eatstoomuchjam

I hope they bring a few of the software features to the RS 1" 360 camera. It looks like the X4 has improved details over the 1", but none of it looked like enough that I'd run out to spend a few hundred bucks on yet another camera, especially since the 1" is still better in low light. Most of the other stuff that I saw in comparisons seemed like it would be solved by tweaking levels or contrast in post. If selfie sticks weren't so universally looked down on, Insta360's combo of 360 camera + great studio software should make them the darlings of the vlog community. Not much need to even pay any attention to where the camera is or if you're in frame - and if something interesting happens, no need to do anything with the camera. Just comment on it so you know when to turn the automatic tracker off in post. 🙂

I think it crops, but not a lot. 🙂 The M4 is the same sensor as the original E2 and I always found the DR to be fine on it (I wish the high dynamic range mode had worked better) and the noise was fine for me as long as the image was exposed to the right. If you exposed at all to the left, though... noise city. In the end, I sold it because I didn't need the high frame rates so much and other than that, there was nothing it did that the F6 didn't do better. Good point about used prices, btw!

And the E2-F6 Pro is even closer to what is described since it has a removable integrated screen with controls and SDI for lower-latency monitoring - not sure it's worth the extra $1000 to me, though. 😛 As for faster readout on the E2-F6, if you're willing to sacrifice around a stop of dynamic range, there's a low jello mode (though I can't remember what limits there are on using it - it may not be available in all resolutions/frame rates). I've never found the F6 jello too objectionable so I never bothered turning it on to figure out how much it helps.

If the R5 II is exactly like the R5, but with better cooling and dynamic range (dare we dream of DGO?) and it's about the same price, I will almost certainly trade in my R5 toward one. I'd ask for timecode too, but I'm sure they'll hold that out for the R5C II.

Exactly. 10gE is only 1.2 gigabytes per second. The CF Express card in a reader can do more than 2 gigabytes per second. If you run 25gE (about 3 gigabytes/second), you'll probably be able to keep up with a single CF Express card. With 100gE, you can do 12.5 gigabytes/second, optimally, but I'm willing to bet you'll find that there are weird limitations in the software stack that prevent you from getting close to that - at least over SMB or similar. You could also do multiple interfaces in the server and make sure that SMB multichannel is enabled on the client and the server. I haven't tested it, but in theory, newer versions of Windows (and Samba) support it. At this moment, I don't feel any need to optimize beyond having 10gE for my stuff. I guess if I cared that much about getting the fastest possible offload, I could just carry the card/reader into the basement and direct connect them to my server. Even on shoots where we're running two cameras and shooting raw, I don't think I've ever generated more than about 1.5T in a day. Offloading it over 10gE takes about half an hour when I get home. That's about as long as it takes me to carry all the gear from my car into the house. So my perspective is clearly not that of a high-budget production. 😛

10gE is plenty fast for a lot of things and as you said, on many productions, the camera ultimately spends more time stopped than it does rolling. Though also for a lot of productions that I'm on, at least, it would be far from ideal to need to keep the camera tethered to a network switch so that somebody could continuously offload footage. Though for the sort of productions that take 30+ minutes to move the camera, etc, I'm sure it would be great... though for productions with that sort of time/budget, $1600 is a no-brainer for a second module for the DIT to swap back and forth. Anyway, it's cool storage and I hope it becomes some sort of standard, even if for the sorts of stuff I do, CF Express will continue to be more than fast enough for a while to come.

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). 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... 🙂

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. 🙂

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. 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. 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.

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. 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."

I'm so envious! I canceled my preorder for the non-limited edition when I wasn't in the first round of shipments. I travel often enough that uncertain shipping dates drive me up a wall. "Good news, we finally shipped your product with signature required! It will be there on Tuesday." (At that point, I usually won't be home until the next week or later - vacation hold/hold for pickup is really variable by carrier and not as good as one would hope) Anyway, looking forward to seeing what you shoot with it! I'll be waiting until they're on store shelves, apparently - unless some other shiny thing catches my eye before then.

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. 😄 Without how they're sending the video signal over USB-C, it's hard to know if it could be hacked to work with other cameras - but if you want an EVF to use with other cameras, I'd suggest just getting the Z Cam or Portkeys one. The one from Z Cam also can act as a video transmitter so another thing that you don't have to have hanging off of your kit.

Oh, hey! They finally released a box camera. Pyxis 6K which uses the same sensor, apparently, as their full frame BMPCC. Pyxis is compatible with the Ursa accessories including the USB EVF. Does this mean I'm actually going to want a Black Magic camera for the first time since the original BMCC? It might. Let's see the price...

Oh, posted too soon. They're also going to release an Ursa cine with a new 17K VV sensor around the end of the year. That's even more resolution than the GFX 100 has in photo mode. Same pixel size as the 12K version - just stretched out to 65mm wide.

Ursa Cine looks like a huge upgrade over UM12K - and priced to match. $15k for the base package. They kept 12K, but went full frame. It has much better DR and even though they didn't mention it (or if they did, I missed it), RS looked pretty good in their example footage. Media is up to 16 lanes of NVMe. I think Grant mentioned that the camera will come with an 8TB module which is made up of 4 separate drives (each with 4 lanes of NVMe). The camera also has 10gE for output. As far as why there's a USB-C on the front, it's actually for the EVF which connects by a single cable.

The new automatic parameters for denoising and the film look panel in Resolve are both a bit exciting. BMD might have just tanked sales for Dehancer and/or FilmConvert, especially if the new film look panel allows export/sharing of settings.

Improbable predictions: BMD will announce that they have been acquired by Ricoh/Pentax Resolve will be fully dropping support for BRAW and adopting ProRes RAW New DaVinci Resolve Nano Panel with only a single trackball and no sliders/knobs/buttons New DaVinci Resolve Pico Panel with just a single small button that can only order pizza from Dominos. What flavor of pizza? It'll be a surprise every time. Black Magic Cloud is merging with frame.io so that customers will only have to pay one subscription fee to share with people on either system Based on strong sales of the UM12K, there will now be a UM36K which uses a beam splitter and 3 copies of the UM12K sensor for each of the R, G, and B channels similar to 3-chip camcorders of the past New AI assist camera module that detects if you aren't recording in BM raw - and if not, a small robot version of Grant Petty jumps out and punches the user in the groin until the camera settings are updated

At least not new features for the stuff that's baked into the ASIC. At least in the case of Z Cam, the E2 got so many features through firmware updates that it's basically a different camera now than when it was released. 🙂

It's great that you can reshoot! I'd also say that if the composition/angles and/or lighting are boring, moving the camera is just a crutch anyway. Fincher's stuff usually looks great/cinematic and he rarely moves the camera. That said, moving the camera can be a great addition to good composition and lighting. Anyway, it sounds like you're off to a solid start! Looking forward to seeing some wip scenes or screen grabs!

Another factor for overheating can be the processor in the camera. The Z Cam E2 series are known for running very well even in fairly extreme conditions (though other components such as memory cards, SSD's, monitors, etc overheat). This is partly because of proper cooling/lack of IBIS, but also because a lot of image functions in the camera are done with ASIC vs the FPGA that some of the overheating cameras use. It has the drawback that Z Cam can't implement some changes (at least not without releasing a whole new controller board), but has big advantages for cooling and power use (can run for hours on an NP-F550). I guess they added a cooling fan to the new F6 Pro - so maybe they changed processors for it or they decided to cool the memory card, etc.

There's nothing wrong with baking in a LUT if that fits your goals. If you're handing off the footage to someone else to color/grade, they might resent you for it, though. As long as that isn't the case, the only thing that's really "wrong" is failing to get the shot/look that you wanted.

Yeah - as kye said, ISO is not invariant between cameras. In theory, it should be - as the name implies, there is actually an ISO standard (ISO 12232) for how sensitivity of a digital medium should be measured (and before it, there was one for how sensitivity of film should be measured), but either the digital spec is insufficiently exact or different manufacturers just choose to ignore some or all of it. This is one of the reasons that side by side camera shootouts tend to devolve to pointless arguments and bickering in the comment section. There are too many variables. Similarly, the t-stops marked on different cinema lenses aren't fully consistent between vendors in how much light they transmit. I haven't found them to be radically different (not nearly as much as with f-stops!), but there can be noticeable differences.

What difference did you expect to see? 4.5K vs 5K is barely any different and unless you're doing heavy grading or SFX work, going from 3:1 to 7.5:1 compression of raw footage should result in minimal impact to the visible image.

Without watching the videos and just looking at the screenshots, it looks like the ZV-E1 was exposed about 2/3 stop brighter than the FX30. Assuming that it's 10-bit footage with a decent codec, you will drag a single slider slightly to the right in post and the images will look much more similar. It is likely that the ZV-E1 has slightly more DR than the FX30 (full frame vs aps-c of a similar generation). In the relatively low-contrast scene that's shown, if the exposure is within a stop or so of (what I think of as) correct, you would never know or care.

Another vote for "buy used from a reputable dealer with a return policy" when possible - both with camera bodies and lenses. They usually have a 30-day return policy as well - so that gives you some time to test the camera. Personally, for the most part, I don't buy extended warranties and if you're going to buy one from a third party, try to do some investigation to understand whether people are happy with it when they try to use it. I do carry extra camera insurance, though, for a bunch of my stuff. On the rare occasion that there is a problem with the camera, you can send it back to the manufacturer for repair, even if it's out of warranty. It'll just cost you a bit to have it repaired. For me, over the last 25 years or so, I've definitely spent less on repairing cameras than I would have spent on extended warranties for all of them. YMMV