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Comment by supernova87a | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I missed it, but is there maybe a side-by-side comparison of the footage that usually comes out of an iPhone camera versus how it can look (with light, simple controls) out of this Blackmagic app?

And question for others, while I'm at it. What was it about Blackmagic cameras or software (or company) that "broke the curve of what you could get for the same $" versus like RED or whoever expensive studio cameras? Did they do something clever with the hardware and controls to get much more out of consumer grade sensors? Or did they make tradeoffs that you eventually hit against when you try to use their cameras for real professional high-duty purposes?

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Blackmagic was essentially started by a hacker in Grant Petty, and you can tell. RED took the existing ethos of the industry that says everything must be expensive and reserved for the elites. Sony is just Sony, and Alexa came from Arri which doubles the price of anything to put its name on it. BMD is the ultimate in "disruptor" category to me. Fuck your Uber or Musk examples, Grant Petty is a gawd! /s Really, though, he's pretty damn cool. Urban legend says that he even wrote the first drivers of his competitor AJA boards.

When BMD bought Da Vinci, they got a huge acquihire leg up on color science. Recording RAW at the sizes cinema cameras do requires fast storage that just wasn't cheap when RED/Alexa came about. Even with cheap storage, neither of those companies are going to debase themselves by lowering prices. There's a lot of technical reasons why BMD cameras can be cheaper, but the main reason is corporate ethos at BMD is totally different than other players.

BMD does amazing work for the price, but it's decidedly still not Arri quality and only Sony is competitive there. I work with footage from all these cameras as well as celluloid etc and have for over a decade. While BMD absolutely can look fantastic, it's typically much more work to get it there. If you're in a difficult situation, then it's not even close to how superior Venice or Alexa are.

I mostly work in Resolve so I'm partial to BM and appreciative of their work if it helps to establish neutrality (though I'm also experienced in baselight, flame, etc).

Reach for the tools you can! BMD can create great looking imagery when treated properly.

>Sony is just Sony

They make the sensors found in nearly every Blackmagic camera and are now taking a large part of the market with Venice and the FX9. No one has ever accused Arri of being arbitrarily expensive because their product is simply the best, perfectly manufactured, and totally reliable

Blackmagic is excellent for the industry and I use Resolve professionally

RED took the existing ethos of the industry that says everything must be expensive

It's hilarious to read this since the opposite was true in the beginning; Red was the one cutting corners to reach really low prices.

>to reach really low prices.

really low when compared to what? $50k USD for a camera body is not really low prices. $1500 USD for a memory card is not really low.

When the Red One was released in 2007 it started at $17500. Arri's Alexa started closer to $65000 at the time.

What they're doing with pricing today, I have no idea, but when Red hit the scene in 2007, not only did the price get a lot of attention, but it motivated the entire industry to take 4k digital video seriously. Every major manufacturer of professional cinema cameras would soon release their own competitive cameras with similar features to the Red One.

The app gives you control over things like the color space, codecs, lens correction, LUT, etc., as well as better monitoring and manual adjustments. For that reason I think it’s not really useful to show a straight out of camera comparison, as the results very much depend on how you use these options and whether or not you intend to do color grading. Without adjusting the defaults, you’ll get a 4K h256 rec.709 video, whereas the default app will give you an HDR video, which might look better straight out of the camera, provided that the exposure and camera work are equally good.

The iPhone's AVAsset* framework system is... intense. For "simple" stuff nowadays it seems like the amount of work you have to do just to get bootstrapped is a lot. But it also seems insanely powerful for all kinds of stuff and would make it possible to do a whole heck of a lot without having to hardware hack.

> What was it about Blackmagic cameras or software (or company) that "broke the curve of what you could get for the same $" versus like RED or whoever expensive studio cameras?

They pack a lot of features for cheap that usually are found in more expensive cameras. Check feature comparisons for the Pocket 4K or 6K with pricier cameras like the A7S III or later. Their camera UI is by far one of the best designed ones compared to Sony or Panasonic. You get to use their efficient BRAW codec. And they include a copy of the Studio version of DaVinci Resolve.

Resolve is free, which is a massive deal to amateur filmmakers.

The BMPCC4k prioritised having RAW, 4k, and being affordable. They cost 2-3k new at the time, competing with cameras that cost 15k and up. Raw is a massive, massive deal, and I argue is the thing separating pro gear from amateur.

Their image quality and color science is arguably "less good" than Arri or RED, but the difference is imperceptible for 99% of people.

Unless you're shooting someone juggling fire in a pitch black room, the images coming out of their cameras are as good as you can hope for.

I shoot documentary, and I just do not see a reason to buy another camera. It's just "chefs kiss"

> Resolve is free, which is a massive deal to amateur filmmakers.

Also, Resolve Studio¹ is just a $300 one-time payment. So far, updates have always been free.

¹ https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/stu...

They’re an order or magnitude two cheaper thanks to innovative and cost-effective engineering solutions from Melbourne, and offer professional connectivity alongside the ability to work with uncompressed or lightly-compressed codecs. Repurposing Off-the-shelf parts too, such as image sensors designed for other uses (such as smartbombs and guided missiles) rather than developing everything in-house. Their FPGA and high-speed dsp engineering is first-class too, and they seem to get this done with fewer,smarter people than say Sony, who have buildings full of engineers spending much of their lives writing design documents and then specifying things correctly at length before building - Blackmagic just hack it together and make it work.

> Blackmagic just hack it together and make it work.

This isn't even remotely true. Nobody at that scale just hacks it together. That sort of approach works for articles on various hardware hacking websites, not for real-life design and manufacturing of products.

given that line

> such as image sensors designed for other uses (such as smartbombs and guided missiles)

I'd assume comment above was satire

Not entirely! I think some of the large 35mm-size sensors used in the early cameras were designed with those kinds of applications in mind. I know BMD didn't design the sensors in-house, and used off-the-shelf parts, that in a couple of cases were actually larger than the desired sensor size, so they used it anyway but discarded part of the image produced from the sensor in order to make it 35/16mm format.

You'd be amazed...

They're hacking together extremely professionally, but I'd imagine many engineers at BMD consider themselves hacking and what they do to be hacking, but I don't have access to any. I'd say my general premise is true though.

> You'd be amazed...

I am amazed...by some of the comments.

This isn't a garage operation with a bunch of dudes hacking on a plywood workbench. This is a real engineering organization with a well-optimized process and enough vertical integration to deliver excellent products at scale. That's how you do what they do.

It is always interesting to watch people on HN, who obviously know very little about anything outside of hacking software, talk about making physical products. There's another thread on the first page about the realities of making a single plastic part. Read it. <sarcasm>It was obviously hacked together.</sarcasm>

Well, I used to work there… so I at least have first-hand experience of the unorthodox methods and flexible working culture, one that is focussed on solutions rather than academic-type rigour. You’d be surprised how small the teams can be that design these products, ready for manufacture in Singapore.

> Well, I used to work there…

Good for you. Don't confuse an optimized process for "hacking". Don't diminish their accomplishments that way.

I have lots of history with this company, including being personal friends with one of the founders for the last twenty years (as in, I stay at his home when I visit). They don't hack shit together. They have optimized an efficient engineering and manufacturing process.

There's a simple reality in physical product engineering: The engineering process is directly related to product quality and reliability, which, in turn, is directly connected to failure rates and support/service load. A product that is hacked together will, at scale, invariably result in a bad quality and reliability along with a massive support load. This is not a financially viable approach at scale, not at all.

Sure, one can hack things together during initial ideation and product definition. This, in the context of a solid product development process, is a normal aspect of almost any engineering organization, from consumer to aerospace. However, once enough is learned about the available solutions and approaches, not entering into a well-run engineering process is a costly mistake. No successful organization at scale hacks products together, it just doesn't happen.

I think you have some preconceived notions of what "hacking" is and isn't. Most on Hacker News do not use "hack" as a pejorative. I suspect in this case it's just an engineering / practicality focused ethos that can be applied as opposed to "design by committee."

Hacking something together - and then refining it - is how many good products are designed.

The line I was responding to was:

"Blackmagic just hack it together and make it work"

That is patently false.

I agree with the poster above, that you're taking umbridge with my use of the verb "hack" - I mean this in a respectful way towards engineers who devise clever solutions to problems, and iterate quickly and knowledgeably, rather than "designing by committee". I'm sure Grant would confirm that (as happening for the lifetime of his brilliant company) so go ask him next time you get a chance to hop off your high horse and go for a sleepover.

An effect of BMD's "hacking" is that on occasion obvious bugs have crept into their products, such as the infamous "black hole sun" issue in the early cameras, whereby extreme overexposure caused by pointing the camera at the sun resulted in the capture of it showing it as black rather than white - https://neiloseman.com/blackmagic-production-camera-field-re... Issues like this can be avoided with more rigorous testing in development rather than fixes in firmware and in Resolve after the fact, which was what was suggested. No doubt an artefact caused by the hack-y nature of the products at the time.

Plus the clue is in the name - it's Blackmagic.

Finally, go into the office if you're such an intimate. "a garage operation with a bunch of dudes hacking on a plywood workbench" will be pretty close to what you find. Just once those dudes have banged their heads together, they write phenomenal code late into the night to get the thing made.

> Repurposing Off-the-shelf parts too, such as image sensors designed for other uses (such as smartbombs and guided missiles)

Interesting. Do you have any sources on this? Afaik smart bombs don't use cutting edge professional cinema camera class sensors but aerospace ones which are much older, lower-res and rudimentary but well tested over the years.

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