“Anyone can do a 4K camera so we are asking what’s the next big leap?” — Rob Tarrant, Panasonic
asked why we need to go to 4K, 8K or beyond but the right question is ‘what am I going to do with a device that can shoot at a higher resolution than I have ever seen before?’”
Blackmagic conjures camera The increasing power and reduced price of digital processing is changing the game, making high-res devices a commodity. A case in point was the 2.5K 13f-stop Cinema Camera from Blackmagic Design, which by modestly delaying announcement until the show, proved a showstopper. It would have turned heads
anyway since the Australian firm has built its business on capture cards, not optics. The stylish Apple-inspired design featured an LCD backpanel, Zeiss and Canon lens compatibility and a £1800 price tag that includes colour correction suite Resolve plus a waveform package which Blackmagic’s EMEA Director Stuart Ashton reckoned was worth another £1600. “We’ve spent years plugging
cameras in with our Decklink cards so we understand the outputs,” he explained. “Since acquiring Da Vinci we also feel we know what good images are from poor ones.” Perhaps most startling is the
recording media. This is a built-in SSD recorder that can capture CinemaDNG RAW, ProRes and DNxHD files to solid state cards which hold 512GB or an hour of 2.5K material (five hours at ProRes HD or DNxHD) and can be diverted directly to a laptop via Apple’s Thunderbolt I/O. “There are no cameras with SSD and none with Thunderbolt connectivity,” claimed Ashton. “The touchscreen interface and the design element is about revolutionising the process.” It’s also about revolutionising
the market. As with Resolve, Blackmagic has priced the kit to sell in spades. “We wanted to make the camera as egalitarian and as aspirational as possible in order to sell a lot of them,” noted Blackmagic’s Soren Phillips. Another company set on
democratising the market is GoPro, maker of inexpensive HD POV cams, which were initially meant for consumers before finding application in reality programming and extreme sports. To broaden its range further the company has new software that dramatically ups the GoProHD’s dynamic range and bit rate. Fruit of its acquisition
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last year of Cineform, GoPro Protune provides a hook into Cineform’s colour correction tools with log curves certified by none other than Technicolor. “We had feedback that the GoPro HD was hard to colour
correct, that the frame rates don’t necessarily match with other cameras used on a production, and that there were artefacts in the colour correction process,” said David Newman, senior director, software engineering,
TVBEurope 39 NAB Wrap-Up
GoPro. “We decided to turn the camera into a digital cinema version of the GoPro. The bit rate goes up from 15Mbps to 35Mbps compressed Long GOP H.264, a capability which allows us to intercut with other cameras used
in professional environments without frame rate conversion.” Remarkably the software is a
free firmware upgrade available for the HD HERO2 camera this summer and is released along with a $99 Wi-Fi system which permits
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