Ursa Mini Pro: Windowed Sensor Stuck in RAW

Just got my upgrade from Ursa Mini to Pro last week.

My new Ursa Mini Pro (firmware 4.3.3) is now exhibiting the following problem:

Off-speed recording is OFF; Project Rate is 23.98

If ProRes is selected, all shooting modes and sensor sizes are fine. I can switch easily between normal and windowed sensor.

If RAW is selected (any size, any flavor, except for 4.6K) , the windowed sensor switch is stuck “ON” and grayed out so that it can’t be turned off.

I've confirmed this by connecting an SDI monitor and watching the image size change as I cycle through the settings. The settings when RAW is selected show every size as Windowed.

I’ve done a factory reset, I've upgraded and downgraded firmwares, nothing will allow me to select normal sensor mode when I’m shooting RAW.

Normally, the window sensor mode only appears if the frame rate is above 60fps. Now it's permanently on if RAW is selected.

What’s going on?

[Chris Pearse]

Hi Paul,

This is the correct behaviour. Raw cannot be scaled, otherwise it would no longer be Raw. So the only way to use the full sensor is to use 4.6K Raw. Any smaller resolution has to be a window, or smaller portion of the sensor.

ProRes on the other hand can be scaled and therefore can either be taken from a window of the sensor, or scaled from the full sensor resolution

Ah... OK, I had the Ursa Mini (non Pro) before and could swear you could do that. But in general, I shot mostly ProRes and shot RAW at 4.6K, mostly, so perhaps I wasn't paying attention...

No, neither you could do that on the Mini.

... swear you could do that...

Memory is a funny thing. I am surprised each time I 'remember' something that turns out to be simply something I wanted to be true, but alas, it's a figment of my imagination! You know what I mean: like the time I was president.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

following up on paulgolden's concern with windowing of RAW and understanding why:
If we can have RAW at 3:1 or 4:1 then why not have a scaled RAW selection so that the sensor is not windowed and our nice wide lenses don't get cropped when selecting various formats? I know that we can shoot 4.6K and scale in post, but scaling the RAW in camera would allow saving disk space. Just a thought.

Yes, but once you start "scaling" a full sensor readout, it is no longer true Rear, but a "processed signal.
You can get scaled readout in ProRes, 444 and stay very close to a Raw image in terms of post production processing latitude. See some of John Bradley's post on this.
Cheers

following up on paulgolden's concern with windowing of RAW and understanding why:
If we can have RAW at 3:1 or 4:1 then why not have a scaled RAW selection so that the sensor is not windowed and our nice wide lenses don't get cropped when selecting various formats? I know that we can shoot 4.6K and scale in post, but scaling the RAW in camera would allow saving disk space. Just a thought.

As Denny wrote, arbitrary scaling of RAW is not possible. What is possible - if implemented into the hardware - is a) charge binning or b) averaging. The result would be a 2.3k RAW file (half the sensor resolution) with reduced noise.

I have no idea if the 4.6k sensor of the UM46k supports those modes.