When Blackmagic RAW (BRAW) was announced a while ago, I was curious to get my hands on a BMD URSA Mini Pro and test it’s dynamic range with this new codec. The combination of having the full flexibility of 12bit RAW and smaller file sizes at the same time is a real innovation of BMD. How does it fare on the UMP 4.6? A while ago BMD was so kind to send us the URSA Mini Pro 4.6 but unfortunately, we were all out traveling yet there was time to install the new firmware 6.0 and test the dynamic range at ISO 800 and 3200 using our test setup described here. One note upfront: I was very surprised to see the playback performance of BRAW in DaVinci Resolve Studio 15.2. I am using an I7-4720HQ Laptop with 16GB RAM and a GTX980M graphics card, and 4.6k ProRes XQ resulted in ~7 frames / second playback (fps), 4.6k RAW DNG (lossless) resulted in ~11 fps, whereas BRAW had smooth 24 fps playback in a UHD timeline! Hence, not only smaller filesizes with BRAW but also vastly improved playback – a real winner combination. 4.6k ProRes XQ ISO 800 dynamic range results As a baseline, we started first with our standardized testing procedure analyzing the 4.6k ProRes XQ dynamic range. Here, at ISO 800 the UMP 4.6 does not disappoint and comes in with a strong 12.5 stops of dynamic range at a signal to noise ratio of 2 according to our...
Published By: CineD - Wednesday, 12 December, 2018