had in mind and it's a dedicated EVF just like the Z Cam EVF is also a dedicated EVF.  I have no idea where you're getting any idea that it's "just [a] small LCD monitor with [a] loupe."  Other than, I suppose, that every single EVF is nothing but a small LCD monitor with an integrated loupe.  Are you mistakenly thinking that it's like a Portkeys LEYE or similar?  It _is_ a lower resolution screen than the Portkeys Oeye, but that's more than made up for (IMO) by the wifi transmitter.
 

53 minutes ago, KnightsFan said:

can't tell if they are off the shelf, user-replaceable M.2 cards (that's how it looks) or something more proprietary (which is what Grant Petty implied verbally)

There's almost no way that BMD is at a scale where it makes financial sense for them to develop their own proprietary memory module format.  Even if they don't advertise it, there's almost no way that thing doesn't contain some standard NVMe drives inside if you open it.  Heck, even the red mags / mini mags contained standard M2 SATA drives protected by nothing but some silly metadata written into a standard SATA device information field.  The bigger question is whether BMD is going to do any sort of similar fuckery.  So far, they didn't announce anything smaller than an 8TB magazine, though, at least that I saw - so at least for now a strategy of "buy small one from manufacturer and then boost it with cheaper off-the-shelf drives" doesn't seem viable.  At the point where you're already putting out $1.6k for storage, you're already in big vendor markup land.

One thing that I wish - and maybe they'll offer this in the future if people ask for it - is that instead of having it configured for 8TB (which I would never need on any shoot I've done), that they would allow the user to configure it for 6TB of capacity as a RAID-5 or 4TB of capacity as a RAID-1.  It has 4 modules inside it so either of them should be viable.  I'd gladly take 4TB of redundant storage over 8TB of "if any one module fails, you lose some percentage of your footage."

[IronFilm]

5 hours ago, MurtlandPhoto said:

It's interesting to see the minuscule amount of hype around this Blackmagic livestream compared to the BMPCC4K in 2018. It's a ghost town here today.

I wonder the reasons....

1) the crash of the media industry lately? Thus less money to spend

2) the economic recession in general? Thus less money to spend

3) the continuing rise of social media? And thus the fall of web forums as the place to be

4) just like with photography, the average affordable video camera out today is already "good enough" for filmmaking? (perhaps the decline we've seen in nerdy discussions about photography, will happen now with filmmaking too) Thus a ground breaking new camera no longer feels the same way as a ground breaking leap forward as before. As honestly, look at what we had before the P4K, it did make the P4K seem like a big deal! For its low price and great features. While today the PYXIS 6K is definitely awesome and at a great low price, but we already have so many similar-ish cameras at similar-ish (or cheaper) prices with similar-ish prices. And a lot of the great things in the PYXIS 6K are not things we necessarily need. It just feels like the leap forward from where the competition was beforehand was bigger with the P4K than it is today with the PYXIS 6K

[KnightsFan]

24 minutes ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

There's almost no way that BMD is at a scale where it makes financial sense for them to develop their own proprietary memory module format.  Even if they don't advertise it, there's almost no way that thing doesn't contain some standard NVMe drives inside if you open it.  Heck, even the red mags / mini mags contained standard M2 SATA drives protected by nothing but some silly metadata written into a standard SATA device information field.  The bigger question is whether BMD is going to do any sort of similar fuckery.

Yeah I mean obviously they aren't manufacturing their own drives in house. I just can't tell if they are saying, "buy M.2 drives and put them in our caddy" or if they are encouraging (or worse, enforcing) branded drives. There are 4 drives per caddy, but I'm not sure whether it's a RAID array or another redundancy. They mentioned the 4x4 lanes make 16... so I don't know if that implies that at max data rates it needs to stripe data to keep up.

I guess best case the reason they decided to make a caddy is that it would be hazardous to change M.2's on a set. But it does raise my suspicions as soon as someone makes a branded connector for a generic part.

[IronFilm]

Quote

"The PYXIS 6K uses the popular and fairly inexpensive Sony-type BP-U battery."

As I already power everything (Sony PMW-F3 + FS7 + my Mixing Bags with the recorder / receivers / etc in them) with BP-U batteries then this is great news for me!  

3 hours ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

My interest in Pyxis dropped a lot when the price was $3k.  Maybe I'll get more interested in it again when it's on the used market for half the price.  😄

Unfortunately I'm kinda in the same boat. Especially as for a few years now then the videography has just been a smaller side line to me vs my main business of being a Production Sound Mixer. Plus with the crash in the media industry and the economy in general, I think I will need to diversify my work (to non-media industry stuff) and aggressively watch my spending (no more cameras). 

The good news though is that a lot of cameras that where in the $3K to $4K ish region of pricing on the secondhand market will I think be pushed down even lower by the release of a Pyxis. 

As why buy an old barebones RED DMSC1 body for $3.5K when you could get a brand new BMD Pyxis 6K with warranty for even less???

So those will tumble in price, which will in turn force down the prices of other secondhand cameras as a domino effect. (sub $1K Panasonic Lumix BS1H camera perhaps? sub $500 ZCam E2-M4?? Maybe, who knows. Perhaps once the BMD Pyxis has been out for a couple of years, and has kept up with buyer demand, and secondhand ones are showing up on eBay at even lower prices than RRP. Which will in turn put pressure on prices of everything else)

  

1 hour ago, KnightsFan said:

The Pyxis looks alright. I'm a little disappointed that they kept the 6k sensor from the previous camera, but it's what I expected. Keeping the accessory ecosystem from the Ursa Cine is great.

A pity that Pyxis doesn't however have the interchangeable mount that the URSA Cine has. 

 

[KnightsFan]

24 minutes ago, IronFilm said:

A pity that Pyxis doesn't however have the interchangeable mount that the URSA Cine has. 

Agreed. It's probably feasible to swap mounts between Pyxis models, but voids the warranty. BM probably manufactures the models exactly the same, with just that part different. Conceivably, they have some annoying firmware difference to prevent electronics from working, but that would be so difficult for them to manage for FW updates.

[eatstoomuchjam]

59 minutes ago, KnightsFan said:

Yeah I mean obviously they aren't manufacturing their own drives in house. I just can't tell if they are saying, "buy M.2 drives and put them in our caddy" or if they are encouraging (or worse, enforcing) branded drives. There are 4 drives per caddy, but I'm not sure whether it's a RAID array or another redundancy. They mentioned the 4x4 lanes make 16... so I don't know if that implies that at max data rates it needs to stripe data to keep up.

There's almost no way that they're pushing enough data to actually require 16 lanes of NVMe, even if it's only at gen 3 speeds.  Each lane of gen3 is able to carry about 1 gigabyte/8 gigabits per second.  From what I read elsewhere, 12K at Q0 on the existing UMP is just over 1.1 gigabytes/second.  Even the upcoming 17K should, then, be kicking out under 2 gigabytes/second (or 2 out of 16 lanes).  That's also assuming gen3 speeds.  If it's gen4 or gen5, it's even more overkill.  A single modern high-performance NVMe drive can write at around 3,000MB/s. 
Anyway, to get to 8GB with off-the-shelf modules, it would either need to be 4 4GB drives in a raid 1 or 4 2GB drives in raid 0.  At $1600, they could afford the former, but I'd bet money that they're doing the latter and pocketing the money.

 

50 minutes ago, IronFilm said:

As why buy an old barebones RED DMSC1 body for $3.5K when you could get a brand new BMD Pyxis 6K with warranty for even less???

I'll hope it does drive them down, then - every so often, I get a fever and once again start leering at a used Monstro 8K VV and thinking which of my current cameras to sell/trade toward it - given that they're only about $6k used (in good condition) these days (well, probably about $7.5k after getting all the accessories that are needed for it to even function).  Then I go read stories from small shops who needed to send in their RED for service (warranty or pay for repair out of warranty) and it's like a cold splash of water on the face (if you're not a major studio, expect long waits and bad communication).  But slowly, the GAS starts creeping in again...  "But it'll match the FOV of your GFX 100 II better...  How often can a camera fail anyway?  Well, it's a RED, but... how often?  Really?"
Well, that and the fact that I get really confused when I start trying to figure out which accessories are compatible with which cameras.  Since I don't have much in the way of PL glass, I'd want an EF mount.  Can a DSMC mount work with DSMC 2?  Does it need to be a special mount for the bigger sensor?  Does a freakin' lens mount cost that much?  USED?

Anyway, if those were to drop to $4k, I'd probably be unable to stop myself from trading some other stuff in toward it.  

 

59 minutes ago, IronFilm said:

So those will tumble in price, which will in turn force down the prices of other secondhand cameras as a domino effect. (sub $1K Panasonic Lumix BS1H camera perhaps? sub $500 ZCam E2-M4?? Maybe, who knows. Perhaps once the BMD Pyxis has been out for a couple of years, and has kept up with buyer demand, and secondhand ones are showing up on eBay at even lower prices than RRP. Which will in turn put pressure on prices of everything else)

I'm less optimistic about this.  My guess is that most of the people buying it will be people already firmly embedded in the BMD ecosystem and thus other brands' cameras won't drop too much in price.  Other than "has BRAW," nearly all of the other features of Pyxis have been present on the E2-F6 since 2019.  Even after the price dulled any initial excitement, it got even duller when I remembered that I'd be trading the external monitor to record raw for an external transmitter for the image when on set.  I always forget that BMD app control is just a control surface with no image preview.
 

[KnightsFan]

I'm shopping for a cinema camera at the moment, so here are my thoughts on the Pyxis. Tl;dr it doesn't quite fit my needs, so my main hope is that it drives used prices on other cameras down.

Price No objection there! It's very reasonable

Image Rolling shutter speed is a let down. Otherwise, image is fantastic, assuming it is in fact identical to their previous FF camera as Petty said. Blackmagic has some of the best color out there, particularly considering how it carries through to Resolve. DR and noise are fine.

Recording Formats Disappointing. I'd like a 10 bit consumer codec. ProRes would be welcome too. But, if you're stuck with one format, BRAW is a good one. It's disappointing but not a deal breaker.

Body Design

+1 for L mount. It'll be easy to add an adapter with NDs. All my lenses are EF, so really I just want to be able to get them on, ideally with NDs.

Ports and connectivity look decent. No real complaints. A few years ago, lack of HDMI would be a con because it limited you to pro monitors, but there are lots of affordable SDI monitors now. The interchangeable side panel is really cool. I could even 3D print my own panel to hold my exact gear (wireless TC, mic receiver, etc). I love how many threaded holes are on the top and bottom.

Other than that, ergonomics are... okay. I dislike the side screen. It's useless without flipping out, and blocks left side rigging. It's better than blocking rear rigging, but I do prefer putting handles on both left and right for handheld. If you're going to have a large, fixed screen, maybe Red had the right idea putting it on the top.

Where Can BM Go?

One thing I can't live without anymore is wireless video monitoring. I know you can add a 3rd party product, but that's extra weight, batteries, latency, wires... I really hoped BM would do something similar this time, since they have an iOS app and are moving into wireless streaming devices. All BM had to do was say "high quality wireless monitoring on an app" and I'd have preordered (side screen and everything!) Z Cam simply got it right, and no one competes with them yet.

It's time we saw high quality 32 bit audio in cinema cameras. The Zoom F3 has been game changing to me. One con to 32 bit audio is varying support in file formats and software. However, Blackmagic controls both the BRAW format and Resolve software so that wouldn't be an issue. Even a single 32 bit XLR would instantly make the camera that much easier to use on solo doc projects. My pipe dream was for Blackmagic to integrate a wireless receiver into their camera. I'd love to run a camera body and a couple transmitters, and have synced, distortion-free audio without any extra gain knobs, cables, boxes, or batteries. BM hasn't ventured into audio... yet. It's got to happen at some point, right? Now they have the whole Fairlight system.

Obviously, a faster sensor readout.

[spinkscapes]

The lens mount options are beyond infuriating makes the offerings dead in the water for me (and I get that this is primarily on Canon, I'm frustrated at the situation not Blackmagic). Maybe if I hadn't converted so many of my EF options I'd be interested.

[JulioD]

2 hours ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

There's almost no way that they're pushing enough data to actually require 16 lanes of NVMe, even if it's only at gen 3 speeds. 
 

Ahh but good for offload speeds right?

[IronFilm]

2 hours ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

I'm less optimistic about this.  My guess is that most of the people buying it will be people already firmly embedded in the BMD ecosystem and thus other brands' cameras won't drop too much in price. 

There definitely a newcomers who'd be weighing up their options of what to get, and will now choose this new BMD camera. Less buyers for other systems = lower prices on the secondhand market. Simple Econ101

Also there are lots of people who went with ZCam or old REDs or such, specifically because BMD didn't offer what they wanted. But now BMD does!

3 hours ago, KnightsFan said:

Ports and connectivity look decent. No real complaints. A few years ago, lack of HDMI would be a con because it limited you to pro monitors, but there are lots of affordable SDI monitors now. 

It's very disappointing it is only one SDI output. Should've been two independent SDI outputs! (or at lead have a second output that is HDMI)

As the lack of this will make using this game on set rather restrictive. 

3 hours ago, KnightsFan said:

BM hasn't ventured into audio... yet. It's got to happen at some point, right? Now they have the whole Fairlight system.

Am curious what a bag/field mixer/recorder from BMD would be like!

Something even better than the Zoom F8n??

[A_Urquhart]

I don’t understand why anyone has any issues with the lens mounts. 
 

L mount is the ecosystem BMD has entered which is hardly surprising as it’s a more open system.  Then you have EF and PL mounts. What’s not to like? You didn’t expect E or RF in all seriousness did you?

The side screen is great. It’s only for navigating menus as everyone wants to use their own monitor. Not paying for a larger or articulating screen is a good thing . 
 

Audio wise, bummer that it only has a single XLR. Can live with it and I’d plug my dual channel Theo’s system into the mini jack but would be great if BMD has a small Mi shoe type connecter on the top and they could offer a different handle with XLR inputs and audio duals like FX3 does. 
I personally wouldn’t want to pay for features such as internal wireless audio which I would never use and would limit what TX units you could use. It’s a plain silly idea IMO. 
 

Still no 10Bit codec. This makes it a non starter for me. BMD did a great job in appealing to the more Pro/ Semi Pro sector with the new rigged alloy body, SDI, TC etc etc and it now appeals to Sony FX6 users but lack of 10Bit means it’s a no no. Give us DNx at least…….!

 

so so close BMD. 
 

[kye]

What a crazy presentation with so many new and big features, but what I took away from it is this:

1) Resolve 19 is awesome.

2) When it comes to cameras, Grant knows what's up:

[KnightsFan]

10 hours ago, A_Urquhart said:

The side screen is great. It’s only for navigating menus as everyone wants to use their own monitor. Not paying for a larger or articulating screen is a good thing .

It's overkill for a menu navigation screen. 1500 nit, 4", 1080p display--it's got to be drawing like 15 watts. It's probably a higher quality/more expensive panel than most budget monitors out there, and it's poor placement for anything other than checking settings. I'm not saying it's a poisonous design choice, but it is not a good one. It would be cool, for example, if they had interchangeable side panels on both left and right, and some kind of connector so that either of the side panels had the screen + buttons. Then you could choose which side, and maybe later they could make a side panel with a foldout screen. The lower cost option is to have a kit with no screen at all, for people using their own monitor. Just two metal side panels.

11 hours ago, IronFilm said:

Am curious what a bag/field mixer/recorder from BMD would be like!

Something even better than the Zoom F8n??

My guess is they'd start with the budget end, so a 2 or 3 channel recorder. Blackmagic is uniquely positioned as they own the camera, file format, video/audio software, and hardware. They could design something modular that works both standalone, or mounted on a camera, or in their massive lineup of live production hardware.

[eatstoomuchjam]

13 hours ago, JulioD said:

16 hours ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

There's almost no way that they're pushing enough data to actually require 16 lanes of NVMe, even if it's only at gen 3 speeds. 
 

Ahh but good for offload speeds right?

Sure, if you have some storage that can write at 16+ gigabytes/second, offloading from 4 NVMe drives will be screaming fast.  For me, when I'm offloading now from a single CF Express card, the 10gE network to my NAS is the bottleneck.  Making the storage medium faster wouldn't do a lot...  but if you have 100gE or you're offloading to a local NVMe RAID for editing, maybe it'll give some advantage.  🙂

[Clark Nikolai]

19 hours ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

The Oeye is the Portkeys that I had in mind and it's a dedicated EVF just like the Z Cam EVF is also a dedicated EVF.  I have no idea where you're getting any idea that it's "just [a] small LCD monitor with [a] loupe."  Other than, I suppose, that every single EVF is nothing but a small LCD monitor with an integrated loupe.  Are you mistakenly thinking that it's like a Portkeys LEYE or similar? 

You're right I was.  I'll clarify better what I mean. While they're all a little monitor with a loupe some are an approximately 3" LCD with a loupe (meaning the whole thing is big) and some are an approximately 1" OLED with a loupe and the whole thing is smaller. I see they exist as part of DSLRs and such but I'm wanting to get something like that separately so my whole rigged camera package isn't so big. The ZCam EVF could work I suppose. For my purposes there's no rush on this. (Still need to figure out a small shoulder rig anyway.) I've tried a Cineroid and it's way too big for my taste.

[JulioD]

8 hours ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

Sure, if you have some storage that can write at 16+ gigabytes/second, offloading from 4 NVMe drives will be screaming fast.  For me, when I'm offloading now from a single CF Express card, the 10gE network to my NAS is the bottleneck.  Making the storage medium faster wouldn't do a lot...  but if you have 100gE or you're offloading to a local NVMe RAID for editing, maybe it'll give some advantage.  🙂

Well I’m assuming a DIT on a three camera shoot will appreciate it.  
 

pretty sure they are doing a CFe dual card magazine too. 

[kye]

1 hour ago, JulioD said:

Well I’m assuming a DIT on a three camera shoot will appreciate it.  
 

pretty sure they are doing a CFe dual card magazine too. 

Yeah, my impression was that lots of these things were aimed at high-end professional users.

There was one bit where (if I understood him correctly) he said you can plug an ethernet cable into the camera and start editing the footage on the card while it's still in the camera.  There was another part where (if I understood correctly) he said that Resolve can even access clips that are still being recorded, which would enable an editor to get started on a multi-camera show with 10 cameras all rolling for hours at a time.

There is a whole world of situations outside the I-shoot-then-download-then-edit-then-colour-then-audio-then-export workflows.

[JulioD]

29 minutes ago, kye said:

Yeah, my impression was that lots of these things were aimed at high-end professional users.

There was one bit where (if I understood him correctly) he said you can plug an ethernet cable into the camera and start editing the footage on the card while it's still in the camera.  There was another part where (if I understood correctly) he said that Resolve can even access clips that are still being recorded, which would enable an editor to get started on a multi-camera show with 10 cameras all rolling for hours at a time.

There is a whole world of situations outside the I-shoot-then-download-then-edit-then-colour-then-audio-then-export workflows.

Yeah that's my understanding too, with the ethernet connection.  Why else do a 10G on the camera I guess?  

[eatstoomuchjam]

10 hours ago, Clark Nikolai said:

ZCam EVF could work I suppose. For my purposes there's no rush on this. (Still need to figure out a small shoulder rig anyway.) I've tried a Cineroid and it's way too big for my taste.

The Z Cam one is smaller than Cineroid, I'm pretty sure, but it's still fairly big.  I think the oeye is a big smaller.  I'm not sure about the Kameleon.  The Z Can one is smaller, though, than any other EVF + a wireless transmitter.  If you don't need wireless transmission, the oeye is probably a better choice (even if a little more expensive).
 

3 hours ago, JulioD said:

Well I’m assuming a DIT on a three camera shoot will appreciate it.  

Unless their offload medium can write crazy fast, they won't appreciate it a lot more than CF Express or similar.  I'd also say that if the media could be configured with redundaancy, having 4T-6T of local storage in the camera might result in fewer productions choosing to bring on a DIT.  🙂 

 

1 hour ago, kye said:

There was one bit where (if I understood him correctly) he said you can plug an ethernet cable into the camera and start editing the footage on the card while it's still in the camera.  There was another part where (if I understood correctly) he said that Resolve can even access clips that are still being recorded, which would enable an editor to get started on a multi-camera show with 10 cameras all rolling for hours at a time.

I think that the Resolve bit was working with files that were being uploaded in real time to their network attached storage device over IP 2110.  However, yes, I think he did say that it would be possible to fetch the files from the camera over 10gE without the need for a DIT.  Just keep in mind that offload over 10gE can use, at most/under ideal conditions, 1.25 gigabytes per second...  🙂 

[kye]

4 hours ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

Unless their offload medium can write crazy fast, they won't appreciate it a lot more than CF Express or similar.  I'd also say that if the media could be configured with redundaancy, having 4T-6T of local storage in the camera might result in fewer productions choosing to bring on a DIT.  🙂 

I think that the Resolve bit was working with files that were being uploaded in real time to their network attached storage device over IP 2110.  However, yes, I think he did say that it would be possible to fetch the files from the camera over 10gE without the need for a DIT.  Just keep in mind that offload over 10gE can use, at most/under ideal conditions, 1.25 gigabytes per second...  🙂 

Hmm..  10G ethernet isn't that fast I guess, but it's all relative.

For example if you're shooting the highest quality setting "12K - 12,288 x 8040 Blackmagic RAW 3:1 - 1,194 MB/s" then you'll only be able to pull it off the camera in real-time, but that's not likely to be a situation that most people would be in.

If you were shooting in 8K (Blackmagic RAW 3:1 - 533 MB/s) then you can copy it off in double-speed, or 8K 12:1 and 4K 3:1 (~133MB/s) then you're copying at 9x realtime.  Of course, most productions are going to be rolling for a lot less time than they're stopped in-between takes, so the DIT can keep pace with offloading the files off the camera throughout the shoot without having to stop the production to swap out media.  

It is a pretty low-cost way to protect yourself against camera/media failures where you'd lose the contents of the media.  

It's like that old backup saying..  Two is One and One is NONE!