What got fixed?

[Brian Drysdale]

Having shot lots of documentary, to be honest, I still can't see the need for delete to be used as part of your standard workflow. You often have usable parts of an interview before helicopters, kids bouncing up waving into camera etc.that could be be used. Outdoor interviews often get stopped because of background noises and get restarted where they were interrupted.

Digging into menus can become distracting for the talent, especially if they're having problems and they get to associate that with their mistake.

[Murray Christian]

This is getting kind of silly though. The price point now is low enough to get down to a, let's say, more casual user. SSDs are getting cheap, but not that cheap. Neither are portable drives and laptops so popular everyone's going to be able to just dump stuff off on a whim.
People are going to stretch to a camera like this without the overhead for a lot of convenient support options.

Murphy's law is great and all, and writing a delete option isn't an effort free exercise, but it's quite conceivable for it to be a harmless and useful feature for a lot of people. (plus a drive format option presents precisely the same problem from an insurance point of view, unless it's somehow hobbled to never work if there is any media on a drive)

[Gabe Strong]

Originally Posted by Brian Drysdale

Having shot lots of documentary, to be honest, I still can't see the need for delete to be used as part of your standard workflow. You often have usable parts of an interview before helicopters, kids bouncing up waving into camera etc.that could be be used. Outdoor interviews often get stopped because of background noises and get restarted where they were interrupted.

Digging into menus can become distracting for the talent, especially if they're having problems and they get to associate that with their mistake.

I dunno, takes me 20 seconds to delete a bad take on my FS700 and that is counting the
time it takes the camera to delete the bad take.

To be honest, I think it's kind of bad form for someone to decide that since they don't need
a feature, no one else really needs it either.....although.I can now understand why narrative
guys might not want it. However, I've been making my living as a video shooter and
editor for quite awhile. I too have shot a ton of documentary style and the delete function
is certainly one I find useful. And I've never once deleted a clip by accident. BMD is
geared towards narrative shooters so maybe it makes sense to not have it on that camera.
It's really not the camera for me anyways.

[Brian Drysdale]

If you wish to use delete whilst shooting that entirely up to you, however, it's not an essential feature on any camera. Possibly it's something that's important to someone doing their own editing, but for me it would be a distraction from planning the next shot, talking to the director or just taking the next take. The quick visual initiator of a new take being to hold your hand over the shot for the first couple of seconds. Personally, I'd save selection to the edit, where you can quickly scrub through to the good takes.

As I mentioned, I've only needed to "destroy" shots on a couple of occasions and they weren't for editorial reasons.

[Mike Wade]

Doug Jensen , Vortex Media's tutor, reckons that the Last Clip Delete feature on the EX1 is so useful that he has it set as number one of the four assignable buttons....

[Brian Drysdale]

It depends on how the assign carries out the delete operation, but it would need to have more cover than just hitting the assigned button, a second, confirming operation is needed to avoid an accident waiting to happen. The risk increases if your shooting style involves a lot of grabbing the camera for hand held shots using different part of the camera body.

EDIT The times when such a feature would be useful is if you film videos which involve talking or demonstrations to camera shot in controlled conditions. These tend to have very definite good or bad takes and don't have the possibly that you may want to edit a good take with part of a "bad" take.

Again, it's not an essential item and all the cameras mentioned are much more expensive than the BlackMagic camera and they're recording variations of Sony xdcam formats. The BlackMagic records uncompressed RAW, ProRes and DNxHD, it comes down to if it's commercially worthwhile adding a delete feature, or is there some other feature(s) that would better serve users. Possibly the audio issue that gets discussed in another thread should be further up such a list.