Ursa Mini Pro: Impressions After 6+ Months

After 6+ months of use on various projects, here are the impressions on the Blackmagic Design Ursa Mini Pro cinema camera from two Ursa Mini Pro shooters: My brother Cary Judd and me. This is not a traditional in-depth review, but more of our overall impressions.

The wide shot of both of us was done with the Panasonic GH5 and the two single shots were shot on Ursa Mini Pro.

Find Cary Judd at The Wormhole Boise.

Links to gear discussed and used to record this session:

Ursa Mini Pro Cinema Camera (body only)

Ursa Viewfinder (we didn’t talk about this but I really like this viewfinder - clear, clean image with effective focus peaking, false color, and zoom buttons)

Ursa Mini Pro SSD Recorder (allows you to record to standard, affordable 2.5” SSD drives)

Anton Bauer 90Wh Battery (about 2 hours of life with viewfinder and SSD recorder)

95 Wh V-mount Battery (Same as above but with a different mounting mechanism for cameras)

Sigma 24-70mm f/2.8 OS ART Lens (used on the single shot of Cary on my Ursa Mini Pro)

Panasonic GH5 (used to shoot the wide interview shots and product shots)

Panasonic 12-35mm f/2.8 Lens

Copyright 2017 by Curtis Judd

C200, Ursa Mini Pro: Workflow & Choosing a Cinema Camera

In this episode our special guest is Jacob Fenn, a filmmaker and colorist. We discuss workflow and how your workflow can help you choose a cinema camera like the Canon C200, the Blackmagic Design Ursa Mini Pro, or the Sony FS5.

In short: map out your production and post production workflows. This will make choosing a camera easier.

See Jacob Fenn’s work over at FennWorld.

Links to gear discussed and used to record this session:
Canon C200 Cinema Camera (Jacob’s main camera for corporate, commercial, and short film work)

Blackmagic Design Ursa Mini Pro Cinema Camera (This is my main camera for corporate video work)

Sony FS5 Cinema Camera

Sennheiser MKH 8050 Supercardioid Boom Microphone - The mic was farther away than I would have liked, probably 1.5 meters. But it did pretty well

Aputure C120D LED Light - this is my corporate video workhorse light

Aputure Light Dome Soft Box - this is almost always on my COB120d to soften the light for talking head video.

Copyright 2017 by Curtis Judd

Sound for Video Session: AES3 Digital, Ursa Mini Pro, EV RE50L, RODE Reporter and iXLR

In this week's Sound for Video Session we take a quick look at sending digital audio to camera using AES3 and also a couple of reporter's microphones.

Links:
Wikipedia article on AES3 Digital Audio

Sanken CSS-50 Short Shotgun Stereo Microphone - the episode was recorded with this microphone. This one is really nice but in reverberant spaces like this little room, it has a tough go with phase issues and comb filtering. Can't wait to test it outdoors.

RODE Reporter Microphone - Getting ready for interviews on the show floor at National Association of Broadcasters again this year. Will be giving this a try. Last year we used the Sennheiser MD46 which worked pretty well but still suffered from some handling noise. Hoping this might solve that problem.

Electrovoice RE50L Dynamic Reporter's Microphone - And this is the other reporter's mic we'll by trying at NAB. Both this and the RODE are dynamic microphones with omni-directional pickup patterns. While I get why they are dynamic (helps reduce pickup of ambient noise in the background), I was surprised to learn that they have omni-directional pickup patterns. I would have expected cardioid to help focus the mic and avoid noise. Instead, the design seems to rely on the dynamic capsule to manage noise and keeps the pickup pattern open so that the reporter doesn't have to move the mic as much. Looking forward to seeing how well they work on a noisy show floor.

RODE iXLR Microphone Interface for iOS Recording - This is what I plan to use to record the sound for the interviews at NAB this year. Not sure the cable is long enough to use the phone as the camera, but we're going to give it a shot and see what happens.

Blackmagic Ursa Mini Pro (Recorded the talking head portion with this camera) - My new main camera. One of my favorite features is that it takes AES3 digital audio from a mixer or microphone which can send digital audio. That means that the camera doesn't do the typically mediocre job of recording sound, now it can take top-notch sound from a pro-grade mixer or mic and just record the digital bits along with the video clips. Now we get the best of both worlds - amazing visuals from the camera and top-notch audio quality from my Sound Devices 633 all in a single file ready for edit.

Sound Devices 633 Audio Mixer & Recorder - just tested the AES3 output for the first time this week and WOW! This solves another big problem. Now I get audio perfectly synced to video with my Ursa Mini Pro. Yay for more efficient workflows!

Copyright 2017 by Curtis Judd

Panasonic GH5 and Ursa Mini Pro? Both?

Before I start, I just want to explain my purpose in writing this. The main thing you should take away from this is that cameras are tools. When deciding which camera to buy or rent, consider the priorities for the jobs you need to accomplish. I am NOT trying to convince anyone that they should make the same camera buying decisions as me, particularly if you're not shooting the types of things I shoot (corporate and educational pieces). But perhaps there is some benefit in here to see how I made my camera buying decisions.

Also, I am of the opinion that upgrading no more often than every 2 to 3 years is best. More often than that and I don't find that I get as much benefit for money spent. Also, it takes time to get really familiar with a camera. And you need to be intimately familiar with your camera to solve problems when production issues arise and you need to solve them.

My main production cameras for the last two and a half to three years for my corporate and educational video work have been the Panasonic GH4 (98% of the time) and the Nikon D750.

The GH4 is a great little camera that has held up reasonably well, with one repair for the rear thumb dial after 2 years of daily use. I'm not a low-light shooter in most cases so the noisy performance at ISO 1600 and above wasn't a problem for me. The only other issue that bugged me was that it always seemed that the audio was out of sync by about 2 frames. Maybe that was just my copy or perhaps it was a setting that I never figured out. Not a huge issue since I generally used a slate or clap to manually sync sound to the video.

But aside from those two main factors, I really, really love the GH4. It helped me produce a lot of content that my clients appreciated.

I like its color science straight out of the camera and almost never find myself doing secondary color corrections to pull the look back into reality. I generally find myself shooting with the Neutral profile with the contrast, sharpness, and saturation reduced a couple of notches. I turn off all of the other little gizmo features like the i.Resolution and i.Dynamic. Those just made the footage look unnaturally crunchy and over-sharpened and flattened them without a much benefit, even with post color correction and grading.

The battery life is quite good, and I find that I can get through an entire production day with 2 or 3 batteries. The 4:2:2 10 bit color which I record as ProRes using an Atomos Shogun makes my post workflow much smoother, especially with 4K footage. 

So I was excited when we finally heard the GH5 announcement. For me the big news was the ability to record 4:2:2 10 bit internally, in-body image stabilization, and a full-size HDMI port. There are lots of other little additions as well including waveforms and dual SD card slots. This makes the GH series even more helpful to me at a practical level. Now I don't need that massive Shogun and a huge Anton Bauer battery attached to my rig when I need to fly the camera on a gimbal or travel light.

So last night, I brought home a new Panasonic GH5. I used it in my most recent episode to shoot some of the insert shots and b-roll. I'm obviously not ready to do a full review or even a give my high level impressions aside from saying that it seems really promising. Everything feels right and the footage it produces is every bit as good as I would expect. The in-body image stabilization looks good with a very short informal test.

The GH5 looks like it will be a good, solid B camera for me, and an A camera when I need to keep things light, like when flying the camera on a gimbal or going to a job where we won't have the luxury of lots of set-up or strike time before and after the shoot.

I have the Panasonic XLR audio interface on order with B&H and will be testing that when it ships in a few weeks.

And my new A camera? The Ursa Mini Pro. With some recent jobs where I needed to turn things around to the client quickly, it became very clear that a DSLR or hybrid mirrorless camera wasn't going to make this an easy job for us. In fact, using the D750, which we did for a few reasons, we actually cut significantly into our profit margin. We essentially built good will with a client and came very close to breaking even. This is a situation that pro shooters eventually encounter when growing their business. And so we had to make a decision...

While you can create beautiful work with a DSLR, there are some workflow considerations that make them a less than ideal tool for the job. Yes, I could have and should have used an audio adapter and fed the audio from the Sound Devices mixer into camera so that we didn't have to sync approximately 12 hours of footage (whether using Pluraleyes or any other method). Battery power was an issue - these were long form interviews so we ran two cameras for angles and to have the opportunity to swap out batteries. We added Atomos Ninja HDMI recorders so that we could record ProRes which are larger files but much better to work with in editing.

So the weight of our Nikon D750 rigs, once we added Atomos recorders, an audio adapter, rods, battery plate, and cinema battery would put us in the same league as an Ursa Mini Pro.

If I had had the Ursa Mini Pro for that job, I could have plugged in to AC or used an Anton Bauer battery which can power the camera for four hours. I could have recorded straight to ProRes in camera. And of course with the XLR inputs, I could have fed a stereo mix from the Sound Devices 633 straight to camera. Our first round of post would have included syncing up camera angles and delivering to the client rather than also syncing audio.

Also, one of the biggest things missing from my kit was a camera with a wider dynamic range. And I realize that I am not shooting the types of things which require film profile (log) for every situation. And I certainly do not need to shoot raw in most cases. In fact, I don't see myself using raw all that often. The ProRes 422 files shot in film profile seem to provide all the latitude that I need. The highlight rolloff looks good as well, much less digital than any other camera I have shot to date.

I had been waiting for Canon to announce a C100mkIII but they haven't done that to date. And when Blackmagic Design announced the Ursa Mini Pro, I found that it met the criteria I was seeking. And because it has been almost three years since my last camera upgrade, I had enough money saved up to make this a reasonable decision.

Now I need to really learn these cameras and get back to shooting!

More to come...