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 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

KomputerBay CF card prices rise due to Magic Lantern RAW discovery

1 month and 3 days ago the geniuses (genii?) at Magic Lantern announced that they had discovered that the Canon 5D  MKIII is capable recording RAW video footage to an internal compact flash card. Since then there has been a sense of excitement in the videography world not seen since the announcement of the original Blackmagic Cinema Camera.

Since then the magnitude of this discovery has been superseded by fresh discoveries that surpass it such as full 1920x1080 frame recording for a decent length of time, 14-bit recording and even that the EOS 50D that never even shot video and is 5 years old can actually shoot RAW. Bonkers.

So far I have not seen a comment from Canon saying a) "we knew it was possible" b) "we didn't want to do it to protect our high end products" or c) "私をファックします。" [apparently "f*** me!" in Japanese (if not Bing Translator is the culprit)].

This voyage of daily discovery has led to the revealing of another little diamond - the KomputerBay compact flash card line. Previously every video shooter used to proclaim that they would never use anything other than an established, branded card such as SanDisk or Lexar and suddenly everyone is using this brand I had never heard of a month ago. 

It's not hard to see why they are going ballistic over the KomputerBay cards; here is a comparison of some of the CF cards for sale on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk tonight (30th May).

That is an eye watering difference of 360% more for the SanDisk and Lexar 128 Gb cards over the KomputerBay equivalent. But this demand for a brand that few had heard of is being hit by the rules of supply and demand. Here is the graph of the price of the 64Gb card on Amazon.com since January - spot the Magic Lantern effect?

How about in the UK?

That is a 182% price increase in 11 days!

So how is the similar size and speed Lexar card faring? Barely a ripple - seems like demand is unchanged, in fact it has got cheaper from 3rd party suppliers.

So who are KomputerBay? Well they are not as new as I thought as there are mentions of them selling cards on Amazon in June 2010. Their website Komputerbay.com places them 50 miles outside Atlanta, Georgia but although the site sells computer goods it does not include compact flash cards.

How they can sell them at such a price? I don't know but would like to. Reviews for the 64 Gb card are thin but of the 105 reviews of all sizes of KomputerBay CF cards on amazon.co.uk 77 give 5 stars. I think we need to get some feedback on these cards so please comment on your experiences here. If they really are as good as some say it could make RAW shooting a much cheaper game.

Credit: The charts here are created by The Camelizer an excellent way of tracking the prices of goods on Amazon. Go to www.camelcamelcamel.com to get the plug-in.

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.