Blackmagic Firmware Update 1.9.5 Brings In-Camera Formatting to the 4K Camera - Pocket & Cinema Cams Soon?

This morning, Blackmagic Design rolled out yet another firmware update in the 1.9 series (any bets on when they roll over to 1.10?).  This update fixes a long-standing problem with all of the first generation Blackmagic Cameras - the inability to format media in-camera:

New Camera 1.9.5 update!  Get in camera SSD formatting for Blackmagic Production Camera 4K! Download now!
— Blackmagic Design (@Blackmagic_News) September 5, 2014

You can download it here.

This summer has been terrific for early Blackmagic Camera owners who bought these cameras "on faith", hoping that the company would, over time, fix their shortcomings. Kudos to Blackmagic Design for rewarding that faith.

With the earlier additions of audio meters, histograms and SD/SSD time remaining, Blackmagic dealt with just about every challenge that could be addressed in software. Now, with the addition of in-camera formatting, Production Camera shooters will be free to buy drives and format them in the camera rather than bringing them to their workstations or dragging their laptops and external drives into the field.

This makes the $500 off sale on the 4K Production Camera even more attractive. If you've been waiting for the Production Camera to become even more usable in the field, this may be the time to pull the trigger. If so, please click on one of the links or displays in this post. It won't cost you anything extra and it will help keep these posts coming. Thanks for your support of the revolution.

All of that said, I really want this feature for my Pocket Cam - and I'm sure BMCC owners feel the same way. Faster, please Blackmagic!

Blackmagic update 1.9.3 adds histogram, audio meter, time-to-go - huge usability improvement for BMPCC & BMCC!

Finally, over two years after the introduction of the Blackmagic Cinema Camera at NAB 2012 - and over a year after the introduction of the Pocket Cinema Camera in April 2013 - Blackmagic Design adds basic camera features to the amazing images produced by these cameras. As a business strategy, this makes sense. Early adopters have been willing to guess at audio levels and how much time they had left to shoot, while producing stunning RAW and ProRes images. And revenue generated by sales to early buyers has provided Blackmagic with the time and resources required to fix the cameras' firmware.

Speaking as an early adopter, this has been more than a little frustrating - but now that these basic omissions have been remedied, it will be difficult to stay peeved.

That said, these cameras are still battery hogs - and the BMCC's black sun issue has not been resolved - but Blackmagic owners are a lot happier today than they were yesterday.

Here are the new features provided by the update:

What's new in Blackmagic Camera Utility 1.9.3 

Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 

Add histogram, time remaining and audio level indicators.

Use Up and Down to reveal and hide the meters while Left and Right will adjust the aperture of your active MFT lens. 

Fixed bug where in-camera playback may sometimes drop frames.

Blackmagic Cinema Camera

Add histogram, time remaining and audio level indicators.

Now that my Pocket Cinema Camera is now almost as usable as a real camera - perhaps I'll use it more :)

If usability challenges have kept you from buying a BMCC or BMPCC, now may be the time to jump in. They are still the only straight out-of-the-box RAW video cameras below $2000.