GEAR
BLACKMAGIC URSAMINI PROG2
“The camera excels under controlled lighting or in natural daylight, especially contrasty conditions of full sunshine”
The colours are lifelike and punchy but not over saturated or ‘digital’ looking. It performs like a far more expensive camera. The camera now also allows you to embed 3D LUTs into Raw clips. A new LUT settings control in DaVinci Resolve makes this easier than ever and takes the guesswork out of shooting in Raw. You can also chose standard video-like codecs or flatter, filmic gammas in the menus. Shooting in Raw in contrasty light and exposing to retain highlight detail, the hidden shadow detail is incredible and you can draw it out in post with hardly any noise. With an expanded ISO range of 200 to the new high of 3200, it’s a stop faster than the original Ursa Mini Pro was at launch; that had its ISO range put up to 3200 with a firmware upgrade and the G2 also has this benefit. But it is still not the ideal camera in very low light but excels under controlled lighting or in natural daylight, especially contrasty conditions of full sunshine. Also new on the G2 are improved ND filters with IR compensation, in 2, 4 and 6 stop range. These filters are designed to match the way the
RIGHT The camera can be fully controlled remotely
try one, but it looks like a sensible option although it does add a bit of bulk. Like many of the Blackmagic accessories, it’s reasonably priced at £414/$395. If you want to record internally, there are dual CFast 2.0 recorders and dual SD UHS-II card recorders, which you select with a small toggle switch. CFast cards are essential for full-resolution Blackmagic Raw 12-bit recording, while UHS-II SD cards are can record Blackmagic Raw 8:1 or 12:1 for Ultra HD and regular HD files. Fast SD cards are obviously cheaper, but CFast 2.0 cards are dropping in price all the time as more cameras are starting to use them. In terms of build quality and using the camera, the rest is the same as the older-generation Ursa Mini Pro. Which means it’s burly, rugged, well-designed and has a great touchscreen and menu
camera processes colour and evenly compensate for both far red and infrared wave lengths to eliminate IR contamination. Unlike Sony’s variable ND filter system, which is electronic, the G2 uses the traditional optical filters that move into place when the ND filter dial is turned. The results were always neutral, but we never had any issues with the filters on the older-generation camera anyway. The final new feature is the USB-C slot on the left side of the body, so you can plug in a large- capacity SSD for external recording. If you are just using an SSD via a cable, this means the screen on the left side has to be open, and the SSD just dangles from its cable unless you concoct some sort of cage and rig. A more elegant solution is a Blackmagic SSD Mini Recorder which clips on to the rear of the camera. We didn’t get to
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AUTUMN 2019 PRO MOVIEMAKER
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