RED DSMC2 8K VS URSA 12k!! - Blackmagic URSA Mini Pro 12k Review

is the new ursa 12k by blackmagic capable of replacing the red dsmc2 helium let's find out today we're going to be going over the features of the new ursa 12k and comparing it with our helium 8k to find out if it has what it takes to replace our helium 8k now to start there's a lot we love about the helium 8k as well as plenty of things we don't love about it we purchased it back when it was originally announced and were able to pick up unit 109 and have put some serious hours on this camera it was originally the epic w which we later paid to upgrade to the dsmc2 helium camera it has been our a cam for almost four years now and has been the camera that we use for any shoots that require a lot of heavy pre-production now i don't want to come across as negative but if we're being completely honest for as great of a camera as it's been it's also to date been the most unreliable camera that we've had [Music] and we've used everything from canon sony panasonic and now blackmagic and that may not be the case with all their cameras but it's been our experience with this camera we'll dive deeper into some of our gripes with the dsm c2 camera and compare them with the ursa 12k so let's get started from the short amount of time we've had with the ursa the build quality seems solid but we'll see how it holds up over time the physical buttons for changing explosion controls are definitely welcome and nice to have while i like having a physical on off switch i feel like it would be easy to accidentally bump the on off switch during a shoot which could be problematic the 12k ships with a pl mount but we switched ours out for an ef mod i would love to see blackmagic come out with an ef mount similar to red's that allows you to tighten down on the mount after the lens is attached unfortunately our ef mount seems to have a bit of play in it with certain lenses the ursa 12k is not my favorite form factor for a camera in fact it was one of the biggest things holding us back from purchasing it while there have been cameras with worse form factors i really would have loved to see them go with a more modular camera body style like that of the red dsm c2 re mini and infiniti cameras i know that some people like the form factor and i can see it working great for shoulder rig stuff and eng style shooting but for our style of shooting having something that is easy to modify and rigged to our needs would be way more ideal while i personally like using smaller monitors like the bm5 the lcd on the ursa mini pro is just slightly too small for my taste and the bezels on it are huge it would have been nice to see them make the screen bigger and fill it out more although what i would have really liked to see is a detachable monitor that still allows for touch screen controls but can be positioned anywhere on the camera which is also similar to the dsmc2 cameras and confinity cameras the urso is also slightly too long cameras will already naturally stretch out as you add long lenses matte boxes transmitters and batteries but having a shorter camera to start with helps it from getting ridiculously long and looking like a bazooka coming from the helium i do appreciate that overall it actually feels pretty lightweight the ursa body with rigging weighs in at 7.8 pounds whereas the red with the tilt expander module and monitor weigh in at 10.8 pounds seeing that both cameras can be rigged out so differently it's a little hard to do a direct weight comparison now this is one area that has always been a frustration with our helium the boot up time on our helium camera is painfully slow to give you guys an idea we did a side-by-side test of the difference in boot up times between the ursa and helium [Music] for us this is especially a frustration when you have a shot lined up and everything is ready to go the actor is in the zone and then all of a sudden you realize you need to do a battery change and everyone is on set sitting there waiting for the camera to boot back up or you're shooting at sunset where every minute matters and you're stuck doing a battery swap right when the sun is right where you want it it may seem like a minor nitpick but having a camera that can boot up and be ready to shoot in six seconds is so nice blackmagic design's software operating system for their camera is really snappy and intuitive red software on the other hand feels so slow and laggy it reminds me of using the old windows mobile phones while the layout and menu system on the red are good it's more so how slow and leggy everything is it just seems like there's always a delay the blackmagix os feels super smooth and snappy and its design is so much cleaner the things like zooming in to check focus seem to take forever with the red whereas the ursa feels super quick and natural now i'm fully aware that the red os does not have to be controlled through a touch screen and that most pros don't use a touchscreen when they're shooting and i'm all for having physical buttons as they are extremely handy for some stuff but for certain things having a good touch screen os can be much quicker than using physical buttons to navigate a menu system now this probably isn't new information to anyone but red cameras have always been known for having loud fans and unfortunately that's also the case with the dsmc2 cameras it's certainly manageable when set to adaptive quiet mode but when set to adaptive it can make some serious noise i know that there is a lot of heat generated in cameras with this much resolution but the ursa 12ks fan is noticeably quieter here's a test that we did in our sound booth comparing the two as many people already know red's cameras are also notorious for sucking down batteries very fast and this was one area we were very curious to see how the ursa performed compared to our helium while we haven't had the chance to put it through a real world test on a shoot we set up both cameras with the same exact batteries and left them on to see how long they would last and here are the results [Music] [Music] having built-in nd is extremely convenient and should be something that comes standard with any professional camera while this is obviously the most convenient for solo shooters it can also be a bonus for productions with full crews not having to waste time loading in nd filters into a matte box tray can save so much time on the day of the shoot and is one less thing to remember when gear prepping if you don't prefer the nd filters built into the camera you can still always use your own but having the built-in nd filters there as a safety ensures you'll never leave home without them i'm not going to dive deep into b-raw and get super technical with it but i do want to quickly talk about it we have absolutely loved b-raw and while some people would say it's not the real compressed raw we frankly have yet to see how that makes a difference what matters to us is if the image is able to be manipulated and changed after the fact and if the codec provides a great looking image and i can say having worked extensively with both r3d and b-raw i don't see a huge advantage of one over the other people may give us grief for that but at the end of the day they both provide an awesome looking image with lots of flexibility in post and to us that's all that matters we also edit all of our projects in davinci resolve and the performance of b-raw within resolve is incredible and much better than r3d which is to be expected as blackmagic makes both davinci and b-raw which also gives us assurance that the performance and support will always be great between these two i also like that blackmagic gives us the ability to choose between constant quality and constant bitrate with red you only have the option for constant bitrate we found to really like using constant quality as it gives the camera the ability to decide how much data it should record which ultimately saves space while giving us an extremely high quality file also one thing to note is that the ursa 12k only records in b raw no prores i love the direction blackmagic has gone with recording media i think it's awesome that they give you options with what media you can use while cfas isn't exactly cheap it's certainly a much more reasonably priced media over red mini megs considering you can get a 500 gig cfast card for as low as 500 whereas a 500 gig red mini mag runs 1400 i also love that blackmagic has in recent years given us the ability to record over usbc to lower cost solid state drives what i don't love is how unsafe doing this can be i think it was smart to move the usbc recording port outside of the flip screen but where it's located could easily be bumped and could break not only the usbc cable but the connection itself they did add a spot where the usb-c cable with a locking screw can be used the only downside is they only sell that cable with the ursa mini recorder which i'll get to later hopefully they choose to sell this cable separately down the road or that some third party makes a cable that can utilize the female thread receiver although i feel like even with the locking screw the usb-c port could still easily be damaged if it's bumped too hard or too many times i would have much rather them integrated some sort of usbc locking mechanism into the camera itself to ensure that the usb-c port is protected as much as i personally love usb-c i would way rather see blackmagic go the route that kinfinity has chosen to go by allowing users to purchase third-party nvme m.2 ssds and install them into their mag enclosures this allows for cheaper faster media without having to mess with a fragile usbc port now blackmagic does actually allow us to do this with the addition of an attachment on the back called the ursa mini recorder unfortunately this still uses the usbc cable and adds a significant amount of length to what is already a longer than normal camera so please blackmagic find a way to integrate third-party ssd media into your cameras without having to use a usb-c cable and without having to add a giant brick on the back now onto my last note about recording media with the ursa 12k blackmagic has added the ability to record alternating frames of a video clip onto both cfast cards this means that if you were recording a 60p clip and one of the cfast cards went bad you would still have the video clip but instead of 60p it would be 30p this also allows for the recording of lower compression rates and higher frame rates if a single cfast card by itself doesn't have the right speeds to keep up while this is great it would have been even better to see blackmagic integrate the ability to do real dual recording for redundant backups so that you had an exact same clip on both cards my hope is that this is something blackmagic can integrate through software down the road the ursa 12k is capable of 12k at 60 frames per second 8k at 120 and 4k at 120 all at full frame using b-raw which is insane and the only camera capable of such high resolution frame rates obviously shooting at these frame rates and resolution can chew through a significant amount of data but having the option to shoot at constant quality does help save some data the red helium is able to do 8k at 60 frames per second but if you want to record at lower resolutions the sensor will obviously be cropped the helium and ursa 12k both have an aspect ratio of 17 to 9 although the helium is slightly larger with an image circle of 33.8 millimeters while the ursa 12k has an image circle of 30.56 millimeters if you're curious how the sensor size compares to other cameras phil holland has an amazing free tool that you can use that i'll link in the description below now i'm sure what most people are wondering is how does the 12k footage look and how does it compare to something like the helium 8k for us this was the biggest unknown and more than anything we really wanted to know how the 8k performed because while 12k sounds exciting we wanted a camera that could produce really great looking ak footage not 12k footage the tests that we did were all shot at 12 1 compression ratio to keep things fair upon our first test the 12k image was in no way sharper or had more detail than the 8k helium for us this isn't necessarily a bad thing as the best image isn't always the sharpest image but i was a bit surprised considering how many more pixels the 12k has i'm not sure how practical it is to be doing extreme crop ins like you'd expect with a 12k sensor for us we rarely crop in any of our videos other than to simply fix a crooked horizon so personally we're more concerned how the image looks as a whole here's a look at some test footage we shot with both cameras [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] wow [Music] left [Music] [Music] the ursa 12k is listed to have 14 stops of dynamic range whereas the helium is listed to have 16.5 now we didn't do any specific dynamic range tests but from our side-by-side comparisons with the helium and the ursa 12k there wasn't a huge noticeable difference typically when we're shooting with our helium and now our ursa we have control of our scene and the dynamic range by using light modification so this isn't a deal breaker for us this is one area that red definitely takes the cake with dsmc2 cameras being so popular there's a lot of third-party companies that make accessories and rigging and components for it the ursa does have options but not nearly as many as the dsm c2 cameras in the last four years of owning air helium i can say that red does have pretty good support and it's nice knowing it's a u.s company which makes repairs and getting in touch with support easier the only major repairs we've had on our red was fixing the swivel piece for our seven inch red monitor which was a spendy repair the repair alone was the cost of a new third-party monitor simply to fix the swivel piece hopefully we don't have any major repairs with blackmagic but if we do hopefully the cost will be reasonable so far i've reached out to blackmagic twice in regards to random questions on their products and have gotten responses from them both times which i appreciate i would be curious to hear all of your guys's thoughts on blackmagic support if you guys have had a good experience or bad experience red also has a very active forum which is awesome and they seem to engage with their customers on the forum quite often which is rare to find this is something that i haven't seen with blackmagic but maybe i'm looking in the wrong place so can the ursa replace the dsmc2 helium from our time with it we think it has a ton of potential its new sensortech makes it much more versatile for shooting raw at different resolutions and frame rates it's certainly not a perfect camera and there's plenty of things i would love to see improved or modified but from our time shooting with it we don't see any huge advantages in terms of image quality of the red helium over the ursa 12k we still want to spend more time using the camera on shoots before we make any decisions but so far we're loving shooting with it and see no reason why this couldn't replace our healing if there's something i didn't cover in the video i would love to answer your questions if you guys might have any if you want to see more content like this in the future make sure you hit that subscribe button i'm caleb with threefold and thanks for [Music] watching

Channel: Threefold

Views: 98,552

Keywords: Blackmagic Design, blackmagic, Blackmagic URSA Mini Pro, URSA Mini Pro, URSA Mini Pro 12k, URSA Mini Pro 4.6k G2, 12k, 8k, RED, RED DSMC2, RED DSMC2 Helium, Helium 8k, SlowMo, Davinci Resolve, Red vs Blackmagic, URSA 12k vs RED, Blackmagic URSA Mini Pro 12k, Review, Test Footage, 12k Footage, DSMC2, Helium, RED Digital Cinema, RED Komodo, Red Hydrogen, Red Komodo 6k, Camera Review, Cinema Camera, Slow Motion Camera, High Speed Camera, Cinematic

Id: A4TMa1DtWcc

Length: 19min 40sec (1180 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 10 2020