This is the
Kinefinity Mavo Edge. Their new flagship cinema camera with a stunning full frame 8K sensor,
a newly designed modular carbon fibre body, and a whole host of fantastic little design
touches which make this a very exciting new camera.
Its been a long wait from the first time that Kinefinity announced this camera back in April
2020, nearly a year and half ago now. For obvious reasons, launching products over the
last year or so hasn’t been the easiest process for any manufacturer, let alone small
ones like Kinefinity. So there might have been a wait, but it is finally ready, this
is a final production model here in my hands, and customer ones are now shipping as well.
I have been very excited for this camera, we have a long history now with Kinefinity
and their last cameras, although far from perfect, were some of my favourites on the
market for some use cases. The image quality from the Mavo LF, Mavo 6K and Terra 4K was
just fantastic, and the small modular form factor with interchangeable mounts made them
incredibly flexible. But on those models, the build quality was a little rough around
the edges in places to be honest. Not to say it was bad, if you knew how to avoid the weak
spots they were actually built very well. We have customers who have used them in all
kinds of situations, including taking them around the globe from ice caves to volcanos
with no issues when their other cameras from other brands were actually giving up on them
in the same environment. But they didn’t feel that, premium.
The Mavo Edge on the other hand is the exact opposite. This thing feels great, just as
good as any other high end camera manufacturer out there. And they have added so many lovely
touches to the design which I think will take people who haven’t seen the Edge before
by surprise. I will go over these as we cover each area of the camera, but they really add
up to make this a camera which is actually much nicer to use than some of those other
high end cinema cameras out there. And in terms of comparing it to their older cameras,
its a whole new league for Kinefinity. At 1.5 kilos the Edge does weigh slightly more
than the Mavo LF as a result, but thats hardly a surprise as it packs in a huge amount of
new features and 1.5 kilos is still pretty lightweight, its light but with a reassuring
weight to it.
But lets start with the sensor. Its an 8K CMOS sensor which measures 36 by 24 mm so
thats the same dimensions as their Mavo LF and the Sony Venice, its very slightly smaller
than the Alexa mini LF and its its taller but not as wide as the Canon C500 II or RED
Monstro. Kinefinity claim it has over 14 stops of dynamic range, and it has a dual native
ISO of 640 and 2560. The Edge records in Prores files, ranging from Prores 422 LT for small
easy to use files, all the way up to Prores 444 XQ which is an incredibly robust industry
standard codec. Theres no raw in the camera right now, when they announced it they were
planning to have prores raw support but unfortunately that never came to fruition due to various
legal reasons. They are apparently looking at ways of getting raw on the camera, but
for now we have good old prores. But to be honest, that doesn’t bother me. The quality
of this Prores recording is just fantastic, so much so that theres a definite school of
thought that Prores 444 will actually give you just as much flexibility in the grade
as raw would but without the extra workflow requirements. Never the less though, it would
be great to get raw recording for those who want it and so hopefully Kinefinity can find
a way to make that happen.
You can record 8K with the full sensor at up to 55 frames a second which is very impressive
and is a higher max resolution and frame rate than pretty much any of its competition except
the RED monstro which can do it at 60 frames, so not far off. Crop that down to their wide
aspect ratio which works out as 2.42:1 in 8K, and you can get up to 70 frames a second.
You don’t have to record in 8K with the full sensor though, you can oversample the
image to 4K and still get up to 55 frames a second. Now this oversampled 4K recording
is remarkably good, in fact Kinefinity actually say this is the way to get the best dynamic
range out of the camera. We did a bunch of tests comparing the two and the oversampled
4K is very nearly as detailed as the 8K, and it definitely lowers the noise floor down.
We couldn’t see much difference in highlight retention, so this lower noise floor will
be what Kinefinity are referring to, you will get cleaner shadows with the oversampled 4K
and so a slightly wider usable dynamic range. This is great because for many people using
the full 8K resolution is simply going to be too much data. If you want to treat this
as a large format 4K camera, you absolutely can. In fact the only reason to really step
up to the 8K is if you want to do any cropping or reframing, that slight extra bit of detail
is important to you, or you want the highest resolution for archive. For everyone else,
just record in the 4K mode and that in camera 8K oversampling will give you very detailed,
very clean images.
If you want to go to higher frame rates you can do that by cropping into the sensor. Crop
into Super35mm and you can get 6K up to 72 frames or 92 frames in the wide mode. Go in
even further to super 16mm and you can go to 108 frames in 4K or 145 in 4K wide, or
215 in 2K and 280 in 2K wide. These are good frame rates to have, but by this point though
you are significantly cropped in to the sensor. One nice touch which i’m very pleased to
see again as it was one of my favourite features of the previous cameras is the quick access
presets menu. This makes it incredibly quick and easy to jump between your most regularly
used settings. Hold button 1 and you get this list of up to 8 presets. This sets your sensor
size, resolution, codec and frame rate and can be set up however you like. Its fantastic
to use, especially when you are jumping between different frame rates a lot.
We also did a quick test of higher ISO’s while using our shutter speed to keep the
exposure consistent so we can compare noise levels. Heres the two native ISO’s next
to each other, both look great. Theres slightly more noise on the higher one but nothing really
to worry about for most people. It also does really quite well at higher ISO’s, only
really getting that noticeably noisey at around 12800 which is pretty good. I haven’t compared
it to the Mavo LF directly yet but I expect the LF to be better as it has always been
exceptionally good, but this is nothing to be ashamed of on the edge. I’d say it should
rival and even beat most of those other high end cinema cameras in terms of noise performance.
Lets now take a look at the physical aspects of the camera starting with the lens mount.
This is exactly the same system as their previous cameras, the camera itself has their own Kinemount
which has a very short flange distance on it. You can actually use this to mount their
own cinema lenses on to the camera now which is nice, but most people will be using one
of these mount adapters to give the camera an EF mount, PL, LPL or even an E mount although
that one is for manual lenses only. This is a fantastic system as it lets owners use a
huge variety of glass from small and affordable EF glass all the way up to the highest end
cinema primes. Kinefinity have also hugely improved these lens mounts with the mark 3
versions especially the EF mount ones but i’ll cover that in more detail in another
video. There is now no longer any need for the mount adapters which have built in ND
filters though, as the Edge now has an electronic variable ND system built in to the camera
itself which is very impressive in a camera this compact. You can go from 2 stops to 7
stops of ND in very small and precise increments, no matter what lens and mount combination
you are using which is just fantastic to have built in to a camera like this. Although Sony
have their fantastic electronic ND filter, its not on their venice. Just like the Alexa
LF and C500 mkII the Venice has built in optical filters that drop in in presets, while the
REDs don't have any ND at all. Having the fine control that an electronic ND gives you
is fantastic. Some productions will of course want to still use a matte box and the optical
ND’s that they know and trust, but for most people the convenience of a built in variable
ND will be a huge benefit.
On the side are your controls and a status screen to show you your current settings.
This camera isn’t on final firmware yet, but on my model this screen is quite slow
to update when you are changing settings, so you have to use the main displays really
to see what you are doing. But hopefully Kine can speed that up over time in future firmwares.
This wheel is how you navigate your menu system, the actual menus themselves are the same as
they were on previous cameras, and despite the controls to navigate them being better,
they are still a little clumsy in my opinion. Your control wheel is here, with a central
button to select things, but the quality of this wheel just doesn’t seem to match the
rest of the camera which is a shame. It feels a little loose and fiddly, but the bigger
problem is the control scheme. You get menu to get into the menus of course, but then
when you want to go backwards you have to find that menu button again, and to leave
the menus you have to press it multiple times to get out. Playback mode is also really quite
unintuitive. It works well but the button layout can just be hard to remember. You hold
the play button to get to playback, the wheel jogs backwards and forwards and going back
to the play button starts and stops the clip. Buttons 1 and 2 then jump forwards and backwards
through the clips but theres no list of the clips available to navigate with. Theres definitely
scope for this to be slightly more refined and this control system is probably my least
favourite part of the camera. But they do get the job done, and changing your actual
exposure settings while recording is simple and straightforward and fast which is the
most important thing.
Next to these controls are the card slots which are another big area of change and a
great example of those nice small touches that I mentioned at the start. Rather than
the thin SSD drives that the previous cameras used, the Edge now uses NVME SSD drives inside
an enclosure. Kinefinity sell the Kinemag Nano which is a 1TB SSD, but they will also
release a caddy which you can put your own drives into. This is a fantastic balance between
getting faster, more sturdy and smaller media, but keeping the flexibility for the user to
use more affordable third party media if they want to. Plus because they are smaller you
can now fit two of them in to the camera giving us relay recording. But unfortunately you
can’t record to both simultaneously, If the camera is capable of it I would love to
see this added, even if its only for the lower codec options like Prores LT as having a backup
recording is very important on some jobs. These new nano drives are really nicely made
though, and a perfect example of those little touches. They fit into the slots perfectly,
yet are easy to pull out. Theres even a little felt back to the door to stop the drives from
rubbing. The best one though is the USB-C port on the drive. This means you can offload
to your computer or watch the files back on a laptop without any need for a card reader.
Its fast, convenient, and a very welcome touch.
This convenience and attention to detail extend to the back of the camera where you find the
battery mounts. Theres no need for a back module any more like on the older cameras,
we now have battery mounts directly built into the camera. And I say battery mounts,
not because you can mount multiple batteries, but because theres a Vlock mount, with a sony
BPU style battery plate hidden inside it. Giving you the choice between large vlock
batteries, and small BPU batteries like their own gripbats, the same ones that were used
in the sidegrip on the previous cameras. I love this, its a really clever way of giving
customers more ways of powering the camera, and using the smaller batteries is going to
be great for gimbals or handheld work, anything where you want to keep the weight and size
down, plus each battery should power the camera for well over an hour. Kinefinities gripbats
are 45 wh and the camera draws 32.
Moving around the camera again, we get to the in and out ports. Kinefinity have effectively
built in the functionality of their previous kineback module into the actual camera. On
the top are two full size XLR inputs, then on the side we get a wifi antenna which is
used to connect to their app for monitoring and camera control, i’ll cover that in a
future video. Theres two SDI ports, genlock as a BNC and timecode as a 5 pin lemo. Theres
a sync port as well for jamming multiple cameras together and of course a headphone port. For
power, theres a 2 pin DC in for mains power, a 12 volt 3 pin lemo and a 12 volt Dtap port.
That leaves the USB-C port, an ethernet port, and these two areas marked as extension ports
and covered by caps. Information on these ports is fairly limited right now. The usb
is used for firmware updates and on their website they say that it can be used for monitoring
on an ios device instead of using the WiFi, although I don’t think this is enabled yet.
The website also says that the ethernet port can be used for live streaming, camera control
and data transfer, although again I believe that is coming in a future update. I think
the plan from kinefinity is to release the camera with the core functionality working
well at the start, before then changing focus to work on these extra features, which is
definitely the right approach if it can’t all be there at launch and i’m looking forward
to seeing what is added to the camera over time with these ports.
Beyond that, there is a whole ecosystem of other products that Kinefinity make around
the camera, theres the monitors, the EVF, the batteries, the rigging kit which Movcam
make for them. Theres a lot more to talk about which we will cover in the next video we make
on the edge. But for now i’m really keen to hear what you all think? Let me know in
the comments what you think of the Edge and its features, how do you think this will stack
up against its competition and what would you like to see from us now that we have a
working model ourselves? I’m keen to know what you think as I have been hugely impressed
with the camera so far. In terms of first impressions, its certainly the best camera
that Kinefinity have ever made, and in my opinion, definitely a solid contender in that
high end cinema camera market. If you want to buy one you can of course head over to
proav.co.uk or talk to our sales team directly. Thanks for watching, and i’ll see you in
the next one.