12/04/2024
(https://buff.ly/4cXU0kY)
“Ladies and Gentlemen, please fasten your seatbelts.” The descent into Las Vegas Airport for NAB can be turbulent as adiabatic or katabatic winds from the nearby Valley of Fire shake the aircraft.
Blackmagic Design also seems to delight in shaking things up at NAB. This year is delightfully interesting with the introduction of their new flagship Blackmagic URSA Cine 12K LF camera.
- Full Frame 12K (35.64 x 23.32 mm) sensor.
- 12,288 x 8,040 effective pixels.
- 80 fps at 12K 3:2 Open Gate. 224 fps at 8K 2.4:1. Wow. etc.
- 16 stops of dynamic range.
- PL Mount. EF Mount included and LPL Mount as accessory.
- Internal IRNDs: Clear, 2, 4 and 6 stops.
- Optical Low Pass Filter.
- 8TB Removable Blackmagic Media Module.
- 6 anamorphic de-squeeze options available in all record formats.
FDTimes was introduced to the URSA Cine 12K LF by Blackmagic’s Business Development Manager for the Americas David Hoffman and Tim Schumann, Senior Product Manager.
David began, “Blackmagic has been making cameras for 12 years now. This time, we wanted to build a high-end digital cinema camera that essentially incorporated all of the knowledge that we’ve gained over the last 12 years and that responded to a lot of the feedback from users. There were no limits on features or costs. We wanted to look at what it was that was going to be a high-end camera, built from the ground up, and not do something that was an iteration or a second generation.”
Wait, wait—has it been 12 years already? It seems like yesterday when Blackmagic Design CEO Grant Petty held aloft their first 2.5K Blackmagic Cinema Camera at NAB 2012 (photo below). It sort of looked like the control stick on an airplane. “It has handles so you can man-up and shoot,” he said. “Or take all the parts off, and use it like a small stills camera.” It was said that he had the camera built because he wasn’t satisfied with the crop of cameras to take his own family videos.
One year later, at NAB 2013, he introduced the new 16mm 2K Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera and a Blackmagic Production Camera 4K with a 4K Super35 sensor and global shutter.
NAB 2014. Blackmagic introduced the first URSA camera, named Blackmagic URSA. It had huge, built-in 10" monitors on each side of the camera. The monitor on the left side folded out. The camera had a Super35 4K sensor, global shutter, 12 stops of dynamic range, and internal dual CFast 2.0 slots for 12-bit lossless compressed Cinema DNG RAW or Apple ProRes recording. You had a choice of PL, EF and B4 mounts—or no mount at all (to be used as a recorder for other cameras).
And so it went, an almost annual progression of innovative cameras. Along the way, many cinematic soothsayers predicted an eventual high-end motion picture camera. Here it is.
David Hoffman continued, “The URSA Cine 12K LF camera is a uniquely new product and a new category. We wanted to base it around a completely new Large Format 12K sensor design. We also wanted to think of it as not only a unique camera but also as part of a system that we have seen developing over the past five or six years. The URSA Cine supports the cloud-based storage and collaborative workflows that have been developed for DaVinci Resolve.
“Let’s begin with the design. Even though it shares some of the design cues from our URSA family, we looked at every component, right down to each screw, and analyzed its purpose. Does it give you the freedom you need and if not, do we need to change or do remove it? For example, we heard that some of the buttons on earlier models clicked too loudly. Now, every button is backlit and silent. Users also requested tool-less capability to attach accessories and change shooting modes: for example, moving the EVF forward or back or putting it on an extension arm. The engineers designed this new camera so you can work with it rapidly and without requiring any tools.
Tim Schumann said, “We developed our own sensor with an entirely new non-bayer color filter array for the URSA Mini Pro 12K. Since this new sensor is a full frame 12K, the pixels are larger so the dynamic range is much higher and is now 16 stops. We’re really proud of what the team has done. It’s a pretty big technical achievement and breakthrough and it’s one of the stepping stones of what we were working towards with the original Super35 12K design -- to do something different and to actually come up with a different sensor design, like a new kind of film stock and try and do something outside of the box. The images that we’ve been getting out of this new sensor are just incredible. Last weekend we had the camera out on a Technoscope crane, on a Steadycam, flying in a drone and then also a Mk II geared head and all sorts of different scenarios and the camera has performed really, really well with all those systems. So we’re really happy with it.”
You will be really happy with these things:
High brightne…
“Ladies and Gentlemen, please fasten your seatbelts.” The descent into Las Vegas Airport for NAB can be turbulent as adiabatic or katabatic winds from the nearby Valley of Fire shake the aircraft. Blackmagic Design also seems to delight in shaking things up at NAB. This year is delightfully inte...
