Along with some impressive new capture cards, Blackmagic has released a new Ursa Mini Pro G2 with a super 35mm HDR image sensor, 15 stops of exposure and 120 fps at 4.6 K and 300 fps at cropped 1080p. All for $5999.
And more exciting for lower end is an update to the Black Magic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K to add full Blackmagic RAW support with 1:1, 3:1, 5:1, 8P1 and 12:1 compression (as well as removing cinema dng codec because of licensing issues). This is a huge update to this impressive little camera!
Of course no Blackmagic raw support yet in premiere so you will need to purchase something like this from BRAW Studio. It is only $29 so worth it if you have a camera that uses it.
So a YouTube Channel called Tailosive Tech has released a video on an inside source from apple on the new 2019 macpro.
And AppleInsider has also covered it (easier to read, especially since the edit is very trimmed, but not very covered and hurts my brain a bit as an editor).
Not only does this cover the new rumored 6K 31 inch monitor, but the new macpro, claiming the modular mac works like stackable legos, with a brain module with a soldered in cpu, and 8 slots of upgradeable RAM. Then you can add GPU modules, and storage modules, possibly modules with the unanounced thunderbolt 4, and eventually possibly third party modules eventually. Each module with it’s own power supply and cooling. And possibly not available until 2020.
This would seem to cover “modular” and why it has taken so long. Giving people an upgraded cheesgrater would not have taken this long, but Apple wouldn’t have made money off every upgrade in that scenario, while with this stackable design they would, including third party modules from licensing their propriety connector. And upgrades likely won’t be cheap. Instead of just a gpu, you are also getting a case, the custom connector a power supply and cooling system (and likely a reason for dropping NVIDIA support, as NVIDIA doesn’t like customized boxes and shapes, but AMD is all in with that).
And depending on the modules, this could be a very cool machine, though also very very expensive. Lets hope they have sone SATA modules as large ammounts of SSD storage are still prohibitively expensive. And let’s hope third party support comes quickly as a blackmagicdesign module for video i/o would be essential. And a sledless 4 drive sata raid module wouldn’t be a bad thing either.
I know this is all rumor, but it makes total sense. This lets Apple give expandability, but lets them control it completely and make money off of every bit of it. And Apple will have delivered what they said, and can charge what they want for it. It will not make everyone happy, especially since it will not be easily user upgradeable, and will be significantly more expensive than a machine that is user upgradeable, but it will ge a true pro machine.
I just hope they show it off at WWDC on June 3rd, but if they aren’t releasing until at least December 31st 2019, that may be way too early.
OK Canon, what the hell? What are they thinking with the EOS R and EOS RP mirrorless cameras? 4 year old sensors that were behind the times on video quality when they came out.
I mean Canon made the DSLR Camera Video revolution, but when they made their C series video cameras they decided it was time to depricate video functionality on their still cameras in favor of their C series video cameras.
Then the mirrorless revolution started and by Sony, but followed by Fuji, Panasonic, Olympus and recently even Nikon, but Canon glass was so good, that people couldn’t wait for Canon to join in. And finally they have with insultingly old technology, and new very expensive lenses! It is a huge middle finger to everyone with a ton of canon lenses!
Really it makes the new BlackMagic Pocket Cinema 4K the last bastion of video for someone with Canon EF lenses and even that is heavily cropped and a small sensor leading to small depth of field.
Canon has betrayed it’s users, opting for usefull video features only with it’s expensive C series video cameras. And the best part is that by doing so they have also betrayed the still users they are supposedly aiming for. Who wants to spend thousands on old technology? A new sensor could have vastly improved both still and video quality, with better low light as well as color technology. Instead they opted for old tech to not canibalize their video cameras and screwed everyone.
Canon has screwed all it’s loyal customers and lost the race for both still and video users. They have betrayed the low end video movement they started and need to nan up and create sone new tech, but at this point it is too late. With the bigger lenses negating their entire line of EF lenses they have lost their advantage (no matter how good their new super expensive lenses are). And even their still feature advantages will eventually not save them (sony’s lack of hdr photography is a huge hit).
I picked up a camranger mini for my wife for christmas to use a a director’s monitor for a dslr.
The Device is mainly used to control a dslr for still photography, but also works for video, though at a very low frame rate. It is works by connecting a small device to your dslr via a USB cable and then connecting your iOS or Android device via wifi. And you can nominally control the camera from the device.
As a director’s monitor it works from framing, but not performances as the frame rate is just too low.
Still cool to be able to see without an attached monitor, especially if the camera is in motion, but a higher frame rate would be welcome.
Maybe the announced Camranger 2 which comes out this year will do better.
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While I was working on an idea for a short film, I realized the footage I had wasn;t good enough, so I decided to do a test between my DJI OSmo+ and my DJI Osmo Pocket to see the difference in quality.
It turned out to be a huge difference. The Osmo+ with Z-Axis is much more stable, but the DJI Osmo Pocket is so much sharper. The image quality on the pocket is just so much better.
An interesting comparison, and I wish that the Pocket had a Z-Axis stabilizer, though it would be much harder because of all of the phone connected to it.
I got a DJI Omso Pocket for Christmas and this is all of my initial footage that I shot to test it out, as well as some of my thoughts on it. I shot it all with the Osmo Pocket including the footage of me.
The footage was shot at UHD 59.94 progressive, though I shot my interview footage at 29.97 so I could try out the face tracking.
So far I am really impressed with the footage, and this amazing little camera, and it’s little tiny screen. I love that I can just drop it in my pocket and have it at a moments notice.
William Gallagher and Mike Wuerthele at AppleInsider hacve an article on how someone at Apple Management doesn’t want NVIDIA support in MacOS.
I have been talking about this for years. Apple doesn’t care about the pros. They care about what they want. And they want the companies that kowtow to them.
And the new “modular” macpro is obviously not going to be what Pros want if you can’t use the components that you want. It seems any new MacPro will only work with AMD video cards. And many video pros want NVIDIA and CUDA, as well as for science people who need proprietary CUDA support! Honestly it means that likely there will be no accessible pci slots in the new MacPro, and not even thunderbolt support for NVIDIA.
There were all these rumors that the exclusivity with AMD ended as of 2019, but it seems Apple is done with NVIDIA. Hell there were even rumors that 2xxx series work with startup unlike all non-supported apple cards, and if that is true Apple is actively supressing NVIDIA!
Now I hear from friends that the new iMac Pro is awesome, but I hate no PCI slots or extra internal storage! Hell you can get PC’s with built in Raids that don’t even require sleds for spinning hard drives. I mean a macpro with an external raid would blow people’s minds! Even if it was a “module” you could add on!
I don’t want to move to Windows. I love my surface, because I can run real photoshop, but would rather have it be a mac, and I want my computer to ge a mac, but am more and more scared that a mac will not be great for a pro.
So I was trying to watch the Martian extended edition UHD blu-ray on my xbox one x, but every time it hot an extended scene the audio goes out of sync. You can get it back by cycling through the available audio or doing a quick rewind, but it is super frustrating. I googled and Microsoft Communities has some posts about it.
I also wrote to their support on twitter. This is certainly an issue Microsoft needs to look into, as no review mentions the issue so it seems to be xbox exclusive, and seens to be a problem with seemless branching.
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So I just got the Blackhawk Down Extended Edition UHD Blu-ray, and just like Ridley’s Scott’s The Martian Extended Edition Blu-Ray, the extended edition glitches whenever their is a new scene. The audio cuts out and it pauses. The Martian was actually slightly worse in that the audio went out of sync and i had to fast forward to get it back in sync. And the regular bluray does play seemless branching correctly.
I called xbox support, and they seem to know about the issue, and know it is software based, but can’t escalate it to where it will actually be fixed. So everyone who runs into this issue please report it.
The xbox one x blu-ray player is broken and needs to be fixed, but they aren’t going to do anything about it unless enough people report it.
So my iPhone X has recently developed a new problem. I use my 256 GB iPhone X as my music player, and up until IOS 12.1 when I showed the lock screen it would show whatever music I was previously playing, and let me hit play to continue playing, but with iOS 12 it is now showing a siri suggestion for music to play instead of what I have been playing!
Here is a screenshot of my lock screen showing a Siri Suggestion for Age of Man by Greta Van Fleet instead of what I have been listening to.
And the best part is that I have Siri Suggestions turned off. AS you can see in the following Screenshot.
If I have suggestions in Lock Screen turned off, why am I seeing this Suggestion instead of what music I have been playing?
Anyone who has any suggestions would be appreciated.
And it really begs the question if it is time to move to Windows. I really hate windows compared to Mac OS, but I want choice, I want an NVIDIA card and from the whole Mojave fiasco it looks like that is not happening.
