 But Linus, YouTube doesn't even support 12K video. I know there's gonna be some of you out there thinking that exact thing. So let's get this out of the way. We know nobody has a 12K display, okay? The real reason someone might want to shoot in 12K are the same reasons that we switched to 8K back in 2017. Capturing more detail in the first place helps immensely with post-production work, and it gives the editor more flexibility to reframe shots. And of course, the sharper the source footage, the better the final output. And of course, there's one other important reason. We just love playing around with the latest high-tech gizmos. And speaking of which, look at this, a Blackmagic URSA Mini Pro 12K. Got it right here. Oh yeah, this puppy makes it super easy to shoot 12K video. And that is a huge deal. I mean, come on Linus, that sounds like what? Maybe 50% more than 8K, right? Right? Wrong! 12K is over double the pixel count of 8K, 80 million pixels per frame. So get ready then for the sharpest LTT videos you've ever seen, right? Right? Well, okay. Shooting 12K might be pretty simple. Editing it on a mere mortal workstation? That's another story. Like my story about our sponsor, Origin PC. Origin PC desktops can be customized with Nvidia RTX 30 series graphics cards. And if you're in the market for a new PC powered by Nvidia's latest graphics cards and backed by a 24 seven support team, you can check out Origin PC at the link below. We realized that it was a pretty bold choice to buy six 12K cameras as soon as they were released. I know, I know, don't pre-order, right? But the thing is the Ursa Mini Pro 12K has a lot of other features, aside from the resolution that make it perfect for a new set that we're building for short circuit. And well, given Blackmagic's typical supply constraints, we felt that we either had to go all in or wait months to get enough hardware to finish up our build. We knew that we were gonna run into some roadblocks. I mean, to say our transition to red cameras was smooth would be a bold faced lie. But actually compared to the truckload of early issues we experienced with red hardware and software, our early 12K workflow testing with the Blackmagic Ursa Mini was significantly smoother. That's partially because our current editing stations with Ryzen 3960X Threadripper processors, 128 gigs of RAM and eight gig RTX 2080 graphics cards seemed to be good enough to edit 12K video without any upgrades. Look at this premiere timeline. It's quick and responsive at one eighth resolution, which by the way is still pretty sharp at this size when you've got 80 megapixels per frame to start with. So it looks like we're good on the hardware side. As it turns out, the 12K early adopter tax is collected in software. In our initial tests with the Ursa Mini 12K, our shooters quickly discovered a bug where the sensor wouldn't initialize after video playback unless you changed the settings. I mean, it's not a game breaker, but it's definitely pretty annoying. However, another YouTuber we talked to had a different issue involving their Ursa Mini 12K where it would just start to record seemingly at random. For what is supposedly a professional tool, that kind of unpredictability is disconcerting to say the least, and we're just getting started. Instead of recording in a well-supported industry standard format like H.265 or ProRes, Blackmagic uses a proprietary codec called Blackmagic RAW. Now the advantage is that like other RAW or compressed RAW formats, it allows you to retain extra information without the unreasonable storage requirements of true RAW and change metadata like white balance and ISO in post after you've shot it. That's great. The disadvantage, and this is where we hit our first major roadblock, is that the Ursa Mini Pro 12K only supports shooting video in BRAW, and well, our other applications didn't like that. For instance, Kino, the program we use to ingest, inspect, and backup our footage doesn't currently support BRAW, and they've been told to hold off on supporting it until Blackmagic software comes out of beta. So we'll have to wait until that happens or completely change our ingest procedure. Also, Adobe Premiere, our video editing program of choice, is able to work with BRAW, but there are some hefty software issues to work out, which we'll get to in a minute. The thing is, BRAW is really meant to be used in Blackmagic's own editing software, DaVinci Resolve. And if you're after a completely seamless, synergistic experience, that can be found using Resolve on a Mac. On both our 5K iMac with 16 gigs of VRAM and our lowly Mac Mini with Intel graphics, 12K BRAW footage plays back just fine when you set the timeline to 4K. Even when we set the timeline to native 12K, Resolve could still play back the footage, although it was choppy enough to be unusable. Blackmagic claims that the experience works using a graphics card with as little as 4 gigs of VRAM, though, wow. Unfortunately on Windows, it's a different story. Resolve instantly stops playback of 12K footage with a warning about insufficient video memory until you install a card with 12 gigs of RAM. Then, because get this, Blackmagic actually recommends 24 gigs of VRAM. Are they in cahoots with Nvidia to get us to buy RTX 3090s? You can't even buy RTX 3090s, come on. This is just cruel. Okay, well then, what about Premiere? Well, thanks to the latest beta version of Blackmagic's BRAW plugin, you can import and edit 12K footage from the Aorus Mini Pro 12K, and with GPU acceleration, playback isn't perfectly smooth at full 12K, but it is serviceable until the moment you want to apply any color correction using Lumetri. As soon as you open up the panel, you instantly lose hardware acceleration, causing about 90% of your frames to be dropped, even if you are running a thread ripper and your rendering times to absolutely fall off a cliff. What? Here's where it gets crazy. The quickest way to fix timeline performance in Premiere is to change your timeline from 12K down to 4K, and then drop the preview window down to one quarter scale. This does improve timeline responsiveness as we'd expect, but it doesn't help at all with the color correction problem. The solution to that was to follow Blackmagic's resolve guidance and then install a 24 gig graphics card, but Premiere's usage of VRAM isn't even that high, and the rabbit hole goes even deeper. If we drop our recording resolution down to 12288 by 5121, it works fine with just eight gigs of VRAM. So why would we need three times as much? And get this, even if we record at full res, if we use Lumetri on an adjustment layer instead of on the clip itself, it also works fine. Damn you software bugs! The bottom line then is that for whatever reason, Blackmagic just cannot seem to get their B-RAW plugin to a stable place, and it's been an ongoing issue. One version will work, then the next one will introduce bugs before being fixed again a couple of months later in a new version. As for the current version, well, it's pretty broken. For example, copying and pasting RAW settings from one clip to another is a guaranteed way to draw out a bug. You might lose the ability to edit the RAW settings, or a clip might take on the settings of the clip preceding it, or your program might just straight up crash. Some folks get around this by sticking to a version that works until the rest of the community finishes beta testing for them. But to edit the Ursa Mini 12K's footage, Premiere requires the latest version of Blackmagic's plugin, which is the first to support 12K B-RAW files. So unfortunately, that's not an option for us. Which wouldn't be a problem if the camera could at least record in ProRes or DNx HD like its predecessors, but it can't. And whether it's for technical reasons or just because they don't want to, Blackmagic apparently has no plans to support other codecs that they were willing to tell us about. So then, with a camera that requires the use of a janky plugin to edit its footage, what's an aspiring 12K content creator to do? Enter AutoChroma. They're a company, AKA two guys, who have been developing their own B-RAW enabling plugin for Premiere called B-RAW Studio for the last two years. And shockingly, even though it's a third party plugin made by two guys, our experience is that it's more stable, offers more functionality, and has better support because AutoChroma actually answers emails, which is neat. They helped us iron out some initial wrinkles and it looks like with their plugin, editing B-RAW in Premiere is stable enough for us to consider making it part of our workflow. But wait a second, I mean, isn't that ridiculous? Why is it necessary to buy a $59 third party plugin to be able to actually edit footage from a brand new $10,000 camera? We don't know. Maybe Blackmagic has Apple dreams, you know, where you film on a Blackmagic camera using a Blackmagic codec, then edit in a Blackmagic program using Blackmagic hardware, which is neat. You know, good for you, Blackmagic. But if you want my advice, make sure that your products work both in and out of your ecosystem. Cause think about it, if I were to dip my toes in the water with a purchase like this, only to find out that the experience totally sucks unless I give you even more of my money to change out all of our other stuff and then maybe it'll be great. That's not a great first impression, is it? So while Blackmagic's Premiere plugin is free, the time and frustration that its instability cost us is worth much more than B-RAW Studio's $60 price tag. So for now, we're not gonna be shooting every video in 12K, but with AutoChroma's plugin and the adjustment layer work around, we can slowly bring it into our workflow while we wait for Blackmagic to fix the bugs. And also for graphics cards with enough VRAM to actually be in stock. Or you know what? Maybe just forget it. Why don't we just all switch to Mac? Brandon, switch to Mac. Come on. 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Let's take a trip down memory lane and check out the unboxing of our first 8K camera. Ah, yes. It was enraging. To put it in perspective, guys, one of those cameras cost about as much as five of these, and it was only at 8K. What a rip.