Blackmagic Design has sent the filmmaking world into fits of nervous laughter with a new digital film camera capable of shooting 12K RAW at 60 frames per second. Yes, each frame will be an 80-megapixel raw photo with 14 stops of dynamic range.
The Ursa Mini Pro 12k follows in a long line of Blackmagic video machines that punch way above their price tag, and it pulls stunts nothing in the Red or Arri range can do at many times the price. It uses a much smaller Super 35 sensor, mind you, so Red won't be looking over its shoulder just yet.
The monstrous processing and data flow capabilities required to shoot 12K at 60 fps – figures I can barely type without starting to giggle at – allow the new baby Ursa to shoot 8K footage at up to 110 fps and 4K at a ridiculous 220 fps, making this an utterly beastly rig for high-res slow-mo as well.
In order to do so, the Mini Pro is kitted out with dual built-in CFast and UHS-II SD card slots, and it's able to write a nutty 900 megabytes per second to the former when "Record RAW on 2 Cards" mode is enabled. My poor iMac is starting to smoke just writing about it.
There's a new fifth-generation color science built in, tuned to address some filmmaker's complaints that previous Blackmagic gear didn't quite get skin tones and bright, colorful lights quite the way they wanted. Naturally it integrates perfectly with Blackmagic's own Da Vinci Resolve Studio color correction and editing software.
There's interchangeable lens mounts. There's built-in 2-, 4- and 6-stop ND filters. There's external recording via high speed USB-C, a 4-inch fold out touch screen, digital slating, wireless control via Android or iOS devices ... It's a fully fledged mini production camera with all the fruit, and it's available this month at US$9,995 – a pittance for a pro-grade rig.
I dunno what you lunatics want to do with all those pixels, even IMAX cinemas only project dual 4K images when they're working with digital. Post-crop stabilization and composing options will be absolutely epic, and Blackmagic says you can get extraordinary motion rendering with much smoother edges if you shoot 12K and then downsample to 8K or 4K.
Go forth and create!
Source: Blackmagic Design
