By site editor Dan Chung:
URSA does Bronte from John Brawley Tests on Vimeo.
Australian DP John Brawley has a close relationship with Blackmagic Design and has been shooting with their new URSA PL mount cinema camera. He took it to Bronte beach in suburbs of Sydney to shoot the video above. The camera is yet to ship but the posting of this video suggests that Blackmagic Design are close to a final product.
The lens was an older Panavision supplied Cooke 25-250 MK3 T3.7 zoom and the camera was mostly set at ProRes HQ, ISO 400, 60 FPS at 4K UHD (3840 x 2160). Brawley filled three 128GB SanDisk CFast 2.0 cards in about 90 minutes of shooting. He also says he did the whole shoot on two v-lock batteries, although without specifying what capacity they are. Shot in 4K it is posted on Vimeo in HD and it already looks beautiful at that resolution – although I would love to see it in 4K. Brawley also notes on his blog that the Cooke lens is vintage and there will be a lot of chromatic aberration. True ND 9 and 1.5 filters were used. The ‘sun spot’ issue that is commonly seen on the Blackmagic BMCC cameras is apparently still there on this version of the URSA as Brawley mentions that he had to fix a couple of the images in post.
The results are certainly beautiful and a testament to Brawley’s amazing eye – the images make me want to go back and holiday in Australia again as soon as I can.
You can follow more of Brawley’s exploits with the URSA on his blog.
