Hacker News Reader

Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

I absolutely love BMD for putting these features/capabilities into their cameras just knowing that people will do things precisely like this. They are the company that I feel like positively disrupted their industry without breaking laws and what not like others have done.

View on HN

right now people are flying blackmagic pocket 4k, 6k and 6k pro camera on $4000-5000 high speed octocopter UAS for cinematic FPV type video which cannot be acquired any other way, and in places too small/tight/risky (or low budget) for a helicopter.

where the need for high quality footage exceeds what you can get out of a gopro hero 10 but you're not going to get into the hundreds-of-thousands cost range.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=shendrone...

the same platform is popular with blackmagics of various types, and the red komodo

BMD has made production-grade video equipment affordable to the masses. They're kind of the Behringer of the video world, with the difference obviously being that BMD doesn't knock off designs from others and uses high quality components.

Only gripe I have with BMD is that you need a separate piece of utility software for each and every component and it's not entirely obvious if there are firmware updates for a specific device available.

Yeah, and that they just give you DaVinci kinda stuns me. It wasn't that long ago that entire agencies existed as a business just to in effect rent productions access to that for color correction.

I was at one of those shops. When the Mac version came out, the colorists were pretty pissed as they were comparing the price of all of the other gear they had already paid for compared to free. Granted, back then the Mac was a toy in processing power. Then the GPU expansions became available, and the non-Linux versions became real. Still held onto the Linux versions as long as possible to continue using the existing panels that used 50ohm coax cables (token ring??) until they finally released updated versions of those. At $30k, people were choking, but still at least $170k cheaper.

This will be the lasting legacy of BMD. Still shake my head and laugh knowing the quality for the price of then and now. I’m crying but from laughing while noobs are crying because it’s not free. From my experience it damn well is!

Yeah, as a teenager I volunteered with a non profit that did some animation and video production. A sony camera and a couple D1 decks to edit on were their crown jewels. Most of what we used was SVHS for cost reasons.

Now, for as little as $10k you can put together a setup that will get footage that rivals the best funded productions in the world.

I like them too but my gripe is they claim BRAW is an "open and license-free standard" when (as far as I can tell) it's undocumented, supported only via closed binary blobs and distributed under a very non-free license.

I actually worked on some of the obfuscation for the SDK back when I worked there. :)

The goal wasn't to promote software freedom but to ensure that anyone could simply download the DLLs and use it in their software without needing to sign an NDA, beg for permission or deal with patent bullshit.

The reality is that there is millions of dollars of R&D in the source code for this (primarily through stuff like camera calibration data, but also the maths in n the background) that they don't want ripped off by competitors.

As I understand it BRAW was developed to avoid RED's patents, which I heartily approve of but I don't think they should advertise it as "open and license free" when it isn't.

Like I said, I do like BM's stuff. I was a Free Software puritan for a long time but when I started doing video stuff Resolve was just too tempting.

Some technical decisions were made to avoid RED's patents, but I don't think that's the main reason BMD wanted to make their own codec.

From the outside it seemed like they removed CinemaDNG due to patent threats from RED, and added BRAW to replace it. But that might be joining the dots and making five.

I suspect it was more of a case that CinemaDNG is just a pain to copy/move from one storage media to another; thousands of small-ish files are much slower and more cumbersome than a single large file.

I don't believe CinemaDNG is affected by Red patents because it's basically just a folder of numerically sequenced '.dng' still images and DNG is an Adobe standard. You see other companies using it.

Note: I am not a lawyer and Red may well have tried to sue somehow, but the basics of CinemaDNG compression go back to JPEG T-81 from the 1990's.

Wikipedia says "The adoption of CinemaDNG among camera manufacturers appears to be hindered by Red Digital Camera’s patent US9245314"[0]. Also there'd be no reason to remove CinemaDNG from their cameras otherwise? Plus I'm fairly sure Grant Petty alluded to patent issues when he announced they were removing CinemaDNG and adding BRAW.

I'm not intimate with the patent but from what I understand you're right, CinemaDNG is just a sequence of stills in a tarball. In which case it seems nuts that the patent office granted and upheld a patent covering that.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CinemaDNG

On the topic of obfuscation, would you recommend a specific product or solution?

> The reality is that there is millions of dollars of R&D in the source code for this

This doesn't check out. The Linux kernel has billions of dollars in R&D, and where is the obfuscation?

I am responding to Joeboy.

The state of FOSS NLE's is laughable. OpenShot is a mess.

Does it need to be FOSS if it is just free? Resolve has filled that niche for many many people. Very few of them care that they can’t modify the code.

What contributions to FOSS NLEs are you working on?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com