IBC 2014 product launches place 4K in the mainstream

A round-up of 4K items of interest from IBC 2014 in Amsterdam.

Those of use who use DSLRs like the Canon 5D to shoot time lapses have been aware of the 4K phenomenon longer than most. The detail it produces and the ability to move the video around within an HD raster without quality loss are just two of the benefits of shooting in 4K. The football World Cup in Brazil was a testing bed for broadcast 4K and many high-end TV series have been shot in 4K - some have even been transmitted (on Netflix) in 4K.

The biggest drawback with 4K is its size. File sizes are huge and because it is such high quality you don't want to compress it too much. Most versions of HD codecs such as ProRes and H264 have been beefed up to handle 4K images but the obvious omission was a new DNx codec from Avid. Most people expected Avid to enhance their AMA system which uses plug-ins to handle other codecs within Media Composer. Most of the time I get to a point in the edit where I transcode the AMA material to DNxHD which Avid handles beautifully and is compatible through the Avid/EVS system. 

Yesterday at IBC in Amsterdam Avid announced they have developed DNxHR a 4K (strictly a UHD) version of their codec which will be available in Q4 of this year. They have called it "4K beauty without the bandwidth" and are releasing a new version of Media Composer to cope with it. Hopefully this will be a universal codec that once added to a PC or Mac can be used in Adobe, DaVinci Resolve and other edit systems. I have yet to discover the all important MB/sec size of this codec but it could be a good alternative to H.265 for distribution of 4K material.

Blackmagic Design has been an early advocate of 4K and is now producing very usable firmware for its 4K Production Camera. In the older HD Cinema Camera DNxHD was one of the recording options so I hope the Production Camera will gain DNxHR recording when it is released.

Blackmagic also added a new monitor to its line-up today with the SmartView 4K, a 15 inch rack mount (or VESA mount) LCD monitor for under $2,000.

Blackmagic Design SmartView 4K

Not sure how good it will be for grading (no gamut information), but it has built-in LUTs so it is intended to be used by creatives and not just engineers. It is due out in December 2014 and hopefully won't experience the delays of other Blackmagic products.

One monitor that you can definitely grade on is Sony's new BVM-X300 4K OLED Master Monitor. I am sitting in front of its HD cousin and it is the best monitor I have ever seen, I cannot wait to see the 4K version but unfortunately I'm not in Amsterdam this week but an edit suite near Heathrow.

Sony BVM-X300 4K OLED master monitor

Unlike the Blackmagic Design monitor this 30 inch monster is true 4K (4096x2160) with an extra wide gamut range, although Sony must be gutted that is doesn't cover the full ITU-R BT2020 wide colour spaces and have to admit it in their documentation. Of course this will probably cost more than a small car, even if that small car is a mini with all the extras on. Canon's competing monitor, the DP-V3010 is currently £29,000 at CVP.

The Blackmagic Production Camera 4K experience Part 2

In part 1 of this blog I documented the first experiences of using the Blackmagic Design Production Camera (BMPC) and how I chose the SanDisk Extreme II 240GB SSDs, a cheap battery solution and a low priced EVF monitor. So far this setup has cost £2310 for the camera, nothing for the battery system (OK about £16 if you bought it), £260 for 2 SSD cards and £400 for the Cineroid EVF-4CSS a total of £2986 (or €3577 or $4936). To this I have to add a tripod and of course suitable Canon lenses which can easily double the price.

But as a result I have a rig capable of shooting 4K pictures on a good codec (ProRes at the moment) with a global shutter (so no "jello") and I have a piece of software that would cost $995 if bought separately, more about this later. But the usability of the BMPC is always an issue and the form factor of the camera worried me because it is heavy and, I predict, easy to drop. I also needed something to attach the EVF and an external microphone. 

I had looked at a lot of cages but the cheap ones were, well cheap, and all of them were bulky and meant I couldn't fit all the kit in my brilliant Lowepro Stealth Reporter D550AW bag. My solution is from Redrock Micro with a top handle and the Ultraplate which added about £100 to the total. The Ultraplate offers just enough screw points to attach the handle, the EVF on a mini magic arm and a mic or recorder if needed.

So the whole rig looks like this.

Post Production

So I have shot the footage, got (most of) it in focus thanks to the EVF and now I need to edit it and Blackmagic Design have kindly included a copy of DaVinci Resolve 10 with a USB key in the BMPC box to help me. This is the first time I have tried to work with 4K footage and I have a pretty powerful PC to do so with i7 processor, 32 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 570 and Quadro FX580 graphics cards. Unfortunately this is far to weak to properly edit 4K footage and as I don't have a 4K monitor I can either view the footage in HD or just see the top half of the footage spread over two 1920 monitors. 

It's not brilliant but it is possible to work this way and produce great results. I work mainly with Avid Media Composer which is less than useless for 4K or Adobe After Effects which is more than good but Resolve is like neither of these and if you are going to use it properly will take fair bit of learning  - persevere it is well worth it. This is not a tutorial in Resolve so I just want to highlight some of the Eureka moments I have had so far. 

Where you store your footage for editing is really important, run the included Blackmagic Disk Speed Test on all your drives and put the material on the fastest one - you can archive to a slower drive later. A raid drive such as the G-Raid is likely to be the best, better than the fast SSD (that was a surprise). 

Unless you have a monster $1000+ GPU like the GTX690 or NVIDIA Titan you will not be able to play 4K on your timeline, you will get a screen of shash and a GPU out of memory message. Go to project settings and select 1920x1080 as your timeline resolution. 

THIS IS IMPORTANT. When you have finished editing and grading and you go to the "delivery" window and select UHD as your output you have to go back into project settings and set the timeline to UHD, if you don't your final output will be HD expanded to fit the UHD raster. Resolve is actually very good at this and it took a lot of looking to see the difference. Below is a still from a scene in Trafalgar Square and two crops with the timeline set to different resolutions. The middle picture shows the image at 400% with the timeline set to UHD and the bottom picture with it set to HD. The bottom picture shows a lot less detail.

If you look at the comparison table of Resolve lite and the full version there doesn't seem to be a lot of difference, but go about a third of the way down and you will see this section:

After the sharpening tool (like the 5D the images generally benefit from a bit of sharpening) the noise reduction tools make a huge difference particularly in areas like sky or flesh tones, be gentle with it and you will be rewarded. The BMPC is not good at shooting in low light (and I am not a fan of ProRes for this) and sometimes scenes like the one below in St Pancras Station mean lifting the dark areas considerably which can bring in really bad speckle. The noise reduction tool in Resolve is amazing at reducing this.

The format you output will always depend on where you will put it, but I have established a workflow from producing 4K time lapses where I output QuickTime Cineform versions which are indistinguishable from uncompressed files but much smaller and then use Adobe Media Encoder to produce QuickTime PhotoJPEG versions for stock companies or broadcasters since that is such a user friendly format and one that Resolve cannot output directly. 


These two blogs have been a quick summary of what I have learnt "hands-on" with this amazing camera and what I feel is the minimum requirement to shoot good footage. Hopefully it will give a bit of guidance to those still in the queue for the 4K Production Camera.

The Blackmagic Production Camera 4K experience Part 1

There has been a huge amount of debate over what the Blackmagic Production Camera (BMPC) would be like to use, and as I finally have one, here are my initial experiences of using it in the real world.


Introduction

In previous blogs I got excited then bored by the long running saga of the BMPC 4K that was announced in April 2013 and eventually started shipping to real users in February 2014. I recently discovered that I was about 20th on the list of my supplier (CVP in London) even though I think I ordered it and put a deposit down within two days of the launch at NAB - this is a popular camera. On 10th March CVP let me know that my camera was in and asked whether I wanted to carry on with the purchase... less than 2 hours later I had it in my hand.

I admit that I did have last minute indecisions about buying the camera, especially as the Panasonic DMC-GH4 had just been launched and the price of the Canon C500 was falling faster than Felix Baumgartner, but the price of the BMPC 4K had also dropped and I felt it was the best solution for me to shoot good quality 4K material.

I had done the same research that many others had performed without actually having the camera and I decided that I would try to get the minimum amount of gear to make the camera work, remembering that I was not hiring the camera out or using it with a client. I already have a decent collection of suitable Canon EF-mount lenses so the only thing I had to get in theory was an SSD card.


SSD Card

There is a notorious list on the Blackmagic Design support pages which gives SSD cards that are "certified" to work with the BMPC but most of them are not available any more. The BM forum is also full of people having problems with SSDs on the Cinema Camera, dropping frames and so on and so I entered the first minefield of decision making with trepidation. 

Cutting to the chase I settled on a pair of SanDisk Extreme II 240GB [SDSSDXP-240G] drives which are not actually on the certified list. These are 7mm thick drives and I had read that even with the shim attached (which comes with the drive) it did not fit the slot in the BMPC too well. Also BM advise that the larger SSDs are faster, although the specs don't agree with this. Well I can report that I have encountered none of the issues above - the drives fit snuggly, don't rattle, but are not too tight to remove with fingers. I have cycled the two drives and after five shoots I have not seen any problems. Shooting 4K ProRes HQ (no RAW available yet) I was getting about 12 secs per GB which is about 48 minutes of footage on a disk. I quick formatted the cards to Ex-Fat each time and I feel these cards should be "certified" soon.

Battery Life

Probably the the biggest concern of many before the launch was how long the fixed battery would last and the answer is NOT BLOODY LONG! I have not timed it but it is nothing like the 2 hours stated in the specifications in real life use. I looked at and rapidly dropped the idea of professional battery packs that added about £600 to the price and looked again at the spec of the camera. 

It is very unfussy about the power source, any DC source from 11-30V is OK. I had a couple of 12V 7Ah batteries that used to power a burglar alarm (they get replaced every 2 years) that I felt would work. I cut the cable off a power supply that used to power an external hard drive and put terminals on the other end. I plugged it into the camera and up came the symbol that the camera was charging - perfect. 

If you can't recycle burglar alarm batteries, you can get the same battery on Amazon for £15.39. The centre pin of the cameras power socket is quite wide so not every plug will fit it. If the camera is on a tripod you can plug it in while using it but I tend to plug it in to the battery when it is in my bag so the camera is normally fully charged when I am ready to shoot. So far I have not run out of power.

Monitor v EVF

I predicted that the screen on the back of the BMPC was going to be more help to my wife putting lipstick on than checking the picture was in focus and so it proved. My first shoot was at sunset so there wasn't much backlight to trouble the screen, but despite using the green focus assist not one shot was in focus. I had to get an external monitor. 

I contacted James Miller, camera guru and infamous lens whacker for his opinion. He had recently been running tests on a BMPC side-by-side with a Canon 1 DC and he told me that an electronic viewfinder (EVF) was essential and preferred over a field monitor mainly because you can close off all the light with your eye.

The output on the BMPC is SDI not HDMI so the EVF had to connect to that and the main options (available in the UK) were by Zacuto, Alphatron (TVLogic) and Cineroid. CVP in London let me look at the first two on my camera and I was impressed by the sharpness of the Zacuto Z-finder EVF Pro and unimpressed by the softness of the Alphatron EVF-035W-3G (so much so that I checked out two in case one was faulty). The focus check on the Zacuto was also significantly better. However the weakness of the cheaper Zacuto was the HDMI connection (which kept cutting out) and that I needed a SDI to HDMI converter. The battery powered BM converter costs over £200 and apparently lasts 2 hours before recharging, so I was not keen on this option. 

CVP didn't have a Cineroid demo unit but the importers Octica let me try out the EVF-4RVW with the "retina" screen and the much cheaper EVF-4CSS. There was a surprising lack of difference between the two and the EVF-4CSS was almost as sharp as the Zacuto. Crucially the EVF-4CSS has SDI connections and was almost half the price of all the others. It's made of fairly cheap plastic and wouldn't survive misuse but that makes it light which is good for me and takes LP-E6 batteries from the Canon 5D's. If you are looking for a reasonable priced EVF for the BMPC I can recommend the Cineroid EVF-4CSS which appears to have been created for the BM cameras.

With the SSDs, my home-brew battery solution and an EVF, the BMPC is a nw a pretty usable camera, and I believe that this is the minimum a sole user would need to get it there. However you do need somewhere to attach the EVF and probably an external mic. You also need to do something with the material you shoot, so in part 2 I will look at an alternative to a cage and some of the issues of post production and post some examples from the shoots.

Go to Part 2

Blackmagic Design 4K Production Camera price shock

I went along to BVE 2014 at the Excel in London today and made a B-line (bee-line?) for the Blackmagic Design Stand to explain why I was a trifle miffed (British mid-level anger) about the non-arrival of my 4K Super 35 Production Cinema Camera, ten months after I ordered it.

And there it was. Not my camera of course, but a living, breathing, full production version sitting on a Manfrotto tripod aimed at a miniature fairground. I took in the scene and then my eye caught the most amazing figure in front of the camera; no, not a gorgeous model but the price of the camera.

Hang on. This was over £3,000 including the government's 20% cut just a week ago, and it's now £19 cheaper than a brand new Canon 5D MKIII body! So what has happened, or to my suspicious mind, what is missing? 

Well the first thing that's missing is compressed RAW recording which is promised to arrive later (as it did in the 2.5K) and Avid DNxHD which won't because Avid still don't have a codec that works with 4K. And... well nothing else. DaVinci Resolve colour grading software is still included, the sensor hasn't been changed, there is still a 6G-SDI output and the picture looks great. In fact the industrious James Miller has already compared the quality of the BMPCC with the Canon EOS 1D C here and it really cuts the mustard as we say in Blighty.

I have felt that this camera was going to miss out on the impact it made at NAB and with the Digital Bolex (kind of) available and the Panasonic GH4 launching that may have been the case before Grant Petty dipped into the BM Design piggy bank and made Christmas come late for all of us, by making this camera the bargain of the decade.

I ordered mine on 26th April 2013 about 2 nano-seconds after it was announced and I am still 30th on the list of orders at CVP, but I am hopeful that I might get it before the UK sinks again or the US freezes over. I might even be able to film Great Britain in the sun. Now how to spend that £1000...

Blackmagic Design 4K Production Camera to break all records - for delays?

Back in May 2013 I wrote a blog about the mythical Blackmagic Design 4K Production camera and how I was expecting a long delay for its delivery. At the time of writing the Blackmagic Design website was showing this:



So let's allow a month or maybe two and then at least I should get my hands on a demo model. Nope. The "expected" date on my supplier's website keeps adding a month.

Blackmagic announce a plethora of new equipment throughout 2013 and on August 2nd Grant Petty posted:

The Blackmagic Production Camera 4K is not yet shipping as we need some more time. Our first batch of sensors was delivered only this week, so we have not been able to complete the software for the camera. We expect to start shipping in about 3 to 4 weeks once the final software work and testing is completed.

Followed by this on September 4th:

It's taking a bit longer than we expected to do this and we think its going to take about 3 to 4 weeks more to get those changes done and to get the QA process completed before we can start shipping.

Then on December 18th the boss posted some personally hand shot material and said:

As I have mentioned previously we have been working hard on redesigning part of the camera due to differences in the production sensors to what we experienced in the early camera builds, however that work is completed now and we are in final testing. 

The Blackmagic forum announcement for the camera has now had almost 26,000 views and 219 replies, which are becoming increasingly frustrated. But at least in January some DoPs managed to get their hand on beta versions for testing.

So you would expect me to be fuming about putting down a deposit on a camera and waiting more than 8 months to receive it. Well, I am several levels below fuming because it is about expectation management, and I expected this.

I have experience of trying to get a new product to market and despite best planning rarely does anything go to plan, particularly when dealing with micro-technology. The lessons learnt from the original cinema camera really didn't apply to the 4K, it was a clean sheet of paper with lots of new ideas written on it, which then got smudged.

There still is, 10 months on from its announcement, nothing on the market that matches the camera's specs and price and I am pretty certain that not many will have asked for their deposits back and lost their place in the queue. I am still excited by the prospect of the camera and can't wait to get my hands on one. 

The biggest worry is that the guy who updates the BM website knows something we don't as it shows that the camera will ship in Q4.

Let's hope he is just as clueless as the rest of us and hasn't updated it recently.

JVC 4K Camcorder - Why take one card to the shoot when you can take four?

JVC have just announced they are going to launch the 4K camera the previewed at CES the JY-HMQ30 based on the JY-HMQ10 that they launched earlier this year. So what are the differences? Well the  10 has a lens but the 30 doesn't so that will make it cheaper right? Uh, no. The 10 is costing about $5,000 and the 30 will be $18,000 based on the yen price (prices from Photography Bay by the way)!

Here are some nice pictures of the pair:

The JY-HMQ10

The new JY-HMQ30

That lens mount in the 30 is a bit unusual because it takes Nikon lenses. Yes, Nikon lenses on a video camera. Now this could be because JVC and Nikon have a good working relationship (although only Nikon is part of the Mitsubishi Corporation), but I think it is more down to smart thinking by JVC. 

Photographers tend to upgrade their camera bodies as soon as a digit or letter changes (or even a Roman numeral on the Canon 5D) but hold on to their lenses forever - if you don't believe me have a look at Philip Bloom's lens cupboard. So Nikon users are likely to have a great set of glass that they can't use on a video camera... until this JVC came along.

Nikon cameras generally prefer SD cards over compact flash which means the Nikonista will have a wallet full of them which will be very useful if you want to use these cameras to shoot 4K as it uses four of them at the same time to shoot four quadrants of the 4K signal. One of the reasons I prefer using CF cards to SD is that I can usually tell that a CF card is lurking in my trouser pocket before I put it in the wash. SD cards have made it through the fast spin cycle on my washing machine and survived though so it might not be a disaster.

But I can't entertain the idea of plugging in four cards to shoot one image, the chances of things going wrong are multiplied. With memory advancing as fast as any technology why not get your boffins to develop a cheap CF card like KomputerBay have managed. It may not use up any more storage to shoot on four cards but it is going to quadruple the amount of files.

When you get those four files you need to convert them to ProRes422 before you start editing and JVC provide a programme called JVC 4K Clip Manager which does the job for you. Unfortunately it is only available for Macs (OS 10.6.8 or newer) so doesn't work as a useful ProRes converter for PC's (I am still trying to find one).

I haven't seen any footage from either camera yet but it is recording H.264 so I imagine the compression will be pretty heavy with a data rate of 144 Mb/s for the whole 4K stream. 

I am a great supporter of innovation and coming up with different solutions, but these JVC cameras tick very few boxes for me and while the multi-card system might work for an enthusiast or wedding videographer, for most it would be a pain in the chassis.

And if you do have a cabinet full of Nikon lenses, you CAN use them on any camera that takes a Canon lens with an adapter, but you may lose some functionality. Canon lenses, with their larger mount won't fit on a Nikon body.

Canon EOS 5D MKIII - the Swiss Army knife of video cameras

When the Canon 5D MKIII was launched in March 2012 after years of anticipation the reaction of the market was one of slight disappointment or even indignation. The long delay of the launch (caused in part by the tsunami in Japan) had left everybody expecting a camera that would turn the video shooting world on its head and it seemed that this was just an improvement of the MKII.

Or so it seemed.

I used to work for Bernie Ecclestone on Formula One and I had all these ideas for on-screen information we could provide the viewer and asked why we didn't do them for the new season. Mr E's right hand man Eddie Baker replied "Don't add too many new elements in one go, if you do some of the best stuff will go unnoticed." Gradually in the seasons that followed the on-screen graphics were added to, much to the joy of F1 fans.

In a way the Canon 5D MKIII is the same and has lots of features hidden away that are now being revealed both by Canon and others and I see the camera now has three levels of operation. 

Level 1. This is the camera as it comes out of the box (with original firmware). Shooting to the internal cards using H.264 with All-I compression at 90 MB/s or IPB at 31 MB/s the quality was a distinct improvement on the MKII (especially with the improved low light performance). It is used as a B-roll camera in the main and CF cards don't have to be massive or ridiculously fast. It was a camera used to supplement other cameras.

Level 2. Other cameras such as the Panasonic GH3 started to have the ability to output the video signal through the HDMI monitoring port directly to an external recorder like the Atmos Ninja or the Blackmagic Design Hyperdeck Shuttle. 

Atmos Ninja 2

Blackmagic Design Hyperdeck Shuttle

This could also be done with the MKIII but it was not possible to get a clean output - no information over the pictures including the red recording dot. In October 2012 the Magic Lantern team released Alpha 2 which allowed clean out pictures on the HDMI among a host of other improvements. Six months later Canon released a firmware update that allowed the camera to do the same thing - officially. This gave the MKIII the ability to record in 4:2:2 colour space which I won't explain here but gives more flexibility for colour correction. It also meant it is possible to record in less compressed formats such as ProRes 422. With a proper external sound recorder this brought the MKIII up to A-camera status and it became a more practical unit to use for interviews and documentaries.

Level 3. This was the Level people had dreamed of and hoped for when the MKIII was launched. Because the camera is a DSLR is can shoot still pictures in RAW format which gives simply the best recording format available and the dream was to capture this stream of still images and combine them to a video clip in the way that time lapsers have done for years. But it seemed a pipe-dream until Magic Lantern discovered a way of making the camera do it, and do it to internal recording media. They have just announced the possibility to record 14-bit which gives even more colour information to play with. This level goes beyond that of an A-roll camera and becomes a film camera and the results are quite stunning as James Miller's Genesis film displays.

Level 4 would turn it into a EOS 1DX C+ and record 4K RAW to an external record device. This is my dream and a month ago I wouldn't even have mentioned it in public, but now I don't think it is all that fantastical, I'm sure Magic Lantern think the same. Canon have probably got their fingers crossed that no-one ever achieves it.

So the Canon 5D MKIII really is the most flexible camera around and can be used for everything with the possible exceptions of sports and car chases and the analogy with the Swiss Army knife would be complete if there was a flip out bottle opener in the card bay - Canon please work on that. Design supplied.

Filming in RAW with the Canon 5D MKIII

James Miller is a film maker and a brave man. Only a brave man would get hold of a brand new $3000 camera and pull it apart without a manual or a safety net just to see if he can make it slightly better. But then this is a man who likes to take the lens off a camera while it is recording. He calls it lens whacking, I call it art and almost everyone else describes it as a certain guarantee violation and the actions of a man who has spent too much time in the sun, pixel peeping. Well he does call his company Miller and Miller which suggests a measure of schizophrenia.

James is a friend and business partner of Philip Bloom and a pioneer in the world of DSLR cameras. We met once but I doubt he will remember because at the time he was salivating over the recently released Canon C300 and cradling it like a child. Inwardly I'm sure he was harbouring thoughts of dismemberment and performing lewd operations using a mini hex key and a soldering iron. I imagine the gaps between the floorboards in his house are forever swallowing up the miniature screws that keep our cameras together - his are in one piece through the arts of origami and gaffer taping.

The results of this camera butchery can be seen on his website mmfilm and some of it is quite beautiful and really shouldn't be possible using the same camera that I own, namely the Canon 5D MKIII. But his latest experiment is one that I might be willing to try since it doesn't involve physical removal of parts and is provided by Magic Lantern, a group of people who produce software that runs inside many Canon cameras to give features that many of us would give our right testicle for. Fortunately there is no need for such drastic surgery because the software is free.

The latest version works on the 5D MKIII and seemingly doesn't turn the camera into a large paperweight but offers lots of useful options like an intervalometer and bulb ramping for time lapsers and zebra levels, waveform monitors and overlays for video shooters. A full list of functionality can be found here.

This week James released a short "film" on Vimeo called Genesis which was shot on a Canon 5D MKIII (previously taken apart in an earlier, seemingly successful experiment) with the Magic Lantern software installed. What I hadn't mentioned was that the ML software allows the camera to record its footage in a RAW format, Canon's own DNG, in a series of still frames, creating in effect a timelapse, albeit one with 25 frames per second - which eats up 4 GB every minute. This allowed the footage to be imported into After Effects using Adobe Camera RAW and its powerful grading functionality, which is the process I use for my timelapses found here. 

He then exported each clip as a ProRes video and edited in Adobe Premiere. Here is the wonderful video (now a Vimeo Staff Pick no less) entirely shot with a Canon 5D MKIII and a Canon 70-200 L IS II lens, please expand it to full screen or follow the above link to James' Vimeo page:



James appeared only to have shot this as a test, but some of the shots are pieces of art, technically superb and wonderfully framed. He mentions the use of IR contamination which is something most of us would avoid but James uses it on the evening sun to stunning effect. Even viewing the film compressed on Vimeo leaves me impressed and goes to prove that the better the source material the better the final video whether it is H.264 or Blu-ray.

James pushes the boundaries far further than us bi-testicled mortals and hopefully Canon will see that they shouldn't restrict the quality of their brilliant DSLRs to protect their high-end cameras, because Magic Lantern and James will bring the revolution to their door. I expect the 5D MKIII to be spitting out 4K video by the end of the year, it will just take a pioneer like James to make it happen. 

One day my 4K BM Production camera will come - please

There is a bit of a lull in the world of 4K it seems. Sony has established a bit of an unexpected niche in the high end with their F-55; Arri is getting a big boost from its Alexa being used to great affect on Game of Thrones and Canon's much admired C300 has a 4K big brother in the C500. I haven't used any of them, partly because I don't want to spend the price of a convertible Mini on a camera, but mainly because I don't have a crew of 6 six to carry all the peripheral kit that these cameras require.

Of all the specs of all the cameras in all the world this is the one of most interest to me at the moment:

I put my name down for one of these mythical creatures the day after it was announced with CVP in London who don't exactly want to get my hopes up for an early delivery with these words on their website: 

At the moment we're not sure when it is scheduled to ship or will actually ship but based on our experience with the existing 2.5K model we expect long delays.

Our pricing is tentative, so may be adjusted upwards / downwards if the camera price is varied between order placement and shipping date.

Hopefully the price will come down because with exchange rates at the moment the UK price should be £2566 not the £3210 CVP are pricing it at - the difference would pay for quite a few SSD drives I'm going to need.

But the big question has to be the shipping date - what does it mean? The first one, the first 1000, a couple to a shop in downtown Melbourne? Black Magic is one of the most innovative companies in  the camera world but it still relies on component suppliers, one of whom screwed up with the sensors of the first Cinema Camera and rather too many people are still waiting for their cameras who ordered it in the early days.

I have faith though - mainly because I believe Grant Perry would physically drive the white van to deliver the camera because he comes from a post production background, and we post productioners do anything to deliver on time. I mainly shoot stock and I shoot a lot in London and I can't wait to suck the colour out of London and put it onto the screen, even if I will only see a quarter of the picture initially.

I have been promised that within a month I will get my hands on a pre-production model and run a couple of tests. It will probably be raining. This is London after all. At least the lull will be filled.

Blackmagic Design Production Camera 4K - initial thoughts.

The old adage "be careful what you wish for" may be true in fairy tales but in real life it can sometimes work out pretty well. In an earlier blog back in January I wrote the following lines:

"My dream machine though is the Blackmagic Design Cinema Camera MKII with a larger sensor (so wide angles are possible) that can shoot 2.5K in RAW and 4K in GoPro's Cineform codec. Even if the price doubled for such a beast I doubt Blackmagic Design would have much trouble selling them."

I even posted a mock-up of the apple of my eye:

My mock-up in January of a dream camera

Well I don't know if Blackmagic Design had been reading my blog but yesterday on day one of NAB 2013 this is what they released:

The Blackmagic Design Production Camera 4K

So I got the logo on the wrong side and it looks like the same designer from Channel 4 in the UK drew up the logo but that doesn't matter, here is a "proper" 4K camera for less than $5,000. To clarify that, you can shoot 4K using a $400 GoPro but not at a broadcast frame rate and the new Blackmagic camera is officially $3,995, but won't work without a fast SSD inside it, oh and a lens would be handy. So let's call it $5K for 4K.

Blackmagic Design have elected not to take up my suggestion of using GoPro's Cineform codec and instead chosen ProRes which is a great format but not when you are using Windows machines. Avid's DNxHD codec has been dropped altogether but if Avid can get their heads out of the sand and come up with a good 4K codec it may be added in a later upgrade. 

A pleasant surprise is that you can shoot compressed CinemaDNG RAW in 4K which for stock material will be fantastic but there is no information I can find about file sizes or how much footage you can shoot in CinemaDNG on a SSD, but with ProRes 4K maxing out at 880 Mbs you only get 36 minutes on a 240 Gb drive. Little caveat here, one bit of the BM blurb says a full version of the DaVinci Resolve grading software is included with the camera but only the lite version is listed in the included software on this Blackmagic page:

Blackmagic Design have dropped the 2.5K resolution that was the main feature of the BM cinema camera, which gave HD editors a bit of leeway for stabilising and shot positioning; now the choice is 1920x1080 or 3840 x 2160 the specification for Ultra-HD. At least it looks like all frame rates including PAL 25p will be working from the start although rather strangely considering the CMOS sensor there are interlaced options in the 1920 resolutions but I can't see this camera being used for sport much.

Although I didn't get the Cineform codec of my dreams I did get my wish for a larger sensor to get wider angles. Below are a couple of grabs from the very useful Abelcine website where you can check field of view for a variety of cameras and lenses. 

The first shows the Super 35mm sensor from the new Production Camera and the field of view using a 35mm lens and on the right is the FOV of the original Cinema Camera. The new camera offers a 39.1 degree angle compared to 25.5 degrees on the original.

The second grab compares the Production Camera (again on the left) with the Canon 5D MKII full frame sensor. The 5D doubles the FOV again with a 54.4 degree so although the new Production Camera gives a much wider view, if you are used to using a full frame DSLR to shoot then you may be disappointed. In fact the new camera is very close to the Canon 7D or Nikon D3100 in field of view.

Within hours of the NAB launch I read criticism of Blackmagic Design retaining the shape of the original camera and the fixed internal battery, but there must have been a huge amount of development to get this form factor and it is also instantly distinguishable from other cameras, which as any marketing student will confirm is a huge advantage. Also like the GoPros, a large number of 3rd party companies have produced vital accessories for the BMCC and these will still be compatible with the new camera.

I think this will be the perfect camera for shooting ultra-hd stock footage and I am extremely pleased that I resisted my urge to order the original camera 12 months ago and can now use another old saying - "good things come to those who wait". Just hope it won't be as long a wait as for the first version; the first cameras are due to ship in July 2013.

8K - is bigger, better?

A few years ago, well seven I think, I decided that I wanted to find out if my brain was capable of learning new things outside of my comfort zone and after a short investigation I decided to take an Open University course called "T175 - Networked Living", exploring information and communication technologies. It took 8 months to do and at the end of it I had 30 points towards the 360 I need to get a full degree. I was hooked.

Since then I have studied modules called "Beyond Google", "Design and the Web", "Communication and Information technologies" and "Computers and Processors" and a few others. Currently I am doing "Innovation - Designing for a sustainable future" and "Technologies for digital media". 

Coincidently this last module has posed a question about UHDTV or Ultra High Definition TV and refers to a document written by two Japanese engineers, Masayuki Sugawara and Kenichiro Masaoka which looks at the future of TV and what is the ideal size and resolution of screen. They did a series of spatial rendering tests and concluded "that UHDTV should have around 8000
horizontal pixels based on the research results described above. Interoperability with existing television system suggests:
- a picture aspect ratio of 16 : 9 is preferable;
- a simple integer ratio between the pixel counts of TV systems is preferable.
Finally, we concluded that 7680x4320 is desirable for the pixel count of UHDTV." 

Now I can't argue with that especially now that 4K is officially half that resolution. The engineers looked at the ideal size of the screen or panel to watch this on.


"Recommendation ITU-R BT.1845 provides guidelines on the relationship between screen size and viewing distance given that the optimal viewing distance is one at which one pixel corresponds to the visual angle of arc-minute. The optimal viewing distance is, e.g., 100 cm when viewing an UHDTV image on a 100-in screen.[...] The optimal viewing distance for a 20-in screen is 20 cm, at  the human visual system (HVS) reaches the limits of accommodation. The size of a 20-in screen is close to A3, and a 7680x4320 pixel screen would have approximately 350 pixels/in."

Let me just repeat that. The best way to watch TV is on a 100 inch (presume diagonal measurement) screen from just 3 feet 3 inches away - wow! I'm now old enough to need the full length of my arms just to focus on something and I tend to watch a 42 inch 1080p screen from about 8 feet away. And if I wanted to look at an iPad screen (presuming it had 8K pixels) "optimally" it should be about 3 inches away from my face.

Really? If your mother is like my mother she would be telling you to move back from the screen or you'll ruin your eye-sight, and this time she might be right. So if this is the ideal do I want it? Does this mean that if I bought a 100 inch 4K screen ($25,000 says I won't just yet) I could watch it from a comfortable (and ideal distance) of 6 feet 6 inches. At least I wouldn't get yelled out by all the people behind me. Be interested to hear from anyone who has actually stood in front of a 100 inch 4K screen for their opinion.

So my vote is that bigger, in this case is not better, which adds more weight to my argument that 4K will not be a stop gap resolution but a very good and well loved one. Now I better get back to my studies as I still have 2 years to go.

* The full document mentioned above can be purchased here.

4K at BVE in London and future proofing

It's been a week since BVE was held at it's new location at Excel in East London and I really enjoyed my two days there, partly for the old colleagues I kept bumping in to, partly because of the new kit I could actually see and touch and partly because of the 4K Cinema presentations. The 3D & 4K Cinema seminars were held in a room about 5 minutes away from the main exhibition so I felt like an orienteerer (or whatever someone who participates in orienteering is called) getting my badge scanned each time I moved between the two locations.

Philip Bloom's excellent presentation "The DSLR journey: from the 5D mkII to the 4K 1DC" was so popular that over 150 people were turned away each day, including me on Tuesday. Philip has not been too positive in the past about 4K's future but one of the reasons I follow him on twitter (@PhilipBloom) is because he is prepared to have his mind changed. He had shot a pop video with Olly Knights on the Canon EOS-1D C the previous week, quickly edited it in Adobe Premiere and Dissolve and produced a 4K ProRes 422 file which the venue guys converted to a DCP to show on the 4K projector at BVE.

The first time he had seen the video in 4K was at rehearsals the previous day, because he, like 99.9% of us working in 4K, doesn't have a 4K monitor (Sony had one on their stand). The only way he could check his pictures at 4K resolution was blowing them up into quarters on his retina screen. I have to say the pictures looked very good and Philip didn't have a massive rig like Canon used on "The Ticket", he just added a TV Logic field monitor:

Canon EOS-1D C on the Ticket (from Canon website)

Philip Bloom (with bag) shooting the Olly Knight video with EOS-1D C
(from Philip Bloom's blog)

The video had been shot very quickly and on the hoof, in Philip's words - guerilla filming - which is pretty incredible at 4K, and he managed to turn it around in about 5 days, which makes a nonsense of anyone claiming that shooting 4K at the moment is impractical.

Of course when you are on an island in the Pacific you might need a bit of backup and Sky's Galapagos series was certainly ambitious. 3D on a volcano - tick, and 4K? Why not. The first episode was shown in 4K 3D (or is it 3D 4K) at BVE and we were suitably furnished with dark glasses, which was a little disappointing. But the effect was not. Once you have seen a marine iguana snort out salt in 3D4K there is little that can impress you. I was in row 6 but wanted to be in row minus 3 to really see the crispness of the image but it was still pretty good from 12 metres away.

In an interview with tech radar this week John Cassy, the head of 3D at Sky TV reaffirmed the company's commitment to 3D and claimed that 4K would not be the innovation that replaces 3D but the technology that enhances the format, "There are very clear benefits that 4K gives 3D. The resolution is better and also it could help in glasses-free 3D because it enables that whole resolution and picture quality." He also claims to have seen a glasses free version of 3D but like a News of the World journalist failed to reveal the source.

Canon's 4K camera the C500 is dropping in price but is still at almost £19,000 so it is a hire only beast for now,but the EOS-1D C £10k less than that but still some way off my Christmas list. To me the cameras that will change the broadcast world though are the Sony PMW-F5 and F55 with the AXS-F5 4K recorder (about £16k and £24k respectively) which get round the rolling shutter problem and are "proper cameras" provided you have perfectly flat shoulders. 

There was a lot of talk about how much storage all this 4K material is going to take up but now I wouldn't consider buying less than 3 terabyte external drives (4 TB are out there), 6 times larger than I was buying 2 years ago. With the amount of storage looking like it will shortly double on a hard drive platter I am looking forward to shooting RAW 4K at a price point close to shooting HD now in about 2 years. 

To conclude I will quote John Cassy of Sky again who sums up my opinion on 4K, "We have a watching brief on Ultra HD and 4K. Actually what we have been doing, the Attenborough shows have all been filmed in 4K - and in some cases 5K - so they have been captured and future-proofed in a sense, as far as we can." 

Future proofing avoids obsolescence, if you get it right.