Agreed, that's the future, for FX-heavy productions in particular. But how far away is it in production-ready gear, with the financial turmoil the film business and the world in general is facing?

@nomad

"Obsolescence Obsolete" you may need the dough for a RED.

The only problem with red "Obsolescence Obsolete" is that it cost like two BMC to upgrade a red sensor and perhaps 3 or more to upgrade the scarlet one.

@danyyyel Then my remark was ironic, maybe? Get a BMCC now, make movies and sell it when something better is available ;-)

Still cheaper than RED!

Hi,

I wanted to give everyone an update on where we are with Blackmagic CinemaCamera shipments.

As you know, we have been dealing with a supplier delay which has stalled our ability to build cameras. I thought it might be a good idea to explain in more detail what is going on, and do a technical “brain dump” on the problem so everyone understands the nature of the delay and what we have been doing about it.

Over a month ago now, we completed the testing of the Blackmagic Cinema Camera and started production. Very quickly we started to see cameras failing our production testing as they suffered from blemishes on the sensor. These are high end cameras so need to be built to a very high specification.

We started testing to discover the cause of the problem and discovered that the problems were from our second shipment of sensors. The first shipment of sensors were fine. All the cameras you currently see people using had been built from this first batch of sensors and that is why we did not see any issues until we started to build cameras in volume.

While investigating the problem our engineers found the blemishes were in the glass that covers the sensor, and not the sensor itself. This is good because the glass might just be dirty so we saw this as a quick fix, but wondered how a supplier could deliver us sensors that had blemishes, as they are supposed to pre test them.

It is worth noting here what this glass does. Each sensor has a glass cover to keep contamination off the surface of the sensor itself, which is essentially a large semiconductor. If the surface ever got dirty, it would be impossible to clean, however the glass is easy to clean. All sensors have this glass cover. It is a high quality glass with optical coatings, similar to lens glass.

Anyway getting back to the issue, when talking with the supplier, it turned out they had a bug in their test software that tested sensors after the glass had been applied. That’s why they shipped us bad sensors and did not notice. They fixed that problem and could then see the problems we saw and stopped production as about 95% of sensors were suffering this problem with the glass.

The next step for the supplier was for them to work out the cause of the blemishes on the glass. They developed tests for the glass before being bonded to the sensor, and discovered it contained the blemishes on the glass before being used in the suppliers factory. After more testing over the last few weeks, the supplier has discovered the blemishes are caused by a contamination from the packing materials used by the glass supplier to ship the glass to the sensor supplier.

So that’s where we are at now. The supplier is due to get more glass later this week and then hopes to start up production again using new clean glass that will result in good quality sensors that we can use to start building cameras again.

We build our cameras in our own factory on a production line built for the camera so we can start shipping cameras again the day we receive good sensors.

I deeply apologize for the delay in shipping and it has been very frustrating for us as well to be sitting on a completed and tested product for a month that we cannot sell. Especially when people need them urgently.

As you can also see from the breakdown of the problem above, there has been multiple stages of testing to discover the cause of the problem so it has been hard to lock down dates or what was going on until now, so its been hard to update everyone on the exact details.

I hope this update helps people understand the delay. We should know more details about shipping times once the new glass arrives at our supplier.

We also have a new software update v1.1 for the camera due in a few days. The original v1 software did not have DNxHD support so thats now been added, as well as support for lens stabilizers and a bunch of other small features.

Regards,

Grant Petty, Blackmagic Design

Small update :-)

@Amadeus5D2

Yep, but someone was not glad about my comments considering October after IBC :-).
And it turned out to be very optimistic estimate.

@peaceonearth'

Original shipping estimate was July, it became Jule 30th and this become August, etc

Throw me a dud camera BM. We'll fix it in post.

Joint special forces from CanoPanaSony. The first thing they get told: " if you get caught, we'll deny we ever met before"…

;-)

c'mon. This is really poor putting the blame on the supplier. Nobody knows wether it's true or not and even if it's true it's still in their reponsibility. And also it does not match that BMD held their tongue when everybody asked for more infomation and now they blather about production details of other companies. Bad style, Mr. Petty.

@tida maybe. But I was talking about communication.

Good news

The Cinema DNG Initiative has been discontinued and is no longer hosted on Adobe Labs

http://blogs.adobe.com/toddkopriva/2012/09/cinemadng-in-after-effects-cs6-and-elsewhere.html

I think it's Adobe just following the foot steps of Apple and letting 3rd parties implement functionality and compatibility so they can use their resources on other things. Apple does this with FCPX. It took a while, but 3rd parties are finally filling in the gaps in FCPX.