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First footage of the Blackmagic URSA at 80fps in 4K


Andrew Reid
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Thanks to Norbert Bielan in New York for this test footage. You can read his thoughts on shooting with the URSA below.

Blackmagic's latest unified firmware release is mainly about the URSA and what an update it is. The new firmware bumps the maximum frame rate up to 80fps in 4K and adds a new 3:1 compression setting for raw recording, fitting more material onto CFast cards.

The URSA also makes an interesting back-end for your existing 4K HDMI camera such as the Sony A7S. Has anybody actually tried this combination yet?

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Not sure how that grade abysmal. MattH, would you please post some of your films with examples of your grading work so that we know your reference point and so we can all see how it's supposed to be done. Thanks.

 

Would you please escort your sanctimonious attitude out the door.  I'm here to discuss with people not justify myself to jonsey jones.  You don't have to be Stanley Kubrick to know that Jaws The Revenge is a shit film.  Consider your 'point' thoroughly dismissed.

 

As for what I dislike about the grade.  Firstly its teal and orange which I despise, and it's not even done subtly.  There isn't much orange in these shots so its just teal teal teal beyond any level of taste or meaning.  It's just arbitrary messing around with color for messing round's sake.

 

Secondly its "the blacks" and that isn't in quotation marks by mistake.  For in some shots they do not exist.  But it isn't like they merely left the shadows milky.  It looks like they've heavily crushed the blacks taking all the detail out of the shadows but then expanded it back out again so that the black is now grey, so you've basically just got a lump of solid bluey grey for shadows.  Look at the guys face at 0:29! Is that how a human face should look?

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Guest Ebrahim Saadawi

I love the quality and the grade! If they had used smaller/lighter construction material, took away a couple of LCDs and used a 3-5" main monitor, this could have been a very successful rival for the reds & C series and fs7, etc. That brick of a body will drive away most customers and makes it a very specialized tool. 

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Is it a LUT that gives all Blackmagic cameras that blue cast? Or is it the camera itself? 

I'm pretty sure it's the color science that they built into the camera. To sort of give you a ready to go "teal&orange" base .. but it's pretty botched if you ask me and imho one of the reasons why people are in 95% of cases not able to produce a nice colors with the BMCC and BMPCC. AJA too seems to be doing everything they can to botch the picture before the person has an oppurtunity to work on it.

 

heh so much for RAW when you're only getting bayered data but with already destroyed color information thanks to not so great "color science"..

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Guest Ebrahim Saadawi

I find it very hard to believe the BM cameras colour the images teal and orange in-camera. Their colour are actually very accurate and raw of course gives the option to get any look. Perhaps it's the least camera with a "colour science" or a special colour rendition, just accurate and strong.

I don't think if I shoot an actor in a grey street for example that the camera will colour the street in teal and his face in orange. That has to be done in Resolve.

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I'm pretty sure it's the color science that they built into the camera. To sort of give you a ready to go "teal&orange" base .. but it's pretty botched if you ask me and imho one of the reasons why people are in 95% of cases not able to produce a nice colors with the BMCC and BMPCC. AJA too seems to be doing everything they can to botch the picture before the person has an oppurtunity to work on it.

 

heh so much for RAW when you're only getting bayered data but with already destroyed color information thanks to not so great "color science"..

 

If by "pretty sure" you mean that you just made something up, than yes you're pretty sure indeed. BMD Film color space does not bake in a teal orange grade, that's silly.

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The colour science is not baked in as 'teal and orange' but the colour science is pretty awful. Perhaps that's why this look is so ubiquitous, because it's the only one that looks all that decent..
I won't use a Blackmagic camera if I can help it because the colours are awful, even in ProRes and raw. It takes much more work to get the colours somewhere where they look okay than almost any other camera, especially any other camera shooting ProRes or raw.
And I'm still to see someone grade it to a point that looks relatively nice.

Seems like the camera's a sucker for flicker - not sure if the lights in the trees would have been flickering like that on the day. Also the sign, and the second last shot, there's flickering on the wall on the left side of frame. You would think with such a humongous screen you'd at least be able to see that end flicker.

The biggest problem with this camera is it will be as hard to build up a shoulder rig for as the RED, but with more weight.

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I find it very hard to believe the BM cameras colour the images teal and orange in-camera. Their colour are actually very accurate and raw of course gives the option to get any look. Perhaps it's the least camera with a "colour science" or a special colour rendition, just accurate and strong.

I don't think if I shoot an actor in a grey street for example that the camera will colour the street in teal and his face in orange. That has to be done in Resolve.

 are you joking? i have a very unique talent i can spot BMC footage from 100 miles...

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If by "pretty sure" you mean that you just made something up, than yes you're pretty sure indeed. BMD Film color space does not bake in a teal orange grade, that's silly.

 

Just to make myself clear - I was only talking about BMCC and BMPCC. Not the BM4K or the URSA - haven't seen any strange biass toward certain colors in RAW from BM4K. I spent days upon days with BMCC and BMPCC to find that the blues always pop out strangely together with the oranges without me wanting this effect during daylight shots - I just pushed the saturation slightly and bam I could see the blues/oranges getting too much attention. It drove me almost insane - maybe it's the sensor characteristics (doubt it heavily) or maybe it's the color science. This did not happen on any camera I used previously or after so that's why "I'm pretty sure" - because it happened.

 

And "RAW" does not give you the oppurtunity to have "any look" - you're tied to what the sensor is capable of and what the color science has already done to the RAW data - destructive modification. When you're getting "RAW" means that you're only getting a bayered image - this does not mean that the image has not gone through some processing. People will hopefully start understanding this after Apertus releases the AXIOM camera and people with some programming skills start to play with the color science on the most bottom level.

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I read the comments before I watched the sample. I was expecting this to be the worst piece of $hit garbage with grey blacks and atrocious everything. People are way too uptight. The flicker is annoying, but there wasn't anything about the color that said, this is dog$hit to me. If the only thing I start to nitpick is the content then the color really isn't as bad as I expected based on the comments. Nitpick as we will, but I though the reactions were a little overboard....or did I watch the wrong video? ;-) 

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I find it very hard to believe the BM cameras colour the images teal and orange in-camera. Their colour are actually very accurate and raw of course gives the option to get any look. Perhaps it's the least camera with a "colour science" or a special colour rendition, just accurate and strong.

I don't think if I shoot an actor in a grey street for example that the camera will colour the street in teal and his face in orange. That has to be done in Resolve.

 

Nah, it's not the camera. The orange and teal look is just some people's idea of a cool cinematic look, and it has been pretty popular lately. My guess is that at least one reason it's used so widely is simply because it's very quick and so easy to do. An instant "LUT." Apart from the more complex LUTs there are several simple orange&teal presets available. One could simply slap such a preset onto the flat Film log of the BM cameras and bingo boom chaga laga, the film is good to go. Thus the end result may look anything between nice and awful. Depending on luck, the technique, the source material and the editor.

 

 

I read the comments before I watched the sample. I was expecting this to be the worst piece of $hit garbage with grey blacks and atrocious everything. People are way too uptight. The flicker is annoying, but there wasn't anything about the color that said, this is dog$hit to me. If the only thing I start to nitpick is the content then the color really isn't as bad as I expected based on the comments. Nitpick as we will, but I though the reactions were a little overboard....or did I watch the wrong video? ;-) 

 

Well, opinions tend to get amplified online at times. Whether we like the colour cast or not, it's a matter of taste, but that wasn't even the point of that clip in the first place, was it. The discussion veered off topic into colour grading pretty early. 

 

I believe the point of the clip was to showcase the slo-mo capabilities of the Ursa, not the grading skills of the shooter, and as such the clip did sort of prove a point, and the motion looked pretty nice. Apart from that unfortunate flicker of the lights.

 

 

I’d love to see Blackmagic change the form factor of their 2.5K Cinema Camera next and reduce power consumption for longer run-times on a smaller, less bulky battery. Something in-between the Pocket and Cinema cameras at 2.5K would be great.

 

Yeah, me too. As long as that form factor is not a typical right shoulder camcorder.

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