The Blackmagic Ursa Mini Pro 12K | So Much More Than Just Pixels

i could literally do this all day this is awesome [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] i'm tired of chasing you down i need serenity now was it too much to ask for on the west side you're my blind side [Music] [Applause] [Music] no going home [Music] blackmagic was kind enough to send this out to me for two or three weeks to play around with if you're new around here and you don't know anything about me or my channel i'm a huge blackmagic fan and i actually did a super in-depth video into the pocket 6k pro which will be kind of doing a little bit of comparisons here today but if you want to check that video out afterwards that will be linked down in the description below as well and i've decided in exchange for you maybe hitting the like button and even hitting that subscribe button i also decided to take a handful of the sample clips that you'll see throughout this video put them kind of in a downloadable folder and leave a link down in the description so if you guys want to play around with the footage and kind of see you know without the youtube compression what 12k actually looks like on whatever screen you're using then you can download those clips in the description uh feel free to play around with them use them in videos if you want to just please don't sell them or you know act like they're your own with all the housekeeping stuff out of the way let's jump right into it so first let's talk about the body design now to do that i'm going to break this down and show you how quickly and easy it actually goes from kind of a basic setup to just basically its bare bones essentials now i think it's relatively obvious at first glance that this is not going to be kind of really compared to dslrs or mirrorless cameras or anything under that 10 000 price point which this does hover so here it is bare bones this is essentially what you get for your tend grand the only difference is uh the v-mount plate is an add-on and then it normally comes with a pl mount but i had it swapped out for the ef mount since those are my lenses and for reference here is the pocket 6k pro and here is the ursa 12k the other thing i was curious about because i couldn't really tell from the website is the material that's made out of i was able to confirm it is magnesium alloy so it is a much stronger material than like the pocket series which is essentially a form of really good plastic the build quality in general is just a lot higher up as you would expect all of the buttons have really good clickiness to them they're not mushy i am actually a fan of these kind of switches that you can just push up and down rather than like a power button i don't know it feels kind of cool to just flip a switch power on and off i do understand some people's concerns if you could easily knock this and turn it on or off i personally never came remotely close to having that issue now in terms of ports yes this thing has two sdi outs one sdi in got two cfast 2.0 slots two sd slots a usb type-c which you can use for updating the firmware as well as a usb type-c which is intended to hook up a solid-state drive you have your 12-volt powered one d-tap p-tap port on the side of the v-mount a 12-volt out and of course the two phantom power xlr ports on top so let's talk about wait for a second of course as i just mentioned that it's definitely in the same weight class of other cinema cameras but maybe you're not used to that so i brought out a scale so i can give you some actual numbers so then if you know how much your camera weighs you can see for yourself if you want to be carrying this thing around for an eight hour shoot unfortunately this scale has like a minimum of i think like 10 pounds or something but we can tell from blackmagic's website that the kind of brain body by itself weighs 5.62 pounds just without any batteries lenses or accessories added on to it so let's rig it back to how i had it a few minutes ago and see what that's weighing alrighty so now we're kind of back to the basic setup here we got a battery on we got the evf we got a lens we got the handle um and technically there's media in there but that's not going to hold up so now let's see what this thing weighs so this setup right here is 12.8 pounds first next bit i wanted to answer the ever so burning question in my head and many others will it gimble now obviously there are some super professional gimbal stabilizers re trinities type setups where yes of course a cinema camera can be stabilized this definitely fits into the weight class of my zhiyun crane 3s pro set up here i just want to see if i can get it to stabilize and work so cue the little time lapse so if you remember with the top handle with the evf with everything that was 12.8 pounds and this gimbal can handle like 14.8 or so nothing like a 10 000 camera being stabilized on a 700 gimbal this thing balances better than the pocket 6k pro now right now i have the 15 millimeter irix which if i go fully top down you can see it just barely clears it but still a decent sized cinema camera and then same thing with the uh battery here that back motor yeah solid two two and a half inches of clearance there that's not a problem at all oh my gosh can i do it full 360. all right now let's pick it up and actually gimble it all right will a gimbal 100 now besides just the physical dimensions fitting into here the reason that i think it uh balances and is performing better than even the smaller pocket series is the pocket series is really really wide because they go with that like traditional camera dslr vibe with this whole right side hand grip whereas on the ursa we took off the hand grip and that allowed me to push in the camera plate the camera closest to the right side of the motor here it is a hundred percent as far as that camera plate will go this is a well balanced camera in the middle battery in the back near equally weighted lens in the front it's just a very well balanced overall and i'm not getting any wobble whatsoever and i mean you can see i'm literally just doing three this is crazy with the evf you have two screens so of course you have the flip out screen here which if i turn this guy on it is tiltable it does not go forward so that's the extent that it will tilt that way and then it will go down but it won't go any further so it stays on kind of backwards 180 plane but it's fully tiltable either way and so that looks great and then you have the evf now unlike the evf on the pocket 6k pro which has a little sensor where it stays turned off uh when the monitor is being used and then when you put your eye up to it the monitor shuts off and the evf turns on here both of them are running simultaneously so one of these cables is powering it so it just works off of the same battery keep that in mind with battery consumption we'll talk about that in a few minutes what the battery consumption actually looks like but both monitors look great we'll talk about the size of this one right here a little later on but they're both clear enough the focus peaking is great uh controlling the camera and this evf actually i'm a huge fan of i really like the one on my pocket 6k pro but obviously it's a lower budget item whereas here this thing the eye cup is super comfortable i literally used this on a nearly all-day shoot because it was super bright and sunny it feels incredibly well put together you can fully adjust it it pops out that way you can adjust this guy here and take this screw off and you can adjust it this way as well if you want forward or backwards more where did the screw go found it so real quick i just want to talk about lenses now when i talked to blackmagic they didn't really recommend or not recommend any certain type of lenses but i wanted to at least point out probably hopefully the obvious but still something to think about if you're contemplating buying this camera is that if you want the sharp crispy look of the 12k sensor then make sure you have lenses that are sharp and crispy to give that look now obviously every project is different and so sometimes we choose lenses that are softer that have different characteristics that we like but again if you're like i want to shoot this 12k thing and be able to punch in 800 percent and have it still look great that's really going to come down to the lenses that you choose because for example my old rokinon ds lenses that were like you know some of the cheapest great starter cinema lenses those things are really really soft if you were to punch in you'd be like why this doesn't really look 12k like why isn't this super sharp it's probably the fault of your lenses i can say that these irix cine lenses uh they're technically rated up to 8k because 12k didn't really exist and still no other camera matches it so they're good up to 8k is what irik says but i think they look fantastic um these are also great budget lenses if you want to check them out in the description below if for whatever reason you buy this 10 000 camera and throw your 50 canon pancake lens on it and wonder why it doesn't look crazy sharp when you crop in that's why okay so now for the sensor this is the big conversation piece because everyone thinks that the talking points of this camera pretty much ends at 12k and that's not even like 12k is awesome don't get me wrong we all have heard the typical use cases of like oh you can crop in and do some crazy stuff sweet but this new sensor is so much more than that and it's got some really cool benefits to it my favorite of which is the insane frame rates options that you have on it we're going to talk about that in a few minutes something they were able to do with the sensor as well as blackmagic raw is to scale your resolution without cropping so you can shoot at 12k ak 4k whatever and not crop at all you can use the entire 12k sensor and it will scale it down either in camera or you can do it in post and so that way if you're trying to save on uh space on your memory card shoot at loader day rates you can shoot at 4k still use the entire sensor but take up a lot less storage space which is really cool now one con of the sensor is the fact that it is a super 35 so it is obviously smaller than full frame or something and when you pack that many pixels onto a sensor size like that you are going to have pretty small individual pixels it's like 2.2 microns or micrometers whatever that funky little symbol is which is significantly smaller than the competition of reds aries and stuff like that now technically that's also supposed to hurt the dynamic range but the sensor has some pretty neat tricks to help combat that and so in every test i've seen both scientific as well as my real world use the 14 stops of dynamic range that blackmagic claims holds up to be true my pocket 6k pro and 6k is 13 and this i definitely feel i got an extra stop or so um while shooting and this came in super super handy during that music video shoot because we were shooting on a day that was so bright so sunny we did not get enough cloud coverage and i was really worried walking on to set but after reviewing the footage i thought it just came out really smooth yes i would love to see it push 15 16 17 stops the dynamic range but it definitely was a nice boost there another huge plus i've noticed from this camera which has been oh so nice is i found that there's less roller shutter effect so this isn't a global shutter or anything but that new sensor apparently helps with the rolling shutter all right so let's talk about one of my favorite things about this camera the frame rates the frame rates that you have is insane no other camera in its price range can touch uh the frame rates that this thing has in addition to all the other traditional features of a cinema camera so let's go down the list real quick you can get 12k up to 60 fps full sensor readout 75 fps if you do a 241 aspect ratio crop in 8k you can get up to 120 fps full sensor readout and for 8k and 4k if you do the 2 to 4 1 aspect ratio crop you can get up to 160 fps now there is a super 16 crop mode you can turn on and with that you can go 6k up to 120 fps or one of my favorites is 4k up to 240 fps in that super 16 crop yes there's a decent crop on that but the fact that you can get 240 fps it looks so good my favorite thing about all of these frame rates is unlike using um other like dslr mirrorless camera type things you're shooting in that blackmagic raw codec and so it matches your other footage so well i always constantly got this feel that like even though i know the data rates change in all these different modes the quality always feels pretty much the same i can color grade them the same because they're the same 12-bit raw type of file as if i was shooting at 12k 24 and so my entire project can match no matter what frame rates i'm shooting in even if i mix them up whereas on lower end cameras you're shooting in these various different compressions that just feel totally different you can shoot in like the highest bit rate uh 24 fps for like a talking head sequence but then if you film like slow motion b-roll when in editing it just the bit depth of colors feels different i don't know maybe that's just me being nitpicky but i definitely think this has become the king of frame rate options so now let's talk about battery life because this thing eats through batteries like every other cinema camera uh it's definitely not your mirrorless camera all day battery with a little dinky battery type situation i mean with everything we just talked about the crazy frame rates the 12k raw like what do you expect but as a quick little test i'm going to swap out this battery for my anton bauer v190 because anton bauer has these nice little screens on the side which when you turn the camera on it changes from a percentage and gives you a very accurate time frame of how long uh the camera will last with whatever accessories you have plugged in so this is going to be a test for the camera being on the screen being on and the evf being on and uh it was at 89 when i plugged it in so it's not a hundred percent and it is showing around three hours 25 minutes it takes a couple minutes to kind of uh fluctuate and and become super accurate but my guess is it'll end around 3 15 to 3 and a half hours which definitely is good it's definitely better than the pockets pakistan pros internal battery which lasts like 45 minutes if that but you're definitely gonna want to have a handful of these if you plan on having a normal full production day i do want to give a shout out to angel burn media again they're not a sponsor no money was exchanged but they were awesome enough to send out this cfast 2.0 card 512 gig as well as their one terabyte a little ssd to go when you have a camera like this that has insane resolutions frame rates you need media that has insane reads and write speeds do not buy this camera if you do not have the extra funds to buy uh proper media now angel bird isn't the only uh acceptable option you can check out blackmagic's website they have a whole kind of supported list of memory cards but i can at least tell you my experience with the angel bird stuff and made a couple notes here and this guy right here has a read speed up to 560 megabytes per second and a write speed of up to 498 megabytes per second now on the 12k pros product uh web page about halfway down they have a really cool data calculator that allows you to input the different compression ratios it'll actually tell you how much recording time um you'll basically get on like a 512 gig or one terabyte or in whatever compression ratio you're going to shoot in as well as you can see different graphs about how much the data rate is at the different compression ratios now i didn't go through and do scientific tests on all of them i mostly shoot in constant quality because i like that just the top end is higher bit rates now with this card at q5 i had no problem shooting in any resolution any frame rates and like i said that music video day it was near 100 degrees out and this thing performed like a champ the card never overheated i never dropped any frames or it never stopped recording however if you start messing around with q0 and q1 that definitely is going to only be able to record for a couple seconds because that in data rates i think is like 1.2 gigabytes per second now i didn't use the ssd to go too much on this camera just because again it was just easier to have the cfas internally but on the back i do have that usb type-c port so i could easily you know attach this on top or wherever i wanted plug that in and now i'd have double the amount of storage and i'd have a similar uh data rate experience with this i'm guessing uh q5 would be no issues by the way for the tests that i did do q01 where i got like a couple seconds of record time at 12k 24 the experience i had in post-production color grading and and looking at it was like next to nothing so unless you are a like doing a feature film and you have this crazy vfx shot that needs every bit of data you can possibly squeeze out of it i wouldn't really worry about it people with black magic i talked to said they mostly shoot at like 18 to 1 or 12 to 1 compression ratio i use q5 and the footage looks fantastic but i gotta throw out some cons out there that i've experienced because no camera is perfect and so i want to point out uh what was not so good about my experience first off we have no dual native iso so the native iso of this camera is 800 that's what i shot basically 100 of all the sample footage you saw now here's a quick sample literally me staring into the dark abyss of the kitchen in my basement here going from the super base iso of like 125 up to its max which is 3200. in terms of the cinema camera world that's not terrible cinema cameras aren't very known for being great at low light because usually uh the sets in which you are filming on you know you're taking the proper pre-production planning to light them properly to expose properly however after using the pocket 6k pro which i know came out later than this having dual native iso on there 400 and 3200 and being able to go all the way up to 25 600 that definitely spoiled me on that camera and so here feeling a little bit limited to trying to stay as close as possible to the 800 because after that it does tend to get pretty noisy it's still usable if you had to but you definitely want to keep it at that 800 and then work with your lights work with everything else to expose properly but you don't really want to mess with the native iso too much on this camera my next con may seem a little nitpicky but it was a problem i experienced a couple of times and that is the non-electronic nds so this does have built-in nds super plus super useful super great but the mechanism in which you turn them on um is like a little bit annoying so basically you have this little knob up here at the front and that is mechanically moving um the different nds in front of the sensor and the problem that i had is that you can start to turn it and then not fully uh seat the nd perfectly like covering the entire uh sensor or lens or whatever and so there were a couple shots that i noticed like almost a really bad vignette in one of the corners of the screen and i'm like what is that and then i would just kind of like touch the dial a little bit more and i would then hear and feel kind of the click and be like oh i didn't fully turn the nd dial to where it fully uh kind of sat in there it is obvious like if i just sit here in peace and quiet and sit here so it does have a distinct noise when you're doing it but in the heat of the moment when you're running gun filmmaking doing whatever you got a lot of noises and things going on it was kind of easy at least for me to kind of miss it a couple of times so i want to point that out hopefully the next generation of ursa cameras has the electronic uh mechanism like on the pocket 6k pro where you just push button and then it kind of like just comes in and it's 100 of the time gonna cover the lens my next con has to do with the screen and this guy is a four inch screen which doesn't sound a world of difference smaller than the pocket 6k pro which has a 5 inch screen when i'm looking on the back of this screen it just feels so much larger i guess when i put them side to side it doesn't necessarily look that much bigger that kind of does i don't know like i mean an inch is an inch right the screen on this definitely feels outdated a bit just from the bulkiness now in my opinion the whole reason they did this is because again they kept the same body as the ursa mini pro g2 just kind of upgrading the internals to make the 12k work so i'm guessing this is the same exact monitor and everything set up from the g2 which is obviously even older than the 12k which this is now a year old yeah if you are on a set where you need to make sure every detail in the frame um is like up to the standards in which you want definitely having like a larger uh screen monitor what have you make sure you don't miss anything in your composition like i did on the apple spec commercial where i didn't notice the microphone boom was uh in the mirror of one of the shots just because it was so small on both of these screens and i didn't verify it with a bigger monitor but hey that's on me so after all that who do i think this is for and would i buy one myself this camera is definitely understandably meant for someone who works in video production professionally and i know that's like super generalized but i really hate putting people into boxes like it's so easy to be like oh if you're a youtuber this camera is overkill just because youtube doesn't support 12k yet but they support 8k but also it's about the ergonomics the accessories the setup like how does it feel in your hand is it comfortable and yes to a lot of people this is way too big bulky and heavy but to me i like the weight like this setup feels so good to me i would rather use this setup for eight hours straight than hold a mirrorless camera with a lens and nothing else that just doesn't feel right to me i don't like the weight distribution it's too light like i feel like i'm not doing my best work with that this i love and while the camera isn't perfect by any means the build quality the button layouts having just being able to quickly change settings without having to dive through menus of course the 12k resolution which which if you noticed i didn't even really like talk about that much in this video and that was on purpose because like yes the 12k is awesome and you know if you create your 4k or 6k projects you can zoom it in like crazy and not really use any resolution but i didn't really want to spend 20 minutes talking about oh look at this 12k sample footage and let me put it up against this 4k sample image oh there's not that much of a difference there's too many variables involved in there again the lens sharpness youtube compression what did i export the project as and so i didn't want to make this entire video a battle of is 12k worth it or not it's more like hey this camera at its top end shoots at 12k which is crazy but because that's the top end you get this amazing middle ground of features like 8k 120 and 4k 240 shooting in 12 bit raw so if you're a youtuber a content creator if you work in commercial client work if you're doing studio project stuff on location documentaries feature films indie films hell you want to make a 12k vertical tick tock i'm not the type of person to say this camera for isn't for you or is overkill if you do x y and z would i buy one personally honestly yeah i kind of want to sell every single other camera that i have and buy this one personally i think i'm gonna wait for the next iteration just because i would like to see if they add like the dual native iso from the pocket 6k pro and a couple other features that i think maybe would come as well as maybe a little bit of a redesign or at least a design update but yeah there you have it guys those are all of my thoughts on the black magic or some mini pro 12k let me know what your thoughts are down in the comments below would you buy this camera do you think it's worth it thanks so much for watching i'll see you guys in the next video

Channel: michael tobin

Views: 123,100

Keywords: blackmagic ursa mini pro 12k, blackmagic design, ursa mini pro 12k, ursa mini pro, 12k ursa, 12k video, davinci resolve, blackmagic 12k, blackmagic 12k camera, 12k footage, 12k video camera, blackmagic 12k footage, ursa mini pro 12k footage, blackmagic design 12k, 12k resolution, ursa 12k sensor, blackmagic ursa 12k, blackmagic ursa mini pro 12k review, blackmagic ursa mini pro 12k vs arri, blackmagic ursa mini pro 12k music video, blackmagic ursa mini pro 12k short film

Id: kRX_FjzOt1k

Length: 29min 4sec (1744 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 16 2021