Blackmagic and Vision Mixing

Today, Peter Dinsdale showed us his own Blackmagic kit and how to use it. He has been making cameras for 3-4 years. I think they came in to pitch to Lee as they kept talking to him rather than us, the students, and I think they are buying a few for us to take out if we are filming in the field and need vision mixing so it's portable. 

They first started talking about some very confusing numbers. I wrote them down but I can't make sense of them. There are two boxes. The bottom box has a 'smart scope' and can show pictures/video feed, waveforms or both. There are 2 ME's (???) on it too, a router and a talkback. When linking it up to vision mix, you can use the vision mixing panel but can also attach up to 3 laptops to it so different people can focus on different things such as audio or SFX, etc. 

The camera they brought was an Ursa Mini and can film in 4K (in other words, super HD). It was made so it can be portable and can carry it on a shoulder. It can also be operated as a studio/production camera. It takes CFAST cards which aren't too expensive (£300 for a 250gb but if you film in 4K it can only hold 20 minutes of footage so we'd need a lot!). It can film in 4K RAW or Pro Res (a little less high quality but takes up less storage). 'Resolve' is the main editing programme they use as it has grading and resizing. 

They use BNC cables when using the vision mixer (some more confusing numbers. I wrote down "1 cable a.k.a 12g" no idea what this means. My amaing note taking skills). The servo lenses limits the footage to HD but the EF lenses can be used for 4K but they wont stay in focus when you zoom. The cameras are made for digital film production rather than T.V. as it films in 4K and is a manual camera (you choose the settings, there is no auto). It is hard to tell if it is overexposed but according to Dinsdale you can "fix it in post" which we were told not to do. But oh well rules are there to be broken. ;-)