From the course: Video Gear

Benefits of the Blackmagic URSA 4K

From the course: Video Gear

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Benefits of the Blackmagic URSA 4K

- I have to admit that my favorite feature, and I'm sure this is going to be a lot of people's favorite feature, is that this is one of the easiest things. You're almost getting an iPad plus two iphones with it. - Yeah, let's talk about the ergonomics of this camera. So it's basically an all aluminum metal square with a handle on top. On the bottom we have built-in ports for having a rail system there. - Yup, and they do make an actual a shoulder mount where you can attach shoulder mount here, so it is more comfortable. Otherwise it attaches to your standard plate. But the hallmark that you're going to immediately notice, the thing that everybody comes up like moths to the flame is that's a huge picture. - Right. We have this built-in iPad, essentially. This is a gigantic viewfinder and it's great because just like the studio camera that Blackmagic makes, this gives you a huge image. And so you don't really have to depend on external monitoring, going to a big client monitor. You have that big client monitor and external monitoring right here. - Which is great. But unlike one of my major beefs with the other Blackmagic cameras, we've talked about this a lot, Ron, you don't have to touch this to do things. Every other Black Magic camera it's like the menu system is your screen. And I have to tell you, unless you're going to wear gloves on set, you can get ski gloves or little thin gloves that'll be capacitor sensitive, it gets really dirty. This is clean. We have dedicated buttons here right on the side to access everything. - Yeah, so if your camera operator doesn't actually want to get near the camera, we have controls here. And that brings up a really important ergonomic feature about this camera. It's designed with three overall zones, if you will, of control. So we have the flipout screen here with menu controls over here. Kind of really dedicated for the camera operator, maybe the DP, somebody running the camera. And then on this side right here we have one little LCD, and you called this earlier, you said it's like having an iPad and an iPhone. - Right. And so this is the DP zone. When we get to the other side of the camera, it's really designed for two folks to work with. So you've got, of course, on the side here the ability for the person doing follow focus, or your audio guy. Look at this, we got easy access ports right here, so we can get right into what we need. Dedicated audio inputs, an output feed if you need to send out over HDSDI so you could attach another monitor. So this is really like a monitoring and control zone, and this toggles between basically being a monitor and a control port. The audio guy's going to love this. Look at this, we've got an actual live wave for you, you might have noticed it was updating on the fly, so you're getting waveforms, audio waveforms. - And the cool thing here is that, don't forget I said three zones. So you mentioned that DP over here, maybe a follow focus person or audio person over here. That doesn't discount that somebody can also be looking at this zone here. Most of the time it would probably be a DP, but you could have three people separately on this camera, and the cool thing is that this zone over here with this little display, and then this zone over here, are completely independent of each other. - Your audio guy could be making tweaks, you'll notice not only is he getting essentially the audio waveform, but really live, easy to see. If I'm directing and I'm standing several feet away, I can look over and I could see the audio levels from a distance. This camera is all about everybody on set being happy with each other. - And there's some other really cool features here too. This is the first pro-level camera that I know of that shoots with CFast cards. So they are much smaller than SSDs. Not quite as fast as an SSD, but they're still exceptionally high quality, because let's not forget that the URSA out of the box is a 4K camera, so we can shoot UHD with it, not true 4K, not DCI 4K, but UHD and that CFast card is going to give the necessary speed that's required for shooting 4K, which is there. - And with two slots, this is the first Blackmagic camera that seems to understand this idea that maybe you want to keep rolling in the middle of a memory card change. I've had this for years on Panasonic, with two for four P2 slots, one gets full, you pop it off, you have it to your DI, they start transferring, and you just put another blank one in. - One of the other key features and essential aspects of this camera is the mount itself. Now, this camera is available in a couple different configurations. - Four, in fact. Standard ones, right? We've got a Canon mount. - Yeah, so this is the EF mount one. - We borrowed this one from our friends at LensRentals. We went with the EF mount using the Canon Cinema lenses. Very happy with this lens. It's amazing how light this Cinema lens is with great quality. - And then we have a PL mount one. The PL mount one, obviously for Cinema-type lenses, little bit more expensive, but I think that's really going to please a lot of people who are probably going to invest in this camera anyway, who are going to rent or already own PL mount lenses. And then we have the broadcast camera, which is a B4 mount. So that's common in ENG style shooting. - Or studio cameras, where you're using a pedestal. I would less likely use this in an ENG environment but it would be very common for me to put this on a pedestal, and want to have some of those remote controls, trigger starts and trigger zooms, that are needed in a studio environment. - And then the last one is that we can actually use the URSA as a standalone recorder over HDMI. Now you might be thinking to yourself, gosh there's got to be cheaper ways of doing that. But the thing about this is that essentially, this whole block here, Rich, is just a recorder. - So, what's going to happen here is this becomes the highest end cage monitor and digital disk recorder on the planet. - The other thing too about this mount is that Blackmagic has said that the sensor is upgradeable by the user. So we'll see in the future as Blackmagic makes improvements to the sensor how well that really works out. But you can see just right up front here, Rich, it's just got a couple screws. We can pop out that whole block, I wouldn't recommend doing that until Blackmagic announces something. - Don't be curious and go, "I'll just open it up and see," because it'll be something that says like, "Step one, disconnect your sensor. Your sensor is now rendered useless. Put the new sensor in." - Right, exactly. Now besides all the things to love about this camera, we do have a couple things that we want to mention that are not so great about this camera as well as jump into the menu systems, and we'll do that next.

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