Tilta Rehouse The Blackmagic URSA Viewfinder

by Tim FokApril 28^th, 2016

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In the tail end of last year we posted this video on how to make use of the fantastic Blackmagic URSA Viewfinder with other cameras. It seems that we are not the only whom took note as Tilta has announced their own rehoused version.

We caught up with Tilta at NAB to check out their latest products and the rehoused Blackmagic viewfinder was something that immediately caught our eye.

The Blackmagic URSA Viewfinder is compact, a 1920 x 1080 OLED display and relatively affordable. We were impressed with how it performed and also the fact that Blackmagic kept it universal with its BNC SDI connection for signal and 4-pin XLR for power. This makes it very easy to adapt for use with other cameras.

Tilta has built upon this by rehousing the URSA Viewfinder into an industry ready state.

Gone is the USRA designed swivel mount and hard-wired cables. The Tilta URSA Viewfinder has been stripped back to accept more universal fittings (pictured in the above video with Arri viewfinder mount) with a HD-SDI port for signal and 12-24v lemo for power. On the underside also is a 1/4″ thread for further mounting.

It’s nice to see the peripherals offered up in the form of ports over hard-wired cables, this makes it much easier to maintain and customize to your specific needs.

Going back to our ground work back in October, we found that the URSA Viewfinder seems to only accept progressive signals (many cheaper cameras only output variants of interlaced signals) so for cameras like the a7S you’ll still have to convert the signal before it reaches the viewfinder (we did this via an Atomos Shogun).

As you can see in the video, Tilta were a little vague in what they’ll do in terms of offering further support for this in the future, but it does seem like they’re looking into it.

The Tilta URSA Viewfinder has no official price, but should be under $2000 (original currently sits at $1495).