Blackmagic Design announces URSA Mini 4.6K and Micro Cinema Camera now shipping

DLD said:
In "consumer", an internal SSD may become the sole provider of the high resolution/high bit rate images, with the removable media used mostly as a backup. In high end cameras, it will become the backup.

As to the offload time, Thunderbolt 3 does 5 GB/s and most pro operators shoot less than 1 TB/day, so it's a 2-3 min offload under most situations. Not really much of a tie up.
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This is a terrible idea. You're also not accounting for the speed of drive you're backing up to, since that's almost always the bottle neck in this situation. Connection speed is worthless if your drive is slow. Second, things like checksums and multiple destination backups increase time. Third, ask anyone who used to shoot MiniDV if it was a good idea to unload using the FireWire jack on the camera... I'm sure some HVX users have horror stories. I remember my school having an HVX that was rendered unusable because the broken FireWire port gave the camera an error on startup. Expensive, timely, and unnecessary repair.

Plus the internal SSD could fail, have errors, etc., it's just another internal component you need to worry about.

I don't see any need to increase the size, weight, or cost of a camera to include internal media.
 
A removable SSD drive, like in the original BMCC, would be my preferred option. Super fast, and cheaper than any other option available (you can buy a good 480GB SSD drive for $140 nowadays).
 
Removable, commodity, solid-state cards (for example, today's SDXC cards) will always be best. It's just a matter of them getting fast enough. They already are fast enough for ProRes at 2K, which is a fabulous format. But just when the cards got there, the industry moved the line to 4K, and, much to my surprise, even pros fell for it --- maybe because their less-technical clients blindly demand it. But I still hold, and will hold forever, that 2K is enough for most situations.

Anyway, that's not why I posted, to start another 2K-vs-4K debate. I came here to say that removable, commodity cards, like SDXC, are ideal. But second best would be an external solid-state drive. Thunderbolt 3 (same jack as the recent USB Type C) came out, and here's an external, Thunderbolt 3, solid-state drive that gets 2,100 megabytes per second. That's 16.8 gigabits per second. By comparison, that's 700 times the bandwidth of AVCHD, 168 times the bandwidth of the GH4 in 4K, over 70 times the bandwidth of Prores 2K, 12 times the bandwidth of Prores 4444 XQ 4K, and about 8 times the bandwidth of 10-bit 4K raw. I don't know how much this drive is, since it was just announced, but it their old, Thunderbolt-2 drives are $2/GB.

The jack is about the size of the Micro USB jack, on a smartphone for instance. It is reversible, so no more fumbling around. And it provides power (up to 100 watts, as needed), so no need to run a separate power cable, no matter how power-hungry the external device. A videocamera or DSLR could fit three or four or five of these little jacks on their bodies, and they could be used for this external drive or, like, an XLR adapter (if someone would please design a USB-Type-C-powered XLR adapter) or an external monitor or whatever.

Fusion-PCIe-Flash-Drive-TB3-402x226@2x.jpg

And this drive, like I said, goes up to 16.8 Gbps. But that's a limitation of the flash media within the box. The jack itself supports 40 Gbps. It's an amazing jack and hope soon becomes standard and pervasive across . . . everything!
 
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combatentropy said:
Removable, commodity, solid-state cards (for example, today's SDXC cards) will always be best. It's just a matter of them getting fast enough. They already are fast enough for ProRes at 2K, which is a fabulous format. But just when the cards got there, the industry moved the line to 4K, and, much to my surprise, even pros fell for it --- maybe because their less-technical clients blindly demand it. But I still hold, and will hold forever, that 2K is enough for most situations.

Anyway, that's not why I posted, to start another 2K-vs-4K debate. I came here to say that removable, commodity cards, like SDXC, are ideal. But second best would be an external solid-state drive. Thunderbolt 3 (same jack as the recent USB Type C) came out, and here's an external, Thunderbolt 3, solid-state drive that gets 2,100 megabytes per second. That's 16.8 gigabits per second. By comparison, that's 700 times the bandwidth of AVCHD, 168 times the bandwidth of the GH4 in 4K, over 70 times the bandwidth of Prores 2K, 12 times the bandwidth of Prores 4444 XQ 4K, and about 8 times the bandwidth of 10-bit 4K raw. I don't know how much this drive is, since it was just announced, but it their old, Thunderbolt-2 drives are $2/GB.

The jack is about the size of the Micro USB jack, on a smartphone for instance. It is reversible, so no more fumbling around. And it provides power (up to 100 watts, as needed), so no need to run a separate power cable, no matter how power-hungry the external device. A videocamera or DSLR could fit three or four or five of these little jacks on their bodies, and they could be used for this external drive or, like, an XLR adapter (if someone would please design a USB-Type-C-powered XLR adapter) or an external monitor or whatever.

View attachment 111862

And this drive, like I said, goes up to 16.8 Gbps. But that's a limitation of the flash media within the box. The jack itself supports 40 Gbps. It's an amazing jack and hope soon becomes standard and pervasive across . . . everything!
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This would be amazing, but I have a feeling it will take a few years before anything remotely like this actually shows up in DSLRs or mirrorless cameras. Here's crossing my fingers for the GH5!
 
jshbckr said:
This is a terrible idea...
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No. It's not. Or any laptop would be run off flash cards.

combatentropy said:
... second best would be an external solid-state drive. Thunderbolt 3 (same jack as the recent USB Type C) came out, and here's an external, Thunderbolt 3, solid-state drive that gets 2,100 megabytes per second. That's 16.8 gigabits per second. By comparison, that's 700 times the bandwidth of AVCHD, 168 times the bandwidth of the GH4 in 4K, over 70 times the bandwidth of Prores 2K, 12 times the bandwidth of Prores 4444 XQ 4K, and about 8 times the bandwidth of 10-bit 4K raw...
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And, with everything moving to 6K/8K - first 8K sensor shipments have commenced for NHK - a pro tier camera will need that bandwidth and the typical removable media may or may not be up to snuff for a while. The SSD's - whether internal or external - are.

And, as I have mentioned in posts that not everyone may have read, there are developments in the SSD technology that are currently running ahead of the removable media. The 3D X-Point may take a long time to be miniaturized but the enterprise level drives will be shipping at any moment.

Edit : Intel and Micron claim that 3D X-Point is 1,000 faster than NAND. It may not be so, since no one outside those two companies have independently tested this tech but, if it comes close to the claims - and any sort of intentional misrepresentation would have negative legal ramifications for the two companies - it would be a huge leap forward for the storage needs of the high end video.
 
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By the way, that 8K sensor I mentioned that is in its early stages of production has 120 fps. So, four times the res and five times the frame rate of 4K @ 24P and you get twenty times the bandwidth requirement. Canon's 8K demo had four Convergent Design Q7+ units hooked up to it with four SSD's recording simultaneously. And the removable media won't do that for a long time. And the 8K testing is set for this summer's Olympics.
 
Jaime Valles said:
This would be amazing, but I have a feeling it will take a few years before anything remotely like this actually shows up in DSLRs or mirrorless cameras. Here's crossing my fingers for the GH5!
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The new V90 SDXC card standard is rated for 8K video and I use 2000x Lexar SDXC UHS-II cards in my Samsung NX1 that has UHS-II support . My new Sony a6300 shoots 4K UHD XAVC-S at 100Mbit using low cost Transcend UHS-1 U3 SDXC cards without any problems so even if the GH5 has 6K todays UHS-II 2000x SDXC cards would be more than fast enough.
http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?344982-New-sd-association-video-speed-class-supports-8k-!
http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthrea...C-and-2000x-SDXC-should-be-ready-for-4K-60fps
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produ...ts64gsdu3_64gb_sdxc_uhs_i_u3_r95_w60mb_s.html
 
I was able to get one at film tools. It has pretty bad FPN at ISO 1600, and it's still there in the bottom couple of stops at ISO 800. I'm going to do some more tests and a seperate post with the results.
 
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