Blackmagic Cinema Camera & Kingston HyperX 3K SSD
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
1,151 words · ~5 min read
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for the ultimate no compromises compact gaming PC look no further than the
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obsidian series 250d from Corsair click now to learn more the black magic cinema
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camera our new camera by the way very excited has been on the market long
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enough now that I'm not going to spend a bunch of time talking about the specs other than a few key ones here it has a
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2 1/2k sensor intended to be downscaled
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to deliver sharper than normal 1080P or 2K it's got 13 stops of dynamic range
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which basically amounts to less detail lost in the highlights and low lights
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and it can shoot in uncompressed cinema dng raw Avid dnxhd and apple proor
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versus AVCHD which is what we're stuck with on our fs700 unless we use an
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external recorder it includes a key for Da Vinci resolve which is otherwise a
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$1,000 piece of software which is pretty darn cool and it comes in a very pretty
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box which won't matter one fish is nipple to most people but I like boxes
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so there you go they're great at box design now they're great at other things
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too black Magic's design philosophy is a little bit different from other
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companies they emphasize building what we can versus what the market will be
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willing to buy for a given price and they emphasize Open Standards rather
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than closed proprietary bille ones in
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fact one of the most notable things about this camera for me is a great
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example of that and that's the use of 2 and 1/2 in PC ssds for recording
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standard computer ssds are probably one of the only relatively inexpensive
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mediums that is capable of delivering
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strong enough performance to handle the massive 150 megabytes per second data
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rate required by 12bit raw 2 and 1/2k
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recording while other recording Solutions sometimes do use 2 and 1/2 in
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ssds convergent design is one of them most other companies choose to use
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firmware to lock down recording media to
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proprietary drives which deliver consistent performance sure but are much
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more expensive Blackmagic takes an open approach and allows you to use whatever
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SSD you want which when you consider that a 256 gig Drive holds only about 30
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minutes of raw footage is pretty nice but this open approach has some
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drawbacks for them and allowing a customer to put drives with inadequate
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performance in the camera will lead to dropped frames in the footage and a bad
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customer experience for which black magic could easily be blamed which leads
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us nicely into the second part of this video which is both I guess a a feature
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for Kingston's hyperx 3 KSD and a bit of a public service announcement now
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Kingston was kind enough to send us over three 480 gig drives for our recording
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needs this will let us shoot about 3
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hours of uncompressed raw footage without offloading to a PC which is
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great and in exchange all they wanted was for us to talk about why their SSD
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is great for you use with this camera which is easy because it's right on
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black Magic's validated Drive list so there you go yay moving on no seriously
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I should probably give some background as to why it's on there hyperx 3K drives
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deliver great performance in this use case because they use realtime data
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compression to take the large files that you produce while filming and turn them
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into something smaller on the Fly before committing them to the flash chips on
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the SSD this is actually similar to how other video compression standards like
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h264 work except for one major difference when you read the data back
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off of a hyperx 3K drive it decompresses it on the Fly again delivering the full
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quality file to you without you ever noticing that it was stored in a
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compressed form this technology is perfect here because uncompressed raw
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footage is right in the Wheelhouse of sandforce controller based SSD drives
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allowing them to perform pretty near optimally and of course they're just
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standard pcssd so the same Tech works in your computer as well on the back we
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find a 5 in 800x480 capacitive touchcreen that can
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be used for uh camera settings playback
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and review uh metadata entry and its
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large size is actually another example of black Magic's because we can attitude
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truthfully a 5-in display doesn't cost much more than a 3-in display so they
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put it on way to be with that said the BMCC isn't perfect the onscreen controls
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are not as granular or as fast to adjust
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as our main camera the Sony fs700 with its deeper settings and reprogrammable
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hardware buttons but considering that I could buy three black Magics and a lens
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for each for the price of a single fs700 and a lens and it delivers better image
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quality out of the box it's pretty darn compelling although the fs does have
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slow-mo built in ND filters and with the firmware upgrad in a third party
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recorder ahead and image quality and can
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record in 4k so just something to bear in mind uh last things to show on the
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camera are of course mounts on the top for any accessories you might have
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straps on the right hand side a yeah
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that SSD slot where you go ahead and pop a 2 and A2 in SSD in there for your
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recording needs on the bottom we've got ventilation yes it is actively cooled
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there's actually a fan inside this bad boy and then last but not least is the
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record button up there on the front that I never actually me mentioned now to
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close out this video where undoubtedly there are many folks who didn't make it
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this far in and left comments underneath wondering why we could possibly need
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this camera for unboxings I'll leave some footage here from some of the
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projects that we've done that aren't unboxings where it would have been nice
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to have a b camera or a little bit more control and post production than the
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stock abchd recording of the fs700
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allows so we do do other things than unboxings and we will put this camera to
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good use and I think that's pretty much it guys we're really excited about
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having it like this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a
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comment and let me know you know something tell me what kind of fish is
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your favorite to eat and then as always guys don't forget to subscribe to L's
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