Looking at http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/10110/cfast-storage I do not see why so tragic tone?

Their purpose is to use things that are made to be inserted and removed many times.

SSDs us quite unreliable medium mostly due to bad fragile SATA connectors.

If you look at CFast specs I do not see any reason why we won't see cheapo cards with bigger sizes soon. And I am sure that BM managers know this much better than strangers at forums.

Btw, RED cameras use SSD. Make a housing for them and you're done.

Red made this quite long time ago and really Red is very bad example for your argument with their prices.

Awful audio (both hardware and software)

And this requires skill and big experience to make it right in tightly packed body. Not easy as you think.

No HDMI out

It is not big problem with cheap converter. But, really, HDMI is bad thing due to connectors.

No formatting

In fact, they explained the reason partially - good formatting of SSD disk requires knowledge. Plus time to make all right. SSDs are known for extremely weird behavior in case of faulty memory chips.

Not ergonomic shape (in a camera they admitted was thought for use without rigs!)

And this also require experience and investment. May be with such shape it will cost much more and will be much harder to cool properly.

I saw your links of CFAST cards, they look really cheap, I wonder if they can work as Sandisk ones, priced around 1000$ for 120 GB

HDMI is an absurdly, horrible connection in a professional working environment. It's cheap, breaks easy and can come lose at a moments notice. It's very simple why they chose sdi. I've never seen someone complain about that once they've experienced the benefits of sdi. I've actually seen the opposite about the pocket because it's out is the worst. Do these critics who complain about the sdi shoot productions or cats?

@BurnetRhoades and @vicharris

SDI is way better than HDMI, there's no question about it.

There's always some better solution, that's not the point. What I stated, quite clearly, is that everything else in BMCC is at consumer/prosumer level (audio input, screen quality, software, cheap SSD for recordimg, it has even the rings for the neck strap!

So, putting ONLY SDI as pro connection is quite a nonsense, the average BMCC user comes from DSLR and has not such workflow.

If it had XLR audio input, V-mount plate and so on SDI would be mandatory, but here is an extra while HDMI is expected.

At least they could put both :)

@jazzroy Actually no, I don't agree with this assessment at all. There is no professional storage at this scale. Creating a proprietary format is Bad Idea Jeans, only slightly less bad would be custom enclosures for media. It's ridiculous to think this wouldn't adversely influence price, introduce new potential for failure, artificial scarcity and then, ultimately, premature obsolescence.

Point me to any camera with an LCD that is useful as-is in daylight. Show me a camera with a small LCD that is useful as-is in a professional situation, on any camera. Do it. While the company has "magic" in their title we shouldn't actually believe in it.

Built-in LCDs are stop-gap in all present situations. A fair amount of camera manufacturers see them as so useless, by design, they don't even waste the money and effort including one in their camera because they know they're not good enough, any of them.

I don't care about audio on any of these cameras. Great or even good audio on a camera is as useful to me as 5-axis stabilization on a camera with a garbage codec and terrible color.

If you're shooting narrative, you really shouldn't be filling up all your cards and/or waiting until the end of the day to dump. If media cost is an issue 1) you shouldn't be shooting 4K, 2) you shouldn't be shooting raw, 3) all of the above.

Most of this also applies to documentary shooting. If you're shooting mostly talking heads and interviews 4K raw is a bad decision where the hardware has no fault. Shoot that stuff with whatever camera you have because it doesn't matter, only the content. One of the best documentaries I've seen in years was The Ambassador and it looked like shit from beginning to end but that didn't matter at all. It was a documentary after all. If you're documenting something where the image and aesthetics actually matter, like wildlife, architecture, nature, you're going to have quite a bit of downtime and shooting in bursts. And again, if the cost of media is a major factor you're creating problems for yourself and you should be living and shooting within your means.

Imagine the cost if you were shooting film. In fact imagine the cost and the logistics of managing a film camera, exposed and un-exposed reels and an 8lb Nagra recording audio, like just about any documentary filmmaker prior to the 1990s would be working, that or gigantic full-size ENG cameras tethered to portapack 3/4" video recorders or a window in there carrying a full-size Betacam camcorder that weighed more than an URSA, cost between $100-200K and shot through a $40,000 lens, not to mention the lights you would also have to carry because those cameras couldn't see for shit in low light.

edit: not only that, prior to just the last ten years or so, less even, you were shooting on cameras that cost much more than this, through lenses that cost much more than is common now, to non-reusable media. Well, you could but you were taking your chances. And professional digital and analog tape meant you were looking at more than $100/hr of pre-edit footage, easily (HDCAM ran us about $80/tape in 2001-2002). So that, while cheaper than film, could amount to $5000+ for economical narrative shooting and well over $10,000 for documentary shooting. Done, spent, just raw media you weren't going to use again.

Because you have to shoot raw and you have to shoot 4K, everything, all day. It's a problem today, odds are it won't be as big a problem when the camera is actually released and the problem will be smaller and smaller as all these other products announced leveraging contemporary instead of old media technology are also available.

Most shooters will likely shoot Prores most of the time anyway. I recall the voices of the multitudes just last year when they realized what it took to work with 2.5K CinemDNG. Oh it's soooooo big! Oh this is ridiculous! How can I shoot a whole wedding with files this big!?

First World Problems.

edit: LOL @ Mmbahahaha

downloaded the proRES LT and... I saw reds; I had started to believe they had ceased to exist.
This @captainhook dude knows what he's doing and funalong ,-)

or is most of that graded footage quite dark?

it is "pre grade footage" :-)

Interview about the camera at the Photokina 2014