100G connect requires receiving hardware which is fine but what I enjoyed about Grant Petty is he talked about the price fluidly so the price change of MSRP from the first series to the second series of $3-4k seems like somewhere a correction was done maybe internal profit targets changed could be a business function that was adjusted.
https://youtu.be/CYV-SUYfthE?t=3711
He talked about the lens as cool and he could see the ceiling (which I interpreted as surprise) which makes me think he views the line as “seems the apple people really like it so I’ll just keep making it” but at his level who has the time to really get into nitty gritty of making apple immersive video. maybe its just the joy of solving an engineering problem for an application that pushes the max.
1:01:211 Get that up there and we'll bring it out. I've got it over here. Here it is.
1:01:271 So you can see it looks similar to the standard model.
1:01:331 Um however the design has been upgraded with much higher performance. You can see on the back it's got the 100G Ethernet connector there. Actually if you can look at the side you can see
1:01:421 we've repositioned some of the controls because we got to have cooling that goes up through. So you can see the controls have moved down there. Same thing with the 12G 100G. So you can see the
1:01:501 connector there. Um so you know as you can guess the um immersive requires a lot more data. It's actually way more
1:01:581 data than 100 Ethernet can handle. So we have a second part of the solution. It's called the Blackmagic Ursa Cinei live encoder. So let me show you. Here it is
1:02:061 here. So what it is it's a I get it out of the container.
1:02:141 It's a processor module that plugs into the media slot. It's basically a ProRes encoder. It can compress the live immersive data on about 46 Gbits a
1:02:221 second and it easily fits that easily fits into 100G Ethernet. In fact, it also means we can get two cameras into a single 100G Ethernet link. That's why
1:02:291 the Blackmagic Studio Bridge has two camera ports. It'll combine two of these live immersive cameras into the one redundant set. Anyway, so let's load this encoder into the camera here.
1:02:421 You can see a view of that. just clips in like that.
1:02:501 And then we can plug in the power.
1:02:571 There it is. There. Now the camera has uh been powered on. Let's plug in the Ethernet. Now what I have is I've got a DeckLink 100 IP card down in the
1:03:051 computer down there and it's installed in a Thunderbolt chassis so I can actually show you it working. So let me plug the 100G into that Mac down there.
1:03:131 So just grab this table.
1:03:241 We'll go all the way down here if you can follow me down. Of course, the camera cables tangled up,
1:03:381 which is seems to the biggest innovation of optical fiber guys is how to make the cables tangle.First thing: hah biggest innovation of optical fiber guys is to make cables tangle says the guy that makes crazy camera hardware
It’s actually way more data than 100 Ethernet can handle. So we have a second part of the solution. It’s called the Blackmagic Ursa Cinei live encoder. So let me show you. Here it is here. So what it is it’s a I get it out of the container.
It’s a processor module that plugs into the media slot. It’s basically a ProRes encoder. It can compress the live immersive data on about 46 Gbits a second and it easily fits that easily fits into 100G Ethernet.
So this live encoder is compressing whatever the bit rate out of the raw lens sensors is down to 46 Gbits each, and then we can stream that 2x over 100G. This is massive data, which is just like wow. Is the sensor data in the Terabytes? Will the Apple Vision of 2050 have this playback capability? It can barely eat 200M bit rate.
Wow.
Anyway price change feels like a red herring, my wild guess is excess BHP returns in the last year can fund blackmagic earnings targets to be lowered so win-win all around.