Blackmagic Design today released the public beta of Camera Setup 4.0, the OS for URSA Mini, their popular, small Super 35mm 4.6k camera. The big focus with this round of upgrades is usability, particularly making the menus more intuitive, faster to operate, and easier to hard-code the exterior buttons to personal preference. This is in conjunction with a re-design of the heads-up display, with more options and more control from the display itself. The new options include the ability to constantly display codec and resolution, which prevents accidentally capturing in the wrong setting.
Intuitive menu for controlling the LUT applied to the on-board LCD and the external SDIsCredit: Blackmagic Design.
The most exciting addition for me is better control over SDI monitoring LUTs. This has long been something offered by the bigger cameras, or through 3rd party LUT box solutions. Having it now available internally on the URSA Mini is a great feature, especially with such an intuitive menu system for controlling how each display feed is processed.
We've all been in a situation where we needed to monitor the same image with different looks applied. The DP needs it raw for proper exposure decisions on the on-board. The director wants to see a LUT, and framelines. The client wants the LUT, but no framelines. It's always been possible, but complicated, and this upgrade makes it exceptionally easy.
Blackmagic keeps innovating at a furious pace, and it's clear from these upgrades they are serious about being a player in the camera space.
Specific upgrades include:
- New heads up display with frame rate, iris, timecode, off-speed, shutter angle, ISO, white balance info and input
- New menu system to allow faster operation
- New monitoring options separately configurable for different SDI outputs
- 3D LUT monitoring, configurable per-output, can be married to shot for post
- Added ability to save and load camera settings presets
- Added flicker free shutter angle suggestions.
- Improve slate metadata, lens data incorporation including auto-fill for electronic lenses.
- Additional ProRes and Raw relations
- Preferred slot recording
- Improve color accuracy for the on-board LCD
- False Color, Zebras, Focus Assist, Frame Guides selectable per output
- Clean feed toggle for each output
- Can view codec and format instead of audio meters in HUD
- Additional programs for function buttons, including frame rate, iris, white balance, ISO, shutter angle, clean feed, display LUT, frame guides
- Drop frame timecode support
- Import and export camera presets through CFast
