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The "disruption" is the promise to get 12-bit RAW out of it for this cheap. It isn't necessarily disruptive (RED cameras are still competitively priced, considering the budgets of productions that could harness what RAW has to offer), but it's an interesting promise. Then again - just because it's RAW, doesn't mean that it's divine. Before a raw signal becomes a RAW file, it still has to go through a Wavelet/DCT compressor and might end up not being very useful. RED cameras have between 1:3 and 1:18 Wavelet compression. It's RAW, so nothing is pixelated, but you can't argue with entropy, and trying to only gets you more noise.

In other words, RAW could be a buzzword, Blackmagic are new to sensors, this might be a big hoax, but having a perfect track record with Blackmagic products so far, I'd consider switching, which is sort of what you're looking for when you say 'disruptive'.



The RAW capture is uncompressed (unlike RED), and further, you can also choose to encode 10 bit 4:2:2 1080p in ProRes or DNxHD.

This cameras is going to sell tens of thousands of units, which in the cinema world, is a huge amount. I think RED has sold just north of 10,000 cameras in the last 6 years. This could easily double or triple that.

I own a 5K 16-bit RAW cinema camera (the Red Epic) and I'll be picking one up as a B or C cam. I expect many other people will as well, if only because it includes the full version of DaVinci Resolve 9 (normally $1K) and UltraScope (normally $700). It's almost like getting the camera for free, since I'd buy the other stuff anyway.


Oh wow. Forget my graduate studies, I'm buying two.




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