[UPDATE: You can hear the full interview here.] I had the chance to talk with Blackmagic CEO Grant Petty back at NAB 2014, and while it's taken a while to get the interview together, it will finally be going live on Monday. Grant offered up tons of fascinating details about his mindset with hardware, his take on the rest of the industry, and what's going on with the Production Camera 4K, and he also gave some interesting tidbits about the new URSA 4K Digital Cinema Camera, which was first announced back at NAB. I've put together a teaser in which Grant mentions that the URSA is not only capable of frame rates higher than 60fps, but that they should be coming this year.
If you missed our video interview with Blackmagic President Dan May showing off the URSA, here it is again:
Even if they don't ship the camera immediately with the newer sensor that is capable of higher than 60fps (which likely means higher frame rates at both 1080p and 4K), you'd still be able to upgrade down the line. While the URSA is expected to start shipping this summer, Blackmagic has had a difficult time delivering their cameras on-time. Since they don't make the sensors that are going into any of their cameras, at times they are at the mercy of the sensor fabricators, who may not always be consistent or may have quality differences between test runs and full production runs.
The other big thing with the URSA is that it has interchangeable sensors, which means it can be upgraded at any time. Since, as Grant mentions, the body itself is so powerful, you should be able to upgrade your sensor down the line when better ones are released. That's a huge advantage for this camera, but he did mention in the full interview that the sensors are not really meant to be changed out on a daily basis, only once in a while if you wanted to upgrade or if you wanted to change out the sensor because the project you're working on requires something else.
I also asked Grant about the image issues people were seeing with the 4K camera, and he gave a pretty interesting answer which you can hear in the full interview coming tomorrow.
