Ellory Yu wrote:There's an overwhelming pour of support for the 12K UMP here... glad that is the case. The new sensor is nice, yet proprietary.
I'm not actually surprised that BMD pulled off 12K... but I am surprised at how soon it did, and even more surprised (pleasantly) but the maximum frame rate IN 12K.
Wasn't that not just too long ago that having a proprietary technology was frown by BMD?
I don't think that frowned upon is accurate. The 4.6K sensor is also a custom design, after all. I don't get the impression that BMD has been resistant to proprietary sensors; releasing lower cost cameras with off-the-shelf sensors leads me to believe that the motivation was to get new stuff out there while keeping the development on this new sensor going. Being such a new sensor, it's possible that BMD launched that R&D project without really having a solid idea bout how long it would need to go from concept to product. There are a lot of unknowns involved in developing new things, which makes timelines for that sort of effort very difficult to predict.
Anyway, this is also a hard pass for me.
Not for me... though it's going to have to wait a bit because of your next point.
Also wrong timing for a new high end and priced high camera. The disease known as COVID-19, has devastated swaths of the entertainment industry: Movie theaters are ruined; big-budget films are being pushed back to next year, who knows.
Not to ignore the rest of that huge paragraph, but it was long. There will be a lot of people bailing on the film industry during this period, especially in the US where the government is doing its level best to screw as many citizens as possible... and sabotaged the test infrastructure, so covid testing in the US is a joke, throwing yet another massive bottleneck into film production.
That said, those of us who are able to use this time to build themselves up will have a big edge when things DO start up again. There will be a huge demand for content...
The problem with BMD is that they tend to leave "old" product behind and focus on their "new" product - which is bad for existing and loyal customers, hence brand as well.
I don't agree with that at all. Part of what BMD does to keep the costs of its products down is to make them monolithic rather than modular. Personally, I'd prefer to have a UMP 12K plus a tinycam (micro sized) with identical sensor technology than to have a tiny body for a UMP 12K and have to add a module to get XLR, timecode, and SDI connectors. Even the long time champion of ultra-modular cameras is heading that way. I'd been planning to upgrade my Red to a Ranger, but now I'm thinking of supplementing it with a 12K instead.
For me, I have several projects for the next 18 months, all lined up for shoot using my BMD UMP 4.6K G2 and Pocket, and also some will be using rented RED Komodo. So I'm not looking for anything else or anything new. Bottom line, all these kudos and hype still has to be proven and seen. Let's see how they do 18 months from now with this new camera. Good luck BMD.
The pandemic will slow sales down, of that there's no doubt. BMD is probably aware of that though, and as we've seen BMD is quite willing to make long plans rather than relying on short ones -- look at the history of BMD absorbing DaVinci Systems... That the first BMD cinema camera came a few years after that was definitely not a coincidence. And witness Fairlight, Eyeon, Ultramatte... they weren't acquisitions for the sake of faking growth by buying customers, BMD integrated the teams into BMD. Think about that for a minute. After dedicating 3 years of R&D to this sensor, do you really think that BMD would let a year of slower than optimal sales discourage it from continuing to make new stuff?
The only thing that would lead to that is everyone universally hating the camera, and from the sample footage so far, that seems unlikely.
Once more people get used to the idea that this new sensor tech doesn't require windowing for lower than full resolution, excitement about it will surge, I think.