For instance, the EVF is excellent.
It’s super bright and clear, with good
color. For $1,500, it looks as good as
other EVFs that cost a lot more. The
menus are clear, simple and easy to nav-
igate. We also found switching between
regular shooting and slow motion was
a breeze.
But the camera had shortcomings
as well. For example, there was no
waveform monitor, only a histogram,
and the record button on the handgrip
was difficult to find by feel. They also
positioned the XLR inputs facing up
instead of placing them at the back of
the camera. I also found the autofocus
is pretty limited for moving subjects—
it’s slow and takes a long time to lock
onto the subject.
I also had a hard time balancing
the rig, especially using my Canon
EF 70-200mm f/2.8 IS II lens. The
shoulder pad moved a little to allow
you to shift the balance point, but it
didn’t move enough. Plus, you have
to unscrew two screws each time you
want to move it, which isn’t convenient
jumping back and forth with lighter
and heavier lenses.Assessment Of Resulting Footage
We shot with Blackmagic RAW for
a few clips just to test it out. We then
switched to Prores HQ, since this foot-
age was supposed to slot on with a
lot of other footage that had already
been shot and was edited in FCP X
as Prores. We also shot footage at 120
fps and even higher frame rates. It’s
impressive that this camera is able to
shoot at up to 300 fps!
Overall, the footage looked very
good. As expected, the Blackmagic
RAW images in Resolve seemed to
yield better sharpness and slightly
lower noise than similar Prores HQ
clips in FCP X. We shot Blackmagic
RAW at 5:1, 8:1 and 12:1 compressionratios and, predictably, in really bright
sunlight, there weren’t a lot of recog-
nizable artifacts or compression sig-
natures we could see. Rolling shutter
wasn’t much of an issue: We put the
camera on a tripod, panned back and
forth with some light poles on the pier,
and saw very little skewing or JELL-
O vision.
Our footage was taken on a very
bright, sunny day, which meant we
didn’t have a chance to increase the
ISO to see how it performed at higher
gain settings. But we tried it out back
at our office.
The URSA Mini Pro G2 doesn’t
have the same dual-native ISO of the
Pocket 4K and 6K cameras. For me, I
was comfortable shooting the camera at
a maximum of ISO 1600. (In compari-
son, we’ve shot the Canon EOS C200
several times at ISO 2500 and even 3200
before seeing objectionable noise creep
into the image.)We shot almost exclusively with the Film to Extended Video
LUT and achieved good results in post with a variety of LUTs. digitalphotopro.com January/February 2020 | 55