eatstoomuchjam

Sort of a new Raptor. It's just a reduced/cheaper version of the existing V-Raptor. It's basically the same as Komodo vs Komodo-X. At $15,000, it's still awfully expensive, but at least it helps them stay competitive with the UC 12K pricing-wise. I suspect that with some of the other recent releases, the number of people willing to go spend $30k on a V-Raptor X isn't huge, a very small number of Hollywood productions notwithstanding. Why shouldn't they? They own both codecs and now they can tell people that it's a camera you can use as a B camera to your Z9 or it's a camera that you can use as a B Cam to your Komodo-X or V-Raptor (or crash cam) and have it fit neatly into both workflows. This is where I am, but $2,600 isn't "cheap" for me. Sub-$2k, though, and I'm starting to pay attention. Since that won't happen, I'm probably in the "wait 6 months and pick it up used" camp.

So it would be a camera with the Z6 III sensor, but a smaller body that includes Redcode for... the same price as the Z6 III? Cool story, Nikon. Cool story. I'll be interested to see test results for it and would consider it once it's available used.

If somehow the "Red tech" is Redcode and the rumors are wrong and that it has a CF Express, this could be a big seller (and interesting to me). But yeah, those things look increasingly unlikely. Still, Nikon Raw to SD card could be compelling, depending on other features/specs/price. The big question, really, is how much Nikon want to preserve Red as a "premium" brand vs trying to make Nikon a name that people associate with cinema/video.

The official announcement happened. The most recent rumors seem to have been correct. It's probably not a camera for me, but it looks like a solid option for people who want a compact Canon which can do 3:2. Along with the announcement, there were firmware updates announced for C80, C70, R5C, and C400. They seem not very interesting in general, but the C400 will get open gate which will be nice for people who want that.

Other than "open gate" and "extra CF Express slot," that list sounds like a less good R5C. You can go spend $800 less (new) or more than $1,000 less (used) and get all the same, but with 8Kp60 raw video and 45 megapixel still images. Oh, and burst photo rate. R5C matches R5, IIRC, and maxes out at 20? Doubt that's a big selling point on a cinema line camera, though. (Broken record: But make that 7K DGO and...)

I'm definitely no electronic engineer, but the 10-15x estimate seems high to me. A sensor that is 2-4x the size and with 2x the photosites of the C70 would presumably cost more than the C70 sensor (oversized S35), but 15x seems awfully extreme. At its core, it's primarily just a second output channel from each photosite that gets amplified differently and then the two are merged with an extremely simple algorithm. The extra processing requirements for that are not all that high - and, again, a fairly small camera from 2020 was able to do it at 4K with no problem.

Indeed! If it isn't a DGO sensor, I'm not too certain that I have a reason to care about this camera much. It's not to say it'd be bad, just that it wouldn't do much that's better/different from cameras I already own - and 3:2 recording isn't a big selling point for me. I'm not sure that DGO needs that much more bandwidth, though. The C70 could do it from 4K all the way back in 2020. Surely, we've come far enough in 5 years that it could now be done on a smaller body with 3-4x the data rate! 😉 Anyway, I'm hopeful.

I'm on the other side - if they put a 6K DGO sensor in that body, it's almost definitely for me. I'd be so pumped to have DGO in such a small body - not to mention dedicated timecode so I don't kill my ears before I remember to mute the audio track that has the scratchy timecode sound. The biggest questions would be what existing gear I'd be selling in order to finance the purchase and whether I'd be waiting for used models to become available. 😅

Ergonomics look good. CF Express is nice and a welcome surprise, given that the rumors are for 6K resolution and the C80 which is also 6K only has dual SD card slots. That was my first thought, but the C80 also has them so there must be more Canon adapters that can be screwed in? Or maybe this one is high-end APS-C? I'd be very OK with that.

The only "Red tech" that anybody is likely to really care about is Redcode and/or the Red's sensors. If Nikon release some sort of entry-level camera where the only Red tech is a color profile to have SOOC colors look like Red's image, I hope their people doing the presentation are going to be wearing fireproof suits because they will get flamed.

Other than the sensors and Redcode, it's hard to think of what interesting tech there is to add. Redcode to SD card? 🤣 Maybe in MQ, LQ, and ELQ modes (in modern Red terminology) and maybe in LQ at 3:2. "HQ - High data rate - Up to ~ 280 MB/s (~30 minutes recording time)* MQ - Medium data rate (default) - ~175 MB/s (~48 minutes recording time)* LQ - Lowest data rate - ~110 MB/s (~1 hour and 17 minutes recording time)* * Data rate assumes camera settings at 6K 17:9, 23.98 FPS. Recording time assumes a 512 GB CFast card. Your actual data rate will depend on complexity of the shooting scene and capture settings. Data rates subject to change with future updates." (https://docs.red.com/955-0196_v1.6/Content/4_Menus/ProjSet/R3D_Quality.htm) SD card benchmarks: https://alikgriffin.com/ultimate-guide-memory-cards/ The very fastest one tested managed 268MB/s write speed and I'd be willing to bet that the person writing the article didn't write continuously for 10+ minutes. MicroSD, on the other hand, just seems insane. Proxies, maybe? But why? Who is asking for MicroSD in a full-sized camera? A second SD card which can plug directly into most laptops would make a lot more sense.

Anything is possible, of course, and I have absolutely no insight beyond rumors, but it still seems a little weird to me. It should be a lot less computationally expensive to handle QB readout (I think this might even be done by circuitry in the sensor itself) than to take a 7K image and downsample it to 6K at high quality. Seems like it'd be a pretty big hit on battery life and heat. Good thing it's rumored to have a fan! Although wasn't there recently a camera that came out and still overheated, even though it had a fan? Maybe Canon's management saw that and got upset that somebody invented a hammer that they never even imagined and they instantly put their best people on it. 😉

I'm glad - I do my best every day to forget them. 😉 (I also forgot Kai and Lok, but less intentionally)

Sure, but if it's not at all hybrid, it's kind of a weird decision to put in a 7K sensor and downsample from it vs just using a native 6K sensor. It's not to say that they wouldn't, just that it'd be a little weird. Similarly, the A7SIII/FX3 are both 12 megapixel stills cameras. While you can find some stills photographers who don't mind 24, a lot more who are OK with 33, and the vast majority are OK with 45. You're really not going to find many who will accept 12.

The new camera is coming out at a similar price point to the R5 II and I know several people who bought R5 series cameras primarily for video work. I'd be glad to be wrong about this one, of course. And as Django pointed out, they might go e-shutter only which would be likely to turn off a lot of photographers. Of course, if RS is <10ms, that might un-turn off some of them. Speaking for myself, the biggest question is whether it would have DGO. I would take 33 megapixels with 2 extra stops thanks to DGO over 45 megapixels. OLPF might also be a thing that would push it more to the strictly video side of things, but if it had one and between DGO and OLPF, it had an image like the C70, but in a smaller body with better low-light performance and more reliable AF, it might be in the rare category of cameras that I'd be excited enough to buy new as opposed to waiting 6-12 months for them to get a 10% price drop on the used market...

The C80 has internal ND and there's almost no way this one does, based on the size. C80 also has XLR, SDI, and about a bazillion buttons that this one doesn't. On paper, the R5C had a number of advantages over the C70, including better AF and 8K shooting. But it also lacked internal ND, XLR, etc. If I were Canon, I'd honestly be a lot more concerned about sales of the R5 II than the C80/C400 if this camera has most of the rumored specs. Especially if it has a DGO sensor, I'd gladly take that over 8K recording and 10-15 more megapixels for still photos.

The rumor that was highlighted said it was "optional" which would absolutely imply detachable. 6K vs 4K, internal raw, and rumored DGO sensor would all be better on a spec sheet. But it's also true that we're in a time of decreasing returns. The FX3 is a great camera. It makes a good image, can work with very little light, has fantastic autofocus, and it's small/portable. Everything about it is absolutely enough for the vast majority of current productions. You could just as easily respond that you don't care about 6K, raw, or an extra stop or two of dynamic range and you'd be absolutely correct. On the other hand, Canon has lost a lot of their video production market share and they need something that they can point to when current users say they want something like an FX3, and ideally a little better than the FX3 so that their users still feel good buying Canon stuff.

So now we know there aren't XLR on the body itself, but we also know that Canon are releasing a first-party XLR hotshoe adapter (maybe it'll be backward-compatible with R5C/R5 II, etc).

And yet, Leica, Panasonic, Sigma, Pentax, Fuji, OM System, and others seem to keep making and selling cameras despite the market dominance of Canon/Nikon/Sony. Guess you know more than the bosses at any of those companies as well. You should let them know about the futility of competing with the big 3, especially Fuji. They only had around 3 of the 5 top-selling cameras at Map Camera in 2024 and should probably quit before they embarrass themselves any further, as obviously nobody can compete with the big 3. DJi would clearly be better-served focusing on the enormous market segment that is... 360 cameras. 🤣

No, it would send the message that the lens mount that they invented for drones in 2017 is not suitable for a general-purpose MILC. And again, to release a new camera with 6 overpriced and mediocre first-party lenses available for it would be fucking stupid and almost nobody would buy it. They'd anger almost none of the existing customers who own those lenses which, again, includes me, a person who would never buy them for any system that I didn't expect to be hurtling through air at 60mph/100km/h. It's not at all clear what would be gained by swapping some mounts and rebranding Viltrox lenses as first-party lenses, especially if those lenses are already available for other existing mirrorless systems. The smart play if they want to have a fixed mount is L mount, a system which comes with great lenses already available from first-party makers like Leica, Panasonic, and Sigma - and a bunch of third-party lenses from all of the usual suspects and which they already support and sell. Other than "sends a message that they don't believe in your system," you have yet to present any sort of even remotely coherent argument for how DL mount would make any sense - or how not including DL mount would impact the sales of the drones or Ronin 4D which are the only cameras in existence that can currently use it. As to their interest in entering the market, it's not impossible to think that the success of the Ronin 4D and Pocket 3 have them considering adding something in-between the two. A few years ago, you might also have insisted that DJI would have no interest in entering the action camera market and competing with GoPro - but now they're 3 generations into that. Or just a few months ago, you might have insisted that they'd have no interest in competing with Insta360 with 360 capture, but yet, they did that too. They also wouldn't be "entering" the market. They are in the MILC market with the Hasselblad brand which they own. And yet, they also probably won't use the Hasselblad mount and that also won't send a message that they "don't believe in their own system."

Nikon wouldn't be supporting RF mount at all if they didn't buy a company already making cameras that used it. And what was the first (or one of the first, I don't track it that much) things they did? Release most of the same cameras again using their own mount. DL mount was invented for drones (I think for the X7), a category where DJI has no competition at all and where they can get away with selling a mediocre 35mm f/2.8 lens for $1,200-1,400 (prices on the others are similar). If DJI management are as dumb as you're implying and think that they can sell cameras that can only use those lenses, then they deserve the enormous failure they're about to suffer. I suspect they aren't idiots, though. The only reason that I have the 24/35/50 is that I got a really good used deal on the 24 and got a kit with the 16/35/50 from ebay for $2,200 and immediately sold the 16 for about $200 - and the only reason that I was willing to spend $1k/lens for the others is that I wanted aerodynamic lenses for when they're on a camera going around 100km/h. If buying a camera for a standard mirrorless camera that I don't plan to hang off the side of my car at high speed, though, if you give me the choice of a mediocre 50mm f/2.8 for $1,199 or an excellent G Master 50mm f/1.4 for $1,298 (current B&H pricing), you've given me the simplest choice of all time. I'd buy a Sony camera and the GM. Most people would. And I don't even like Sony that much (though I did shoot with them for 5+ years). As BTM_Pix already pointed out, DJI have been part of the L mount alliance for a while now and as I already pointed out, DJI already make and sell an L mount for the Ronin 4D. My hope would be, if they release a very small mirrorless camera (and if I want that camera) is that it would just accept the lens mounts for Ronin 4D since I already have them in DL, M, and EF mount (and I'm not opposed to also getting one in L mount)

I just checked and my initial enthusiasm for the cloud option for something like a 48hff or similar faded quickly. It looks like the option is not granular enough for a weekend project - minimum interval is 1 month and it's $30. At that price, I might just deal with the headache of sharing one of my licenses/seats with the editor for the weekend (bought one, got one with the UC12K, each has two seats). I was really more hoping for a thing that would let me toggle it on for the weekend for around $10. At least the free version of Resolve is able to download the proxies from BM cloud that were made when the DIT (which is sometimes me) imported media into my laptop on-site. I'm also kind of excited to experiment with the same with the UC12K's wifi since I think it can sync proxies to BM cloud directly from the camera. Hope they don't change that to push that use case into a $30 cost. FWIW, the rest of my cloud plan (that I am not actively using right now so I should probably cut down on) is $12.50 for 500GB of storage and $5 for a cloud project library. That's the minimum that I've found is needed to create Cloud projects with shared proxies. Wish I could pay a bit less for 100GB, though - proxies ain't that big.

Willing to bet that was a typo and should have said "EF mount."

Do you mean their cinema camera that has swappable mounts including DL mount, L mount, and M mount all coming first-party from DJI themselves? And E mount coming third-party rebranded by DJI? And EF and PL mount from third parties? If you go on any Ronin 4D user group, you will quickly see that Sony E mount seems to be the most popular followed by L mount. I think you're just flat-out wrong on this, sorry. DJi have a total of 6 lenses for DL mount, IIRC. 16/2.8 (APS-C), 24/2.8, 35/2.8, 50/2.8, 75/1.8, and 17-28/4 PZ. These lenses are generally considered mediocre - I have had every one, sold the 16 (since cropping for it is pretty redundant with 24 on FF) and returned the 75 after verifying that it didn't fix the autofocus lag I was getting on a manual mount Leica lens. The whole point of those DJI lenses (except the zoom) is that they are very light weight and designed to be aerodynamic - I use them when mounting the R4D on a car. I like the 17-28, but it's really a focal length that basically screams "use me on a gimbal" and would have everybody instantly demanding a 24-70 ASAP. There two third parties who have made a small number of lenses for the mount, the most interesting being Viltrox who have a set of f/1.8 lenses. This would put them in the position of having to play huge catch-up on lenses since everybody else has a many years-long head start and it'll be a major uphill fight to get third parties like Sigma to make lenses for it, given the lack of market penetration. So it makes perfect sense that DJI would release a new camera using a mount that they already support and offer on their cinema camera. That or that their cinema camera would just support the mount system for the R4D and all of the mounts that go with it.

Part of me wants to knee-jerk against anything even remotely resembling a subscription, but this is also something I've wanted when using BM Cloud on things like a 48 hour film project to collaborate with others. If the studio rental is cheap, I might even do this sometime.