Kudos to Blackmagic.
(Resolve can also work 100% offline, with the license dongle, and is buy-once, not subscriptionware like Premiere. I am a very happy Blackmagic customer.)
This just looks like it’ll drop the low end of that range even lower.
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/app-privacy-details/
The only caveat is that it's developer-published information that Apple doesn't verify.
Well you can guess what would happen if you get caught lying or cheating. Apple didn't hesitate to remove Epic's or Facebook's apps in the past.
They made true interoperable raw video format a selling point of their BMPCC lineup, only to irreversibly cripple units later by removing CinemaDNG support after the fact. This dramatically narrowed toolchain options (mostly to Blackmagic’s own software suite), effectively making cameras useless for enthusiast FOSS videographers. Furthermore, the hush-hush way they pulled it off using a firmware update says something about their ethical standards, so as a rule I’m not using their products anymore.
The fact that they offer a cheap software product of their own (even with a free version) in no way justifies removing features (especially support for an open format with a thriving FOSS ecosystem) in a camera that they already sold.
It's not clear if this was a choice. RED has a patent on in-camera loseless RAW that is compressed, and have been aggressively going after other camera makers (including Nikon) for offering the feature.
To my knowledge, Nikon and RED are the only brands that offer in-camera compressed loseless RAW, and Nikon settled with RED [1].
BRAW is okay as it is lossy (not loseless).
Other RAW formats from brands in video are not compressed in-camera.
[1]: https://www.newsshooter.com/2023/04/28/red-patent-lawsuit-ag...
CinemaDNG doesn’t have to be compressed.
> BRAW is okay as it is lossy (not loseless).
BM chose to go not from compressed CDNG to uncompressed CDNG, but from compressed CDNG to no CDNG at all. This is a significant reduction in processing pipeline options for those using open-source or truly free raw photography software in their work.
> The CEO confirmed it was due to patent infringement claims by Nikon
Assuming that’s true, what they have done is they made their customers pay for their legal snafu. Perhaps it’s legal in your jurisdiction to sell a product advertising a specific feature and then remove that feature post-fact (in hardware people already own!), but it’s certainly not a great look. Based on their course of action and their (almost nonexistent) communication on this issue, it’s very difficult to have any sympathy towards the company.
This is the downside to patents and patent infringement. It happened with Google home speakers and Sonos, where I used to be able to tell google to play a song "whole home" and now I cannot do that any longer. I think this might be a bit of a new normal, and I'm sure this is allowed by the license agreement to ensure that patent infringements are not death sentences.
On the other hand, capture format is a principal consideration when audio or photo equipment is concerned. Decisions are literally based on whether, say, an audio recorder supports WAV and whether it’s 24 or 32 bit.
It’s hard to draw a parallel with a consumer device, but imagine if Sonos completely removed Google Assistant, Alexa, or AirPlay 2 support (based off the specs section of Sonos One). Their legal department didn’t do their research, they didn’t feel like paying licensing fees, so they thought they’d just implement a similar platform themselves. They’d issue a firmware update where they wouldn’t mention this at all, you’d apply it and lo and behold. Would you be sympathetic to their cause? Knowing that they were also in the business of selling high-margin, very expensive professional-grade equipment to Hollywood studios, would you consider this kind of treatment something other than a ripoff? Would you still consider them “awesome” and their CEO “fantastic” if they just provided you with a free version of their commercial closed-source software (some features behind a paywall)?
That feature was advertised on the in-store endcap display where I bought the google speaker. It was the only reason I bought five of them.
The rest of the story is identical. Ship an infringing product, be forced to retract the feature to mitigate damages and so on.
> Would you be sympathetic to their cause?
I'm not sympathetic to Google or any other company that takes a feature away for customers to mitigate damages in a patent dispute. It really sucks to be a customer when it happens. But I do understand how it happens, and why, ultimately Google had no choice but to remove the feature. I'm also glad they did the right thing because in the case of Google, Sonos could have went after Google's customers, too... and I don't ever want a free patent lawsuit with my $29 speaker.
This is like saying that an ad for a camera means you will be granted pretty models to take photos of.
Again, it is not a tech spec for a smart speaker, and never was. If you sincerely believe so, I am sympathetic; modern life is hard. If you don’t then try responding to my analogy instead.
> I'm not sympathetic to Google or any other company that takes a feature away
Again, in this case RED did not take any feature away after the fact—BM simply didn’t do their research ahead of time. They made a buck selling cameras by advertising a specific feature, then took it away when things got hot. Meanwhile, another camera manufacturer keeps selling cameras with this exact feature for years. There’s just nothing to be said and no passing the buck can make it look good.
2) Google had to remove the patented feature. I don’t know how many times it should be reiterated in this thread that Blackmagic did not have to remove CinemaDNG support—again, it’s not a patented feature, there are cameras using it just fine. This move (removing support for the only open raw video standard) is anti-FOSS and designed in order to lock users into their proprietary ecosystem.
People keep drawing parallels with other patent lawsuits (and I for some reason keep wasting time looking into it—try doing own research, please), yet inevitably it only highlights how bad Blackmagic’s move was. There’s just nothing to be said and no passing the buck can make it look good for them.
[0] https://completemusicupdate.com/google-restores-functionalit...
I just did a hey google, "play my favorites playlist whole home"
Google's reply:
"Sorry, I can only play music on one speaker at a time."
Neither Nikon nor RED are mentioned in the source you link.
While I wish they would have been able to keep the compressed CDNG, BRAW is great to work with. Sigma FP (great camera too), as you mentioned elsewhere, does uncompressed CDNG. The data rates fo 4k 12bit uncompressed CDNG are pretty shocking - 2400Mbit/s. At that point you can't record it internally anymore and can only record on a fast SSD. It could be nice to have that as an option on Blackmagic cameras too, but to be honest I don't miss it since BRAW arrived - the files get huge.
It's a shame RED was awarded a patent for in-camera lossless compressed RAW video. Even Apple tried to sue them and lost.
> forced by RED patents - they for some obscure reason have been able to patent compressed raw video
RED’s patent is a travesty, but no one forced BM to drop CDNG. They could go for uncompressed CDNG, or pay RED (like what I assume Apple has done in order to implement ProRAW). Perhaps they could even do their research before they advertised and sold all those units. Their haphazard decision to drop CDNG post-fact in favour of their own proprietary format without any communication shows lack of forethought at best, scammy tendencies at worst, and in any case blatant disregard for their paying customers.
> the files get huge.
The files are huge either way. BRAW doesn’t mean you don’t have to buy that new HDD if you want to work with raw video. Besides, converting a DNG to a compressed DNG without any loss would have been a trivial production step.
What matters is losing an open format and the entire software toolchain that works with it. Even if you personally didn’t use FOSS raw development software, it was an option with a lot of potential. BM silently took away such option, leaving only BM’s own proprietary toolchain.
We can thank Microsoft for this clause in modern licensing agreements, because that little "it's a free product, you get no royalties! haha!" is what Microsoft did to the original 3rd party developer of Internet Explorer, when Microsoft introduced the concept of free web browsers, and then free enterprise class corporate software in a competitive move against their competitors.
Furthermore, BM’s software is not free. It is a commercial suite that currently costs $300 (an inexpensive price point, likely subsidized by selling $xxx–$xxxxx hardware controllers without which Resolve is moderately painful to use). They do offer at no cost a limited version where certain features spawn a “please buy” pop-up; in return for that limited version they collect plenty of personal data including your full name, email, phone number and the company you work for. I know this all because I have in fact used Resolve (frankly it’s been somewhat buggy on macOS though), have you?
From what I remember from when this was happening, new 4K Pocket units started shipping that could not be downgraded a few months after the change. Many people were upset because the product pages or boxes still advertised CinemaDNG, but the cameras were incapable of it.