A seemingly small announcement by Atomos and Nikon during this years CES show could generate enough impact to affect future roadmaps of other mirrorless camera manufacturers: The Nikon Z 6 and Z 7 will be able to output a RAW video stream to the Atomos Ninja V which will record that stream as high-quality ProRes RAW. That’s the news and the development is still in progress so it’s just that: an announcement. Time to move on then? Not so fast: This collaboration marks the point in time when RAW recording (internal or external) in a mirrorless camera has become a de facto standard! Filmmakers always strive for maximum quality. SD, HD, 4K.. 8K? 8-bit, 10-bit, 12-bit.. 16-bit? Sure, bigger is better. Why should one compromise on quality if the other make and model has it? Do you always need RAW? Of course not but isn’t it nice to have it handy if you need it? Yes, sir! Atomos Ninja V & Nikon Z: ProRes RAW The Blackmagic Design Pocket Cinema Camera 4K (BMPCC4K) does record RAW internally or externally already (cDNG now, Blackmagic RAW later). Even the original BMPCC did cDNG but both cameras sport comparably small sensors. The Nikon Z 6 and Z 7 feature full frame sensors. In order to accurately judge critical focus, an external monitor seems appropriate. If you happen to choose the Atomos Ninja V monitor/recorder you end up with this: A full-frame camera which records ProRes RAW, in a nearly pocket-sized package. For Nikon this business move should have been relatively straightforward: They don’t have a cinema line of cameras they have to protect. They are free to boost the still fresh Z line of mirrorless cameras as far as possible. Things are different with Canon, Panasonic or Blackmagic. But since this Nikon/Atomos collaboration is happening, the other manufacturers will have to make a move. Let’s see what the upcoming Panasonic S1(R) has up its sleeve. The EVA1 does sport RAW recording for quite some time now so Panasonic knows how to do it. Canon has Cinema RAW light in their C200 cameras, so plenty of know-how there. Will they do it? That’s the big question here. How Does it Work? The Nikon Z 7 or Z 6 camera outputs a stream of RAW data to the Ninja V using a 4K HDMI cable. Since RAW data just contains the unprocessed sensor read out, it’s all about transfer speeds and not so much about processing horsepower. Incoming data is repacked into the ProRes RAW format by the Ninja V. From there the resulting video stream is recorded to the removable SSD drive just as any other video stream. The heavy lifting of debayering and processing is outsourced to the editing computer, which usually has a lot of processing power both in terms of CPU and GPU. Furthermore, ProRes RAW helps to keep file sizes reasonable – uncompressed RAW results in lots of SSDs in no time. What’s up, 2019? A mirrorless camera with a full-frame sensor, recording RAW? Back in the days, Magic Lantern laid the foundation with their Canon 5D mk.II hack, enabling RAW recording. It wasn’t perfect but it worked (still does). Now, in 2019, RAW recording becomes mainstream. Other manufacturers will have a hard time explaining why any of their upcoming cameras won’t have RAW capabilities and as always this competitive pressure is to the benefit of us, the indie filmmaking community. Sure, we don’t need every feature all the time but for me personally, RAW is more important than –let’s say– 8K. Quality over quantity (of pixels). RAW for the masses is a welcomed improvement, at least to me. I’m very curious how all this will impact the higher-end market of (proper) cinema cameras. Features like an interchangeable lens mount, internal ND filters, modular design or a variety of powering options are still a thing for bigger and more expensive cameras and sometimes there are very good reasons not to use a tiny mirrorless camera. However, the gap becomes smaller and that’s probably a good thing! Protecting their higher end models and still deliver satisfying (smaller) mirrorless cameras is a huge challenge for most manufacturers, let’s hope they get it right. Prices will drop, higher end features will trickle down the line, the possibilities will grow. We still have to wait for that perfect camera because there is no such thing as the perfect camera but we’re heading in the right direction, I’m sure. links: Atomos | Nikon What do you think? How does RAW in every mirrorless camera sound to you? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

EDIT: Based on multiple comments made by our audience suggesting that the original results of the URSA Mini Pro 4.6 Dynamic Range tests may be flawed since we did not execute camera black shading prior to the tests, we decided to rerun it. Our workflow was as follows: Let the UMP 4.6 warm up for about 15min, perform black shading in the menu with the lens cap on and then repeat the tests at 5600k WB. As can be seen from the above IMATEST screenshot, we are getting exactly the same results as before (SNR = 2): shooting ISO 800 BRAW 4.6k (scaled to UHD) gives us 12.6 stops of dynamic range at a signal to noise ratio of 2 (13.7 for a signal to noise ratio of 1 without further post processing like highlight recovery or noise reduction in DaVinci Resolve 15.2. Shooting ProRes also gave the same results as in the initial test. One thing however did change after black shading – the shadows that were a bit blueish in the original tests became black. (Thanks to doing black shading). Nevertheless, thank you all for your suggestions, keep them coming in the future as we all can learn from each other! Original Article: When Blackmagic RAW (BRAW) was announced a while ago, I was curious to get my hands on a BMD URSA Mini Pro and test it’s dynamic range with this new codec. The combination of having the full flexibility of 12bit RAW and smaller file sizes at the same time is a real innovation of BMD. How does it fare on the UMP 4.6? A while ago BMD was so kind to send us the URSA Mini Pro 4.6 but unfortunately, we were all out traveling yet there was time to install the new firmware 6.0 and test the dynamic range at ISO 800 and 3200 using our test setup described here. One note upfront: I was very surprised to see the playback performance of BRAW in DaVinci Resolve Studio 15.2. I am using an I7-4720HQ Laptop with 16GB RAM and a GTX980M graphics card, and 4.6k ProRes XQ resulted in ~7 frames / second playback (fps), 4.6k RAW DNG (lossless) resulted in ~11 fps, whereas BRAW had smooth 24 fps playback in a UHD timeline! Hence, not only smaller filesizes with BRAW but also vastly improved playback – a real winner combination. 4.6k ProRes XQ ISO 800 dynamic range results As a baseline, we started first with our standardized testing procedure analyzing the 4.6k ProRes XQ dynamic range. Here, at ISO 800 the UMP 4.6 does not disappoint and comes in with a strong 12.5 stops of dynamic range at a signal to noise ratio of 2 according to our IMATEST analysis (13.6 stops at a signal to noise ratio of 1). I also tested ISO 400, which yielded slightly lower results. This is the best result in our recent 2018 testing, coming in half a stop higher than the Sony FS7. However, quite far from the 15 stops that Blackmagic Design claim. Anyways, we are going to test BRAW subsequently, so let’s see. The noise floor looks very clean, looks like some internal noise reduction is going on here. Fig.1: Step chart waveform plot of the UMP 4.6k ProRes XQ at ISO 800: a little more than 12 stops can be discerned above the noise floor (code values scaled to 8bit). 4.6k BRAW dynamic range results Now, there is a little issue with BRAW and our standardized testing workflow, as we usually try to avoid any 3rd party software when extracting keyframes for our IMATEST analysis (other than FFmpeg) to avoid any kind of manipulation/influence of this software to the image. With BRAW this philosophy doesn’t work, as we have to use DaVinci Resolve to develop the files – the latest version 15.2 Studio in our case. ISO 800 BRAW constant bitrate 3:1 4.6k scaled to UHD Now, using ISO 800 yielded again the best results, with the dynamic range coming in at an even stronger 12.6 stops at a signal to noise ratio of 2 (13.7 stops for SNR = 1). However, this slight difference to ProRes might be also a result of scaling the 4.6k BRAW file to UHD (3840×2160) – as there is no 4.6k timeline preset in DaVinci Resolve (for exporting keyframes to IMATEST). Fig.2: Step chart waveform plot of the UMP 4.6k ISO 800 BRAW. Again, a bit more than 12 stops can be identified visually above the noise floor. NOTE: DaVinci Resolve offers a “highlight recovery” option for BRAW, which can reconstruct the RGB channels even if one channel is already clipped. Together with the noise reduction features, you can heavily post-process the BRAW files – I just tried around a little bit and was able to reach around 13 stops for SNR = 2 (14 stops for SNR = 1). However we don’t count this result as our intention is to test the untouched files straight off the camera – this is not a post-processing contest, it is about a standardized result using a standardized workflow for all the cameras we test. ISO 3200 BRAW constant bitrate 3:1 4.6k scaled to UHD For ISO 3200 we counted 11.7 stops for an SNR = 2 (12.9 stops for SNR = 1), again without post-processing. Playing around with the highlight recovery option and noise reduction, I was able to get around 12 stops for SNR = 2 (13 stops for SNR = 1). Noise kicks in, hence about one stop is lost vs ISO 800. This is still a very good result. Fig.3: Step chart waveform plot of the UMP 4.6k at ISO 3200: noise kicks in, and about one stop is lost vs. ISO 800, leading to around 12 stops of dynamic range. 4.6k RAW DNG (lossless) dynamic range results Similar to BRAW, we have to develop the RAW DNG files in DaVinci Resolve in order to export keyframes for analysis in the IMATEST software. Interestingly, the dynamic range results of the Cinema DNG files without postprocessing are lower than with ProRes and also BRAW, coming in slightly above 11 stops untouched (SNR = 2). The DNG files exhibit much more noise than BRAW and ProRes, hence leading to a lower dynamic range reading in IMATEST. This is a similar phenomenon as we observed with the BMPCC 4k. Using postprocessing like the highlight recovery feature in Resolve along with noise reduction lifts it above ProRes and BRAW (I played around and was able to get more than 13 stops at an SNR = 2, and almost 14 stops for SNR = 1). Fig. 4: dynamic range comparison of the UMP 4.6k (BRAW) ISO 800 result with other cameras. It fares very well, coming in one stop higher than the BMPCC4k. Conclusion When testing the various codecs on the UMP 4.6k there are clear signs of internal noise reduction going on in ProRes and BRAW, very similar to what we observed with the BMPCC4k (please watch particularly the end of our BMPCC4K review for an insight into our testing procedure for dynamic range). Speaking of the BMPCC4k, the UMP4.6k overall comes in one stop higher with regards to the dynamic range. Impressive. However, I cannot reproduce the 15 stops dynamic range that Blackmagic Design are claiming, even at a signal to noise ratio SNR = 1 the maximum I was able to squeeze out by heavy post-processing was about 14 stops. In contrast to this, I was able to confirm the 13 stops for the BMPCC4k at SNR = 1, thereby confirming Blackmagic’s statements. Therefore the untouched BRAW ISO 800 SNR = 2 (or 1/SNR = 0.5) dynamic range result will be the cinema5D reference for future dynamic range comparisons with other cameras. We know that many of you are waiting for an overview chart of all our dynamic range and other technical tests, and please stay tuned for a bit, we are still working on it. There’s a lot of parameters to think about, and also it’s not so easy to display elegantly on our site – however it won’t be long until we will share it with you! You can find Nino’s Ursa Mini Pro Hands-On video review by clicking here and Johnnie’s review and “real world footage” by clicking here. Did you already work with the URSA Mini Pro 4.6 in RAW recording mode? If yes, What is your impression? Please share your experience with us in the comments below.

At this year’s Inter Bee show in Tokyo, our own Johnnie Behiri met with Blackmagic Design in order to discuss their latest updates for both DaVinci Resolve 15.2 and firmware version 6.0 for URSA Mini Pro cameras. We already reported about the updates to DaVinci Resolve 15.2 and Camera 6.0 in detail here. Here’s a round-up including the interview with Blackmagic Design. With version 15 of their popular editing/grading/audio mastering/delivery suite Blackmagic Design added a new tab to their one-app-for-all approach: Fusion FX. Now, just a few months later, Resolve 15.2 hits the streets and it comes with a lot of improvements to almost every aspect of this software. One part of Resolve to which special attention has been paid is the Edit tab. DaVinci Resolve 15.2 Improvements Blackmagic Design really pushes hard in order to get the editing part of their software right. In Resolve 15.2 the editing timeline renders much faster, resulting in a smoother look and feel. Also, a lot of animations within the UI have been improved. As a general improvement the part of DaVinci you are currently working in is being highlighted which makes it easier to keep track of what’s going on. Speaking of visual feedback: You now can easy track down bits of the timeline which contain duplicate frames (pieces of footage you actually have used before within the same timeline). Furthermore clips in the media pool show a visual indication if (and which parts) are being used in the current timeline. You now can load a second timeline or compound clip into the source viewer and send clips straight to the active timeline. This should increase the speed of your workflow! Two bins now can be viewed and accessed at the same time as well. Another nice improvement is the freshly implemented keyboard shortcut manager which is now a visual tool just like in Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro X. You even can emulate keyboard settings to the aforementioned NLE’s. Furthermore you now can assign items from contextual popup menus to keyboard shortcuts. New FX Plugins & Audio Tools Additionally DaVinci Resolve 15.2 features new FX plugins such as Beauty (Studio version only) or Blanking Fill. More advanced plugins for the color page include ACES transform and Gamut Limiter. Edits and transitions applied to audio clips on the Edit page now can be further tweaked on the Fairlight tab of Resolve 15.2. Furthermore you now can edit multiple audio clip at the same time. A cool new feature is called Stereo Fixer. It helps you map your audio to the appropriate channels in order to avoid bad audio mixing. Common mappings such as stereo, reverse-stereo, mono and others are built right in. There are really a whole bunch of new features and a lot has already been covered by Nino in this article. If you want to dive deeper in all the new features make sure to watch the following intro video by Blackmagic: It’s Still Free Although Blackmagic tries hard to convince users to buy the Studio version by limiting certain features such as noise reduction or the new Beauty FX plugin, you must not forget that DaVinci Resolve 15.2 is still free to download. This is actually pretty incredible. You get a full-fledged piece of post-production software which gets frequent updates for no money at all. If Blackmagic maintain their current development speed, this suite of tools might get pretty dangerous for a lot of other (paid) NLE’s out there pretty soon. While it might not be the first choice for serious editing work right now, let’s wait and see how Resolve 15.2 will impact the market. I’m really curious what future versions of Resolve will bring. How about you? URSA Mini Firmware 6.0 This new firmware adds two important new features to the URSA Mini Pro camera: Blackmagic RAW and ISO 3200. Read all about this new RAW format in our initial coverage here. The new ISO doubles the current limit of ISO 1600 and should be a useful tool when shooting in difficult lighting conditions. When does the new Blackmagic RAW codec hit the popular Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K (BMPCC4K) you ask? The answer is: It will but it’s not yet certain when. That’s not exactly what we wanted to hear but at least it’s coming! Need a refresher on this new RAW format? Watch Blackmagic Design CEO Grant Petty’s introduction here: CinemaDNG might be cool but you’ll end up with lots of GB worth of data and it really demands for a mighty powerful computer to cope with it so Blackmagic RAW might be the better choice offering a very good balance between quality and size. Plus it offers a much more modern approach to metadata handling. Links: Blackmagicdesign.com (DaVinci) | URSA Mini Pro | Blackmagic RAW Are you digging the all-in-one approach of Resolve? Or do you prefer Adobe’s take of individual software tool working together? What do you think about v6.0 for URSA Mini Pro? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Swiss manufacturer ALPA is showing off the ALPA PLATON, a camera cage for medium format video at Photokina 2018. The cage works with the Hasselblad H6D-100c, making it able to shoot 4k RAW video at 3.2 Gbps. Here’s what you need to know. Who is ALPA? ALPA got their start in the late 30’s manufacturing 35mm SLRs and continued to do so till the 90’s, when the company had to declare bankruptcy, having produced more than 40000 cameras over the years. In the late 90’s the brand was bought by a Swiss company and returned to Photokina 1998 presenting two new medium format film cameras, mainly for industrial usage. Today, twenty years later, ALPA has reestablished themselves as a maker of premium bodies and accessories, housing the digital or film backs of other medium format manufacturers, such as Hasselblad, Pentax and Phase One, without producing their own sensors. Medium format video Technically larger-than-35mm video is nothing particularly new or special in itself of course, having been around since the earlier days of cinema in the form of 65mm or 70mm film, while the Arri Alexa 65 and the RED MONSTRO present currently available digital options. So what’s special about the ALPA PLATON using the Hasselblad H6D-100c back? Well in regards to sensor area it even out-measures the Alexa 65’s huge ARRI A3X sensor by over 30% and it shoots 16bit RAW video. All of this in a small package and on CFast 2.0 cards, or to SD cards if shooting HD in H.264. Any more questions? Of course the Hasselblad H6D-100c has its own set of problems, which we’ve talked about at length in our initial review as well as our workflow review, but it produces stunning imagery nonetheless. See some footage below (used in the initial review by Christoph Tilley): What does ALPA PLATON do? To clarify: the ALPA PLATON doesn’t add shooting capabilities, a new interface or a recording solution. As is customary with medium format cameras the back (the back being the sensor, all the circuitry behind it, as well as the touch interface and main button controls of the camera) can be rehoused into the ALPA PLATON, which is effectively a new body, providing the following features: Lens mount: in this case a PL-Mount Power supply: NP-F style battery solution Cage with lots of 1/4″-20 and 3/8″-16 attachments and an ARRI Rosette on each side Integrated monitor sun shade Flap to access the controls on top of the camera 15mm rod system (which the power supply unit is mounted to) The overall goal is to make the Hasselblad H6D-100c’s back into a more workable production camera, for example as a B-Camera to a 65mm system. To achieve that goal, ALPA is also cooperating with Erns Leitz Wetzlar (the newly rebranded lens division of Leica), as well as Hasselblad and the ETH Zurich. New mounts under development In addition to the already developed PL-mount version, there will be versions of the ALPA PLATON in Canon EF mount and also Pentax 67, further opening up the possibilities for video usage  (edited  due to outdated information – to clarify: there are currently no other mounts under development). A V-Mount battery solution is also in development. We will keep you posted. What do you think about the ALPA PLATON? Do you think it will be part of a new medium format revolution? Are you even interested in medium format video, and why? Let us know in the comments!

On the heels of IBC 2018, the cinema5D team has decided to give their IBC 2018 Technological Innovation Award to Blackmagic Design for their newly released Blackmagic RAW technology because of its wider implications to filmmaking and its power to further democratise high-quality image acquisition. The Outset – ProRes RAW Less than 6 months ago at NAB in Las Vegas, Apple announced ProRes RAW together with Atomos as their first partner that was implementing the technology into their products. RAW codecs that were user-friendly before that introduction were rare – in all honesty, I think REDCODE RAW was probably the only RAW flavour that was widely used, but of course only in RED cameras. Suddenly having the post-flexibility of RAW combined with the widely recognized ProRes ecosystem was worth one of our Best of Show Award at NAB 2018. Nevertheless, ProRes RAW has some shortcomings that severely limits its current use: only compatible with Mac so far only available on Atomos Recorders – and not in cameras only two compression settings – “normal” and HQ so far only works with Final Cut Pro X In comes Blackmagic RAW By introducing their own user-friendly compressed RAW codec with Blackmagic RAW (read all details here!), Blackmagic Design poses a significant threat to Apple and their ProRes RAW standard. Why? First of all, it’s implemented on a camera-level without the need for any external recorders at all. Admitted, that’s true only for Blackmagic’s own cameras right now (starting with the Ursa Mini Pro), BUT as you can see in our interview below, Blackmagic is open and willing to give it to other camera and software manufacturers for free too. Manufacturers that have “nothing to lose” in the video field (no higher end line to protect) like for example FUJIFILM with their X-T3 should theoretically be very motivated / excited to implement it into their cameras. We will see who goes first. Secondly, I already mentioned software: the newest version of DaVinci Resolve supports it already, and it’s free in its quite powerful basic version, both for Windows and Mac. And they already published the SDK that will allow other NLE software providers to implement support as well, without licensing fees. Adobe and Apple would have a hard time explaining why they don’t want to implement it, in case they wouldn’t. Thirdly, Blackmagic RAW is available in various compression settings in the Ursa Mini Pro, quite similar to what RED is offering with REDCODE. That really allows flexibility when it comes to storage consumption and will help the codec to go mainstream. Other IBC Innovations As usual, we had 3 awards in our baggage to give at IBC 2018, however, we really ONLY found this technology be worthy of a price. IBC 2018 had no camera announcements, not even non-exciting ones, no major lens announcements nor anything else REALLY noteworthy other than the announcement of Blackmagic RAW. It’s sad to see that manufacturers seem to be ignoring big shows like IBC more and more in favour of finding their own dates for big product releases, including big press trips. That is really not great at all because it can easily become a way to prevent real hands-on reviews before a release or to squash critical questions. Congratulations Anyway, we congratulate Blackmagic Design on the technical achievement with Blackmagic RAW and really give this prize in hope that many other camera and software makers will implement the standard into their products in order to allow us filmmakers greater flexibility and better quality in our productions, at no extra cost. Will you be using Blackmagic RAW with your URSA Mini Pro camera or in your other Blackmagic cameras? Would you use it in your other cameras if manufacturers would support it? Let us know in the comments below!

With stock footage sites sprouting out of the ground left and right, the stock footage market is getting rather crowded and saturated these days. In addition to that, there is the issue of aggregators like Blackbox, submitting their contributors’ content to multiple stock footage sites simultaneously, thus leading to confusing experiences for customers, who find themselves looking at the same rather drab content on different sites. RawFilm, a subscription-based stock footage site, that offers only self-produced content shot on RED cameras in REDCODE RAW exclusively, is taking aim at changing that. Producing stock footage seems like a rather enticing proposition: we all know we probably have tons of good looking footage wasting away on hard drives, because we over-shot the B-Roll for some of our projects. Now, how about that nice looking clip from that sunset at sea that we deemed to cheesy to include in our documentary generating some money, without us moving a finger? That’s the fantasy of stock footage and also the way that some sites suggest their contributors could work. The reality of the stock footage market is much different. Your footage will probably be bought with an specific edit in mind, meaning the customer will likely be looking for multiple different angles of that same shot, because that’s what’s going to make it editable and thus usable. In addition to that, your download rates – and by that your money earned – will likely only be high if you have a large catalog to choose from and multiple outlets fitting the kind of content you are producing. Otherwise it might be hard to get noticed on a giant stock site with thousand and thousands of contributors. The same problem exists on customer side of the stock footage market. All too often the content you find does actually look like it was either shot for something else and then reused, or it might leave that metallic aftertaste when you realize you’ve seen some clip that you previewed in ten different Youtube commercials already. And let’s just not mention the often highly complicated pricing structures, that might work out to a clip costing 5 times as much as you anticipated, once you’ve added all the licenses you might need at some undefined point in the future. Of course stock footage sites themselves are reacting to these problems already. We reported on Filmsupply premiering their first short film and trying to change both how stock footage is conceptualized and shot, as well as seen and bought. RawFilm is doing something rather interesting with the same problem. RawFilm’s proposition RawFilm is trying to change things up, by offering only self-produced, exclusive content shot on RED cameras and available for download in REDCODE RAW via a simple subscription. As with most stock footage sites their content is organized in collections, however these collections are mostly consisting of footage from one coherent shoot, providing that footage in lots of different angles, versions and sequences in roundabout 100 – 300 shots per collection. The footage consistently has exceptionally high production value and takes into account the usual requirements for stock footage, like racial and gender diversity. It does seem a little skewed towards use in commercials, but many of the collections could work just as well in narrative work, helping out with missed shots, or shots that are out of budget. In addition to being organized in collections, footage is tagged and searchable, but also suggested by context. All clips are shot in log formats and there is a handy switch in the collection view, as well as in the single clip view letting you check out what the footage looks like flat, or with a very light pass of color correction applied. Of course you can also download lower resolution previews, to incorporate into your project for testing purposes. If you don’t find the content you need, you’re encouraged to get in contact with RawFilm and maybe get that content produced. Pricing structure and subscription model The subscription model is simple and elegant: The basic plan will give you 5 clips per month in 4k H.264, the plus plan contains 10 clips per month in 4k+ (meaning 4k and higher) ProRes and the Premium plan offers 20 clips per month in 4k+ REDCODE RAW or CinemaDNG. One clip means one license for one clip in one project. Unused credits for clips from one month are rolled over to the next month and like in most subscription based models annual payment will get you a substantial discount of around 60%. So how much does this acutally cost? Annual billing on the premium plan will set you back $1080.00 per year, for 240 clip licenses in 4k+ REDCODE RAW, while on the low end you can enter RawFilm’s service for $49.00 per month using monthly billing, awarding five 4k H.264 clips. The other plans offer many options for lots of different budget scenarios, that you might need some stock footage in. Possible downsides? RawFilm’s service does make an impression. It’s very innovative and enticing, and the footage is of very high quality throughout. The pricing model seems fair and accessible for footage of such a high standard and I liked using the site quite a bit. The only possible downside I could find, was the distinction between uses. RawFilm’s terms distinguish between commercial use, editorial use and advertising use, commercial being the one that is generally usable in both advertising as well as editorial cases. So far so good, but what if I know which use case I need and want to filter for that use only, so that I don’t look at footage realizing only after I’ve fallen in love with a clip, that I won’t be able to use it? There is no toggle, search filter, search term or other mechanism on the site, that would allow me to make that distinction. Every clip I clicked on was marked with commercial use, so it could have been used anywhere, but I was little inclined to go through the entire catalog of thousands of clips and check for that. Another thing I might add is, that the distinction of clips being shot only on one brand of camera is something of a marketing stunt. RED is indeed becoming something of a standard in the world of commercials and the brand’s high recognition value makes it somewhat of a signifier of exclusivity – even for clients who can’t operate a camera. Using this fact for marketing purposes is an understandable move, however it does add an unnecessary elitist twist. All in all, RawFilm’s service is a commendable entry into the market and the incredible footage and simple pricing structure absolutely address the greatest pain points of customers and most people involved with using the footage in the post production process. If you’d like to check it out for yourself you can sign up to RawFilm’s service here. What do you think about the quality of RawFilm’s footage? Would you use it in your projects? And what about the pricing? Let us know in the comments! 

In this guest review, Osaka-based filmmaker Matthew Carmody takes a close look at the Hasselblad H6D-100c – a 100MP, 4K Raw-capable medium format camera. Intrigued? Read on for his hands-on impressions. I’m sure I’m not the only one who took a peak at Christoph Tilley’s write-up about medium-format video on the H6D-100C last year. The images had something special about them to my eye and I wanted to know more. But, to my surprise, after scowering the internet for days there wasn’t really much in the way of other detailed reviews or footage. This only served to fuel my interest, eventually leading me to chat with an old colleague that had recently started working at Hasselblad here in Japan. And, funnily enough, it seemed that I wasn’t the only one that wanted to see what this camera could do in the field. So, two full days of testing and two all-nighters to make workable rigs for my usual fast-paced shooting style later and I was ready to head out to the track to film a popular drifting event I originally intended to shoot with Blackmagic’s URSA Mini Pro. Here is a detailed description of what I discovered in the process. First Things First – Workflow & Technical Details The Hasselblad H6D-100C shoots UHD 4K video @24p to CFAST2.0 cards in a proprietary compressed raw format with a .3FV container. The 256GB CFAST2.0 cards I used held around 20 minutes worth of data. Why I say “around” is that it doesn’t tell you how much space is left on the card while you shoot, leaving you to guess and backup as you go. The whole width of the sensor is being used, with the tops and bottoms cut off to create 16:9 aspect video. I can’t seem to verify if it is using a method such as pixel binning, but nonetheless, this is quite amazing as it is converting that lovely medium-format look from the 12K sensor to 4K compressed raw video on the fly. As a result, prepare for noticeable rolling shutter effect, something I was ready for thanks to Christoph’s original review. Seriously don’t try and shoot handheld with anything over 24mm, especially if you are a heavy coffee drinker like me… Once you have shot something, you need to decompress the .3FV files into a flavor of ProRes or a cinema DNG sequence using Hasselblad’s Phocus software. You can name these sequences, or just output to the same name as the original compressed files. Beware that Phocus is very slow to decompress the files. I mean REALLY slow. It took close to 20 hours on my reasonably fast PC to decompress 930GB of .3FV files from the shoot. I put this down to it being optimized for single photos and not video. Hopefully this will change in a future version! Slimraw screen If you choose cinema DNG like I did, the decompressed 16bit DNG files take approximately 2.5 times the space of the original compressed .3FV files. These files are very processor intense even in Resolve, so I recommend creating DNG proxies with Slimraw ($49.00 USD) to compress the 16bit CDNG files into 12bit DNG with 3:1 or 4:1 etc compression for editing and grading in Resolve. This way the workflow remains the same in Resolve and you then just re-link the original 16bit CDNG when finished to output. NOTE: Resolve is the only software that currently reads these compressed DNG files. Other NLEs need a different workflow. This decompression process is kind of similar to what you have to do with DJI’s X5R footage from the Inspire 1 or DJI OSMO RAW. Anyone familiar with Blackmagic or DJI products will feel at home with these DNG files. I enjoyed the editing and grading process once everything was decompressed and proxies were created. The Good, The Bad, and the Audio I quickly worked out that there is no built-in microphone. You can attach an external mic via the 3.5mm jack on the left side.  I couldn’t find anywhere in the menu to alter or monitor audio levels. They appear fixed. As a result, I had to scrap all audio from the shoot as it was way too loud and noisy. A shame, as some of the engines sounded amazing… Once the mic is setup, the audio is recorded along with a 720p mp4 file that is put in the cinema DNG folder and called “audio.mp4.” Surprisingly these mp4 files are 25p, not 24p like the raw sequence. Even more surprising is that the audio.mp4 and corresponding raw sequence are different lengths and don’t match.  You could add something like a Juicedlink for better preamps, but the audio itself isn’t going to be easy to use even for scratch due to the differing lengths.   Rigging the Camera for Real-world Filming The first problem I ran into was that the camera body needs to be raised as the lens is lower than the body and will hit the tripod or gimbal plate in most cases. The viewfinder can be removed, so I did to streamline the build. In combination with the very compact 80mm lens, fitting it on a Ronin-M was reasonably straight forward.   80mm is equivalent to 40mm on a super 35mm camera like the Blackmagic URSA Mini Pro or Canon C200, making it a perfect focal length for general shots. The built-in screen is less than ideal for anything other than seeing you have a picture when filming moving images. You absolutely need an external monitor to shoot video on the Hasselblad H6D-100C. Some other quirks associated with the built-in screen are a lack of metering/monitoring tools like a histogram in video mode, so you have no idea of your exposure. The built-in focus peaking is useful for manual focusing but will only work if you first go into photo mode and then back to video mode. It will then stop working as soon as you press record. Once you have an external monitor setup you will find the 1080p feed out from the mini HDMI out seems to have a heavy rec.709 LUT applied, making it difficult to judge exposure by eye. Not that one would ever judge exposure purely from a monitor by eye, but… To overcome this I used an IKAN DH5e 5″ external monitor with waveform to purposefully overexpose, ignoring the misleading super blown out look you get on the camera LCD screen. The reason for this overexposure is that the raw files have amazing highlight recovery. More on this later. Another area that needed some thought was power management. The battery in the hand grip only lasts around 30 minutes when using live view and shooting video. You could use a few batteries and recharge as you go, however the batteries take several hours to fully charge and I didn’t have time to do this during the shoot. To shoot a full day event I made a 12V D-TAP cable to get external power from the Ronin’s battery distributor for gimbal work, and a V-mount battery for tripod shots I didn’t have to change the hand grip battery once with this setup, making filming a lot less complicated. NOTE: You still have to have the hand grip battery inserted for the system to boot, so the hand grip itself can’t be removed. Continual power means heat and the sensor will overheat in continual live view mode after around 30 minutes on a warm day. I decided to leave the live view off between shots whenever possible, allowing me to shoot for over 8 hours straight with only one overheat resulting in 5 minutes downtime to cool off and backup data. On the topic of live view, the live view screen will go blank after every clip you record, requiring you to restart it and get everything setup again for each individual cut. This isn’t a big issue, but can be a slight hindrance if you want to shoot clips in quick succession. No built-in ND filters meant back to good old 4″x 5.65″ IRND for the 300mm and 24mm lenses, and a 67mm IR cut + Variable ND for the 80mm/2.8 and 100mm/2.2 lenses. Not a big deal if, like me, have filters lying around for other cameras without built-in NDs. Also, there is no way to remote trigger REC with something like a LANC cable. You have to press the small rec button on the touch screen, or press the shutter button on the hand grip. Needless to say, this makes recording a little cumbersome on a gimbal… Shutter Angle and ISO The Hasselblad H6D -100C is primarily a studio camera. After much research and several days of testing in various environments I found that you generally need to film at ISO 64 for the cleanest results, so I decided to fix ISO at 64 for the whole shoot. This camera is not designed for lowlight environments. At least not when it comes to video. One nice side effect of this is that you don’t need as much IRND during the day even at bright apertures.  The closets you can get to a 180 degree shutter angle is 1/45 or 1/60. There is no option for 1/48 or even 1/50. Slightly strange as it only shoots 24p. NOTE: ALL SHOTS IN THE VIDEO USED ISO64 and 1/60 SHUTTER. I could have chosen 1/45, but drift cars are fast and I wanted to cut stills for SNS from the video as well. The Raw Truth As soon as I brought the files into Davinci Resolve, I found the colors to be amazing even with a standard rec.709 LUT and basic grading applied. The grade you see in the video literally took 30 seconds to achieve. I just needed to tweak individual files from there and I was done. The next thing I discovered was that the highlight recovery of the 16bit raw files is very good. You can get back even the most severely overexposed areas to a point where the clipping doesn’t bother your eye. Quite amazing and much better than some other popular cinema cameras on the market. Highlight recovery BEFORE     Highlight recovery AFTER The catch is that the shadows can be quite noisy. You can see this in the wide angle slow push into the yellow car window. The bucket seats show a decent amount of noise.  It would seem that the compressed raw files favor the highlights at the expense of the shadows. “Shadow noise: exposure lifted heavily to highlight issue” One thing I can say is that if you look at the video as a whole you see it isn’t a problem with the majority of shots. Overexposing in light of the excellent highlight recovery can help solve this issue in most cases. Another thing you may also notice in the overexposed areas have a tendency to exhibit a purple tint. I needed to mask and fix a few shots in the video due to this. Check the wheel rims and other overexposed metallic parts in some shots. You can see a bit of this purple in the bright highlights. Medium-format Lenses This was a real shoot, so I decided to go with three main lenses that were all reasonably different and would cover wide, medium, and long shots. Starting from the wide end, the 24mm lens has noticeable distortion in the corners as it is apparently designed for a slightly smaller medium-format sensor. Check the wide shots in the video. Phocus apparently crops and corrects this for still images, however in-body correction of this distortion would be much appreciated for video shooters. It has a very unique look that is great for certain shots. Creating bokeh with such a wide angle is one reason medium-format is so intriguing to many people including myself. The 80mm lens is a great all-round lens that is super compact and features a bright F2.8 aperture. F2.8 for medium format is faster than it sounds. I used it as the main lens on DJI’s Ronin-M with a DJI follow focus system for control. 80% of the footage is filmed with this lens purely due to the convenience and speed this lightweight setup afforded. The early morning shots are at around F2.8-F3.5. Later on I used F5.6 for medium shots like the fake cop car with flashing lights. All apertures up to F8 were pleasing to my eye. The 300mm lens was naturally a tough one to shoot moving objects like drift cars. Rolling shutter can be a problem with longer focal lengths and moving objects. Most of the shots in the video with the 300mm (The blue drift car, guy waving green t-shirt) are shot at F5.6 with 1.2 IRND applied and the results look very pleasing to me. Resolving, but not sharp with creamy bokeh. Wide open, all lenses seemed to be a tad soft and creamy, while at the same time highly resolving. This is a character I really liked. They started fully resolving when slightly stopped down to F5.6 through F8. The bokeh and fall off from all the lenses (aside from the 24mm which I mainly used at F8 for this shoot) are absolutely beautiful. The subject in focus is very 3-dimensional and the backgrounds are soft and creamy to my eye. Watching the video should show this better than anything I write here. Summary This camera is not everyone’s cut of tea. However, working around its restrictions you can get very nice images in the right conditions. For me, the overall image quality and look this camera produces is special enough to outweigh the current list of cons, some of which I am sure can be easily rectified in a firmware update and future versions of Phocus. Hasselblad H6D-100c – Main Pros: (In no particular order) Full readout of the sensor width with no horizontal crop The amazing look the lenses give in combination with this massive sensor Lovely 3-dimentional rendition of subjects with superb fall off and creamy bokeh Beautiful colors out of the box Medium-format video in a compact form factor that even fits on a small gimbal Highlight roll off is pleasing even in heavily overexposed areas Recording to readily available CFAST2.0 media Hasselblad H6D-100c- Main Cons: (In no particular order) No way to see how much space is left on the CFAST card Noticeable rolling shutter in fast pans or fast-moving objects The audio is difficult to use even for scratch Shadows can show noticeable noise in some situations Overexposed highlights tend to have a slight purple tint The mp4 files are 25p and of a different length to the DNG sequences Live view resets and needs to be reactivated after every shot Phocus is slow to expand the compressed raw files into DNG files I hope some of this might be useful if you ever get your hands on a Hasselblad for video. Happy shooting!

Kinefinity has just realeased a major update for their Terra cinema cameras. The KineOS 6 update brings a completely overhauled user interface (UI) and a lot of new features, although surprisingly many of those are only available for the Terra 4K, not the 6K. You can download KineOS 6 for Kinefinity Terra 4K and Terra 6K right now as a free update. Both cameras will benefit from an upgraded UI but only the Terra 4K will get the whole package of new and improved (technical) features. Read all about these cameras here. Kinefinity KineOS 6 Update The layout of key parameters has been revamped in order to achieve a cleaner look and feel without having to search for the most frequent settings all the time. Here’s a list of all the new and improved UI fetaures: Interface redesigned: New layout of key parameters such as clip name, timecode and codec format. Key Parameters Tuning: Define shortcut buttons in order to change key parameters such as ISO, iris, color temperature, ND stops etc. A waveform exposure assistant is now available. New Setup Menu which is easy to read and operate. The Kinefinity Terra 4K is now able to record compressed RAW in cinemaDNG format. This feature is still in beta (‘test version’) but you can already try it for yourself. Choose between 3:1, 5:1 or 7:1 compression ratios and record compressed RAW cDNG directly in-camera. The Terra 4K inherits this feature from the MAVO. Note: Even though you can download KineOS for the Terra 6K, this compressed RAW feature is only available for the Terra 4K. Kinefinity offers some notes on this feature: 1) KineLog will be burned in when you record comressed RAW in cinemaDNG (which will be handled by DaVinci Resolve natively). 2) You will have to grade from scratch after importing the footage in DaVinci Resolve because cinemaDNG and ProRes footage require very different workflows. 3) Playback of cinema DNG footage will be very slow, the speed will increase in future firmware versions, though. KineOS 6 offers some new oversampling options. The camera uses all the pixels of the CMOS sensor and outputs 2K/Full HD footages which usually improves the overall image quality and reduces the noise level. Again, only the Terra 4K will support this feature. Another big improvement of KineOS is the ability to shoot anamorphic with the Terra 4K camera. You can choose between an anamorphic mode (3700 × 2700 pixels) and an open gate mode (full sensor -> 4096 × 2700 pixels). If used with a 2x anamorphic lens, the de-squeezed image will sport a whooping 7400 x 2700 resolution. When using either of these new anamorpfic modes the framerate is limited to 50 fps. You guessed it, only the Terra 4K will benefit from these new shooting modes. Other Improvements Apart from the major updates of KineOS 6, the company has squished a few bugs and polished some features. here is list of some minor improvements: Optimized In-camera LUT: more balanced color for fast workflow. Added project frame rate: 48, 50, 59.94, 60fps. Fixed the abnormal image when start up. Fixed freeze issue at some operations. Optimized black shading of TERRA 4K. Fixed system crash when adjusting ISO under certain color temperature. Fixed the mismatch of exposure compensation in menu setting. Optimized the highlight performance for TERRA 6K in some special case. Change the minimum frame rate of TERRA 4K to 6fps. The KineOS 6 update can be downloaded now for free over at Kinefinity.com. The Terra 4K is $3,999 and the Terra 6K is $5,999. If you can wait just a little bit longer, the $7,999 MAVO (read our initial coverage here) might be an option, too. Do you own a Terra 4K or 6K camera? What are your thoughts about this update? Let us know in the comments below!