Blackmagic’s reputation took a major hit after their infamous CinemaDNG bait-and-switch.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Your speaker didn’t come with a promise that you can tell Google to play a song. This particular feature may have been your low-key expectation, but it’s unlikely it was your principal consideration. The best illustration would be that it did not warrant a line in technical specs.
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)?
> his particular feature may have been your low-key expectation, but it’s unlikely it was your principal consideration.
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.
> his particular feature may have been your low-key expectation, but it’s unlikely it was your principal consideration.
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.
There is literally no difference in removing whole home/multiroom audio from Google speakers and what happened with RED. Both Google and BM made the exact same mistake and fixed it the same way.
1) Google challenged Sonos, won, and apparently reinstated[0] the feature;
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.
So you can play it still, but only on one speaker. You can’t record CinemaDNG at all from BMPCCs. The feature was not limited in some ways; the feature is gone completely. It’s a completely different level of badness and no matter how Blackmagic spins it it’s a very bad look.
I have both the original BMPCC and the 4k Pocket. When the BRAW firmware came out (forced by RED patents - they for some obscure reason have been able to patent compressed raw video) I did extensive tests - there is no discernible difference at the higher BRAW settings. And you can always keep your old firmware or downgrade to it later - there was no crippling of units.
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.
> And you can always keep your old firmware or downgrade to it later - there was no crippling of units.
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.
Indeed. IIRC firmware was available via some unofficial links, and downgrading worked for certain units but not for others—impossible to determine in the usual circumstances of acquiring a camera from a store.
My only issue with BRAW is that afaik it's the least open video format in common use. Undocumented and supported only via obfuscated binaries. So free tools like ffmpeg that support "everything" do not support BRAW.
That’s kind of the point. These cameras are not point-and-shoots; most people buy units for a specific workflow they already use or have in mind. With CinemaDNG, this workflow can be based on almost any tool capable of working with raw capture. With CinemaDNG sneakily removed after the fact, those cameras turned into useless bricks unless one adopts a new workflow based on Blackmagic’s own tools (closed and paid with feature-limited free versions). You can see how it benefits BM’s bottom line and hurts FOSS.
Yes, I am a happy fp user now. I edited that out from the original comment as I thought it’s not that relevant, it merely demonstrates that a camera with a larger sensor in a smaller (AFAIK) body can record CinemaDNG in 14 bit FHD to an SD card (and UHD to an SSD) just fine.
> 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.
I can understand BackMagic's position from the perspective that often a licensing agreement prohibits incorporation into any form of a free product - after all, there's no royalty when a product is free.
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.
I have a nagging suspicion that you don’t quite understand what you are talking about. It’s professional photography hardware, and it’s very far from being free.
Their software is free. Which means they have complications trying to incorporate certain licensed components into their product, those that are traditionally handed by a revenue sharing agreement on the sale of the product. When there is no revenue in the "sale" or distribution of a product that means some other non-traditional license needs to be agreed upon for the revenue share expecting 3rd party. Many, many licensing based business models do not afford the added expense of attorneys for custom license agreements, so they are simply refused. Therefore, free software often has to use nontraditional and custom licensing agreements or agree to some prior licensing business model approved method of paying them without them having to create a custom license enforcement mechanism for various clients. The free yet ad revenue supported game type software fits into an easily policed revenue stream a revenue share expecting 3rd party can be expected to accept. But BlackMagic's software is both free and not ad supported, so where is there revenue? Some share of the BlackMagic Cloud revenue? That'd be a custom agreement.
There is no limitation for CinemaDNG support. It is an open standard that requires no licensing fee. There is plenty of both free and commercial software supporting it. There are cameras supporting it. The patent under discussion doesn’t prevent BM from implementing it.
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?
If so, you should probably know that they have in fact incorporated support for CinemaDNG into Resolve, including the free version, but your comment doesn’t seem to acknowledge that.
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.