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What's the longest shutter you can do with the Ursa Mini's?

PostPosted: Thu Jan 11, 2018 7:32 am
by Savannah Miller
Can you do longer than 1 second exposures for doing long time-lapses?

Re: What's the longest shutter you can do with the Ursa Mini

PostPosted: Thu Jan 11, 2018 5:20 pm
by Robert Niessner
No. The longest shutter is 1/24 (360° at 24 fps) or 0,0416 seconds

Re: What's the longest shutter you can do with the Ursa Mini

PostPosted: Thu Jan 11, 2018 6:33 pm
by timbutt2
Technically you can shoot 12 fps, which would mean 360° would be 1/12 shutter speed.


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Re: What's the longest shutter you can do with the Ursa Mini

PostPosted: Thu Jan 11, 2018 7:38 pm
by Savannah Miller
Robert Niessner wrote:No. The longest shutter is 1/24 (360° at 24 fps) or 0,0416 seconds


Would long shutters be a simple firmware update or do you run into problems because its not a dedicated stills camera?

Re: What's the longest shutter you can do with the Ursa Mini

PostPosted: Thu Jan 11, 2018 8:12 pm
by Rakesh Malik
Savannah Miller wrote:
Robert Niessner wrote:No. The longest shutter is 1/24 (360° at 24 fps) or 0,0416 seconds


Would long shutters be a simple firmware update or do you run into problems because its not a dedicated stills camera?


It might be possible, but the reason for not having them is that it's designed for motion pictures rather than stills. I don't believe that the Ursa Mini line has a dedicated stills mode.

Even if it's possible to implement within the camera's OS, there's no guarantee that it would be any good; I wouldn't be at all surprised if keeping the shutter open for a longer period worked against some of the noise reduction techniques that BMD uses.

That shouldn't be perceived as a negative though. The camera does fine at ISO 800, and has enough dynamic range that shooting time lapses is easier with it than with most dSLR and mirrorless system cameras these days.

About the only thing you'd have a bit of trouble pulling off in camera is long exposures, I think. You could accomplish those by shooting a series of images with a 360 degree shutter and then averaging them in post.

Re: What's the longest shutter you can do with the Ursa Mini

PostPosted: Thu Jan 11, 2018 11:56 pm
by Robert Niessner
timbutt2 wrote:Technically you can shoot 12 fps, which would mean 360° would be 1/12 shutter speed.


How would you shoot 12fps on the Ursa Mini? Did I miss something?

Re: What's the longest shutter you can do with the Ursa Mini

PostPosted: Fri Jan 12, 2018 12:52 am
by Timothy Cook
Robert Niessner wrote:
timbutt2 wrote:Technically you can shoot 12 fps, which would mean 360° would be 1/12 shutter speed.


How would you shoot 12fps on the Ursa Mini? Did I miss something?



I was wondering that too. But maybe Tim was meaning that you could shoot 24p RAW and remove every other frame from the BMD RAW folder once you save the file to your computer.

Not sure if that would give you the same effect but it seems like it would...24fps minus every other frame would be 12 frames every second.

Re: What's the longest shutter you can do with the Ursa Mini

PostPosted: Fri Jan 12, 2018 1:00 am
by Tim Schumann
Offspeed at 12fps with 360º shutter is the longest shutter on the 4.6K

Offspeed at 5fps with 360º shutter is the longest shutter on the Mini 4K

This is not able to be changed with firmware... it is a hardware limitation to do with the sensor.

Re: What's the longest shutter you can do with the Ursa Mini

PostPosted: Fri Jan 12, 2018 1:12 am
by Robert Niessner
Thanks Tim!
I had no idea that this was even possible. Have already tried it out - nice to have for night timelapses.
:-)

Re: What's the longest shutter you can do with the Ursa Mini

PostPosted: Fri Jan 12, 2018 1:25 am
by timbutt2
Sorry, I had a busy day and couldn't quickly reply to your questions. Luckily Tim Schumann came in with the answer your were looking for as I was referring to offspeed recording.

Re: What's the longest shutter you can do with the Ursa Mini

PostPosted: Sat Jan 13, 2018 5:25 am
by Savannah Miller
Thanks everyone, that is exactly what I was looking for. Now on the other end of the spectrum would slow motion at 120fps at a higher than 2k resolution be possible? Assuming it's a low or no compression option, the processing power doesn't seem like a huge issue, and CFast cards in dual card mode are not a bottleneck either. Am I missing something?

I find shooting in 2k and downscaling the slight bit to 1080p is not any better than shooting 1080p because the image filtering that takes place doesn't have enough resolution to improve the quality, and either it looks softer, or slightly sharpened.

2880x1620 with a 1.5x downsample to 1080p would be the ideal sweet spot for resolution.

Re: What's the longest shutter you can do with the Ursa Mini

PostPosted: Sun Jan 14, 2018 6:55 am
by rick.lang
The most important advantage shooting 2K for HD deliverables may be the image stabilization it affords to remove those little flaws and help smooth camera movement. May mean no loss of sharpness if your micro jitters are no more than a few percent of your frame.


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Re: What's the longest shutter you can do with the Ursa Mini

PostPosted: Sun Jan 14, 2018 9:09 am
by Savannah Miller
rick.lang wrote:The most important advantage shooting 2K for HD deliverables may be the image stabilization it affords to remove those little flaws and help smooth camera movement. May mean no loss of sharpness if your micro jitters are no more than a few percent of your frame.


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Sort of. Images that have transformations applied (i.e) stabilization, reframing, tracking, etc. apply a type of image filtering math to reconstruct the new image. Some of those soften the image, or some of those apply sharpening, but either way if you take an image that's 2048x1152 and resize it to 1080p, you get an image that is objectively worse than a 100% 1080p crop. Even doing things like stabilization, the difference in quality is minimal. In order to get the same quality as a 1080p source, you need to have enough oversampling to negate the quality loss, which makes a 1.5x oversample at 2880x1620 the perfect sweet spot of data rate, cpu consumption, and quality. I don't see any reason why the camera can't handle this in short bursts.

In fusion there is a filter type called "nearest neighbor." I don't think there is an equivalent in Nuke that I have seen and it doesn't average the pixels together so you get a very sharp image, but it's unusable for animated transformations such as stabilization. And it also depends heavily on the type of stabilization you're doing. If you do something like warp stabilizer it's very localized to different regions of the image so the crop is not an issue. BUT, you have no options as to what filtering is applied as typically warp algorithms don't allow for adjustable filter types. On the other hand, if you do a transformation based stabilization, it depends heavily on how much the camera moves at which point you may need a huge crop. But the best stabilization of them all is a cornerpin-stabilization, ala mocha or syntheyes 3d stabilization, and those require huge crops.

The technique that is typically used in VFX would be to degrain it with something like neat video, stabilize, sharpen and then add the grain back using either scanned grain or grain tools inside of your compositing application. The grain helps a lot to give the illusion of detail back into the image.

Re: What's the longest shutter you can do with the Ursa Mini

PostPosted: Sun Jan 14, 2018 11:35 am
by Uli Plank
For any moving images sensor, there is a (relatively short) lower limit of exposure time.

Red is using a clever trick when you aim for very long exposure times: you can shoot up to 16 frames at 1 second with 360 degrees and integrate them into one. You even have the choice of lower noise by temporal integration or more exposure by adding them. I don't know if an UM would have the processing power to do this in camera, but you can always do the same in post.

Re: What's the longest shutter you can do with the Ursa Mini

PostPosted: Sun Jan 14, 2018 4:14 pm
by rick.lang
Savannah, you may get what you wish for someday, if only for short bursts. As you know BMD has intentionally steered clear of any combination of codec, resolution, and frame rate that they cannot sustain for limitless recording. But if there’s enough demand, they may rethink that. It may also though be related to restrictions of the sensor being used, rather than a coding option. Just speculating.


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Re: What's the longest shutter you can do with the Ursa Mini

PostPosted: Sun Jan 14, 2018 11:15 pm
by Savannah Miller
You're right. I was basing my assumption on the fact that it took them quite a while before the URSA was able to do 120fps in 4K and 150fps in 2K. From what I understand about how the cameras work, as long as the sensor can do 120 in 2k, the only limitations to 4k are bandwith, camera temperatures, and processing power required for compression. Beyond that I see no reason why it's not possible to do 4k 120fps on the Ursa Mini and 2.8k was simply a nice middle ground compromise.

The Red Raven can do that resolution/frame rate combo and according to Red doesn't even have the processing power to do 4k prores or 3D luts internally.

Re: What's the longest shutter you can do with the Ursa Mini

PostPosted: Sun Jan 14, 2018 11:37 pm
by Rakesh Malik
3D LUTs require a lot of computing power, since the image processing engine has to perform the same calculations for every pixel in every frame, and that adds up quickly.

The Redcode encoder is implemented on a custom ASIC that Red's been refining generation after generation for years. ProRes at a given resolution and image quality also requires quite a bit more bandwidth, though less computing power. That's always been Red's secret; the ridiculous resolutions Red delivers wouldn't be viable for any production but the very largest if it were only able to record in CinemaDNG. The catch... RedCode is computationally VERY expensive.

Red's have also been designed from the outset as hybrid cameras, while Black Magic has been specifically making cinema cameras.

The Raven has a lot less hardware in it than any other Red bodies. Helium and Monstro have extra hardware in them specifically for image processing in addition to the Redcode encoders.

And all of that extra custom hardware drives up the cost of the camera. That's the other tradeoff... BMD cameras are inexpensive because so little of the hardware in them is custom.

Re: What's the longest shutter you can do with the Ursa Mini

PostPosted: Mon Jan 15, 2018 8:29 pm
by Steven Abrams
Rakesh Malik wrote:And all of that extra custom hardware drives up the cost of the camera. That's the other tradeoff... BMD cameras are inexpensive because so little of the hardware in them is custom.

Apart from a custom ASIC, what other image processing hardware is Red using that is custom? Yes their sensor is a custom design, but the 4.6K was designed by/for blackmagic too as talked about by grant petty. If you've looked inside a red camera (I have) it's all typical electronic components in there. The BOM for their cameras are probably $2-3k max in parts (taking an educated guess at sensor/ASIC unit cost). You're paying for RND, support, marketing, etc and at the end of the day simply what red think their cameras are worth based on their brand (and the customer must agree since they pay for it).

The hardware costs would not be that different based on the products that I've looked inside - except that red may do far less volume than blackmagic so perhaps blackmagic has unit costs far lower from their purchasing power since they probably order lots of similar parts that work across many products they make - red only really make cameras and priced so much higher would naturally do less volume. They may pay double/triple or more for the same parts.

Re: What's the longest shutter you can do with the Ursa Mini

PostPosted: Tue Jan 16, 2018 8:41 am
by Savannah Miller
RED is one of the hardest forums to read because a lot of people are very biased into thinking they have a camera with some "magical" color science that's somehow 10x better every other camera on the market, and that their prices are earth shattering. Everyone was praising how the Raven was a game changer, but at a 15K kit, it's not at all. The value there is nothing compared to what Blackmagic is offering. No timecode, no SDI, no internal lut support, 2k Prores 4:2:2 maximum, and almost Micro 4/3 sensor in 16:9 mode? Blackmagic and other cameras such as FS7ii, EVA1, C200 are a tremendous value.

One thing though is Red is pretty good with upgrade paths to the point where the cameras can be purchased much more cheaply than the regular price. For example the Epic MX was either 35K or 45K (can't remember) but you could buy the scarlet for around 12K, and then upgrade to the epic for 10K. And if you are a teacher or know one, you can buy all cameras through them at 10% off.

There was a huge lawsuit a few months back where a company called Jinnitech released a "Jinnimag" SSD for RED. The RED team was very unhappy telling people that the's products are a "scam" and that they simply "don't work." One of the things that RED is very adamant on making its users believe is that their SSD's are the most reliable drives on the planet and that they are expensive due to the research and testing that goes into them. The Jinnitech claim was that their SSD's contain consumer level drives in a rehoused casing, with no custom tech at all other than a firmware preventing non-Red drives from being used.

So how much is custom remains a mystery, but some of the biggest cost to Red cameras comes in the small marketshare, marketing, and the little things such as an OLPF that is very time consuming to make. And they have a crazy long warranty and repair period on their cameras too.

All in all considering how underpowered the raven is, it can still do 4K at 120fps, which makes me believe there is no reason the UMP can't do similar.

Re: What's the longest shutter you can do with the Ursa Mini

PostPosted: Tue Jan 16, 2018 10:02 am
by Uli Plank
Yeah, it's a mixed bag with them.

The exchangeable OLPFs, for example, cost less than Sony's and do better. And the upgrade path for their cameras is second to none: we went from Red One to Epic and finally Dragon without paying more than the price differences and handing back massively used cameras. This is something that goes into calculation too.

Anybody remembers those poor folks who bought into Sony's F23, believing their claim that it's a cine camera with it's 2/3" sensor and you don't need more than that? About a year later came the F35 with a true cine size sensor for another quarter million and made those F23s obsolete. Ouch!

But mags? It's hard to believe Red's are that much better than anything else as the price suggests. OTOH, you could run a car over the case, I presume (untested).

Re: What's the longest shutter you can do with the Ursa Mini

PostPosted: Tue Jan 16, 2018 3:49 pm
by Timothy Cook
It's funny, this was a post asking about the long shutter angles... :P lol

Re: What's the longest shutter you can do with the Ursa Mini

PostPosted: Tue Jan 16, 2018 6:58 pm
by Uli Plank
Sorry for the derail…

Re: What's the longest shutter you can do with the Ursa Mini

PostPosted: Wed Feb 07, 2018 2:26 am
by Timothy Cook
Uli Plank wrote:Sorry for the derail…


Don't say you're sorry. Now I feel bad,lol. I was just giggling that it turned to a RED discussion fairly quick.

I've learned a lot on the forums for derailed topics. I can probably say the most informative post are the ones that get a little side tracked and multiple conversation start on the topic(s).