Firstly everyone gets -10 points for the mac/pc conversation.
Both platforms are serious and in widespread use in the video industry. Blackmagic products are traditionally crossplatform so the lack of USB3 capture support under OSX more than a year after the rMBP release is disappointing.
The frustration with the ATEM line (and Blackmagic as a whole) is that BMD clearly sleepwalk into these issues. The original ATEMs had large numbers of HDMI ports, and this was followed by many users being annoyed that they couldn't really make use of these ports as HDMI signal degradation over long cables means the ATEM cannot sync many HDMI sources in realworld situations. Blackmagic's response was first to deny that this was a problem and blame the manufacturers of the source hardware for sources which were intermittent. Then they had a rethink and started to tell people to use HDMI cables of less than 5 meters. Then finally they accepted that HDMI is not a suitable interface for live vision mixing environments and slowly dropped it from their switcher designs. (this happened during the hardware design of the original 2ME, a google image search will still bring up the old image of the original spec which had 4 HDMI inputs even though this was never manufactured)
USB3 was similar, they produced a few products with USB3 (Intensity, ATEMs) but then found that these products only worked on a handful of USB3 chipsets, rather than trying to fix the problem in their own hardware / drivers they simply publish a very small list of "compatible" hardware and then slowly drop the USB3 interface from the products.
This isn't really listening to their users, it is removing features which they have never had the capability to make work correctly. Technically it might not be entirely BMDs fault if the USB3 chipset they choose to use is not widely compatible, but if they are stuck behind the limitations of their hardware choices then users would tend to expect hardware revisions to fix the problems rather than simply removing the functionality.
What's really frustrating is that none of this should be happening in the first place. My initial response when i saw the spec of the ATEM1 was "why has it got so many HDMI inputs? they will not work with long cables that are needed for cameras, and people will expect them to work with blurays and stuff which has HDCP and so cannot work" - Turns out that I was right about these things, and BMD eventually changed their design and radically cut down on HDMI inputs.
USB3 hasn't been a reliable solution on the ATEM (unless you have a "supported" chipset motherboard) and so it hasn't seen widespread use. Dropping USB3 was the right thing to do, but they should've replaced it with Thunderbolt. Instead they just kill the concept of direct capture from the switcher which is a real shame as it was a good idea and would be a USP.
The product development just seems very haphazard - they launch things which cannot ever work, or which don't work properly and then lack the resources to fix them. These problems are not being learnt from as can be seen by the Studio Camera. It's a brilliant concept which i've been asking them to make since they got into the camera game, but it is completely flawed by stupid design decisions (wrong sensor size, complete lack of any suitable lenses, no ability to use the lenses which they show in the product photos even, ergonomically weird in a very restrictive way) Typically BMDs response to these points has been to ignore them or to shift the burden onto 3rd parties ("we make cameras not lenses" - yes that is true, but you've made a camera which is incompatible with every lense that has ever been produced and now you're trying to blame the lens manufacturers!)
I'm not sure that anyone at Blackmagic is really listening to their customers. They are slowly starting to fix long term issues in 5th or 6th generation of products, but often the "fix" is to simply remove features rather than to actually fix anything. In the meantime they continue to heavily market products as solutions when they know that they do not actually work properly. Firmware updates are few and far between and seem to introduce as many new bugs as they fix.
Just for a laugh i'll make some future predictions about current products with issues and we can look back at this thread in a few years to see if i was right or not.
Hyperdeck - hyperdeck SSD issue will be fixed, they will do this by releasing a "hyperdeck 3" it will not use SSDs but will record to CFast cards (it will also do 12G SDI and possibly have fibre connections too if it comes at the point when they realise that 12G SDI can only go about 15meters down an RG6 cable)
Studio Camera - will be replaced by a 2/3rd inch version with a B4 mount so that proper ENG lenses actually work on it.
ATEM - Who knows? maybe they will one day actually finish the control side? Seems pretty unlikely though, 3rd party options will continue to be the only way of using it seriously.
If people want to look back on this thread when these things have happened and say "see they do listen to their users" then I'll have a little laugh, I don't think these things will happen because of user feedback as such, more because they will kind of blunder forwards coming up with "fixes" to the products which they create in isolation from the working production industry. (we will see a whole load of new things from them on the way to getting these "fixes" and many of them will be really badly thought out, in generation 1 at least)
Cheers
Tom
Fri Jun 06, 2014 8:22 pm
