Introducing Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera! Super tiny digital cinema camera with Super 16mm sensor and 13 stops of dynamic range. $995!
Get true digital film images with feature film style 13 stops of dynamic range, Super 16 sensor size, high quality lossless CinemaDNG RAW and Apple ProRes™ recording and the flexibility of an active Micro Four Thirds lens mount, all packed into an incredibly tiny size! The Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera records 1080HD resolution ProRes 422 (HQ) files direct to fast SD cards, so you can immediately edit or color correct your media on your laptop. Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera is everything you need to bring cinematic film look shooting to the most difficult and remote locations, perfect for documentaries, independent films, photo journalism, music festivals, ENG, protest marches and even war zones.
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Article by: Stu Maschwitz
Deadlines are good.
I only had the camera for a week. And for that entire week, there it sat, unused except for a few test shots. I should shoot something nice with it, I kept thinking. Something pretty. Before the day comes that I have to send it back.
And then that day came, and I had a shipping label in my hand, and zero footage. Meanwhile, my wife and her sister—who, as a company of two people, have a less developed procrastination method than my lone enterprise allows—asked if I could take a few behind-the-scenes photos of them testing new scents for their line of handmade candles.
“Sure, but how about we shoot a video too?” I said before I’d thought it through.
I jammed the borrowed Blackmagic Cinema Camera onto my Redrock Micro EyeSpy rig, attached my Canon 50mm f/1.2 L, and got to work.
As perfectly expressed by Vincent Laforet (the generous loaner of this particular BMC), the Blackmagic Cinema Camera is a perplexing mix of unmatched bang-for-the-buck, along with some maddening shortcomings and inscrutable design decisions.
Upon picking up the camera body, I was immediately impressed with its build quality. It’s solid, pleasingly minimal, and made with high-quality metal, rubber, and plastic. What it is not, is light. The body alone weighs 3.75 lbs, and this one had the Wooden Camera BMC Kit (Advanced) grafted on with a sense of permanence that a gracious borrower would balk at challenging, adding nearly three pounds. Slap on a lens and you’re in an awkward zone of too heavy to hold, too small to stop trying.
The large touch LCD built into the camera body is a big part of why you’ll keep trying to “hold” this camera in your “hands.” The built-in focus peaking is wonderful to use, and major reason why so much of Let’s Cook, the result of my hasty shoot, is in focus. You can also double-tap the display to zoom in for precise focus. But unless you’re on a tripod and operating at CWH (Comfortable Working Height), you will find the touchscreen difficult to use as a viewfinder. Red’s design of a detachable, adjustable Touch LCD may not be pleasingly minimalist or comfortingly DSLR-like, but it’s significantly more useful.
Despite the LCD being precisely where you’d put one on a camera meant for your hands, the BMC is not actually designed to be held. It lacks any kind of hand grip, and its ziggurat shape wants to fall out of your grasp, even as you try to place your thumbs over the buttons that cry out to have thumbs placed over them. The DSLR-esque shape of this camera is, unfortunately, more of an aspiration than a practical design feature.
The way I tried to make the BMC behave like an HDSLR was by mounting it to my EyeSpy rig. It fit on with only a few modifications, but the counterweight was not nearly enough to balance out the front-heavy rig. For hand-held work, this camera really wants to be directly over your shoulder, like an Alexa or an Epic, with an EVF or small LCD monitor extended in front. Bear that in mind if you’re considering the BMC as a graduation present from the school of HDSLRs.
I love a good deal, and the Blackmagic Cinema Camera is a great one. But the touchscreen would be more usable, and would save BMC customers substantial money on accessories, if it was detachable and/or adjustable to a position that better acknowledges the reality of this camera’s size and weight. Even if the camera had to cost $1,000 more to accommodate this, the net would be a savings to the owner.
Now, about those buttons crying out for your thumbs. On the right is the Focus button, which toggles the super-helpful-on-the-rare-occasion-that-the-touchscreen-is-usable-as-your-EVF focus peaking. It’s really good. I wore myself out hefting my imbalanced rig around just so I could keep using it, and as a result, I did a better job pulling focus on Let’s Cook than I’ve ever done before.
The button on the left is labeled Iris, and it is stupid. Press it and the iris—on a compatible EF-mount lens—is set automatically, according to rules that require a glance at the manual:
When shooting using the Video dynamic range, the exposure will set using an average of scene similar to what you’re used to on a stills camera. However, in Film dynamic range, the IRIS button adjusts your exposure to ensure that nothing in your scene is clipped.
That Dynamic Range setting of Film or Video affects the recorded image when using ProRes, but not, of course, when recording raw. There’s a separate Film/Video setting for the LCD, which toggles a non-destructive Rec 709 LUT for the display. I shot raw, but used the Video setting on the LCD for a nice contrasty image. I wondered why, in raw mode, the Dynamic Range setting remained available—maybe just to control this Iris button behavior?
Anyway, back to this stupid button, that is stupid. Who exposes this way? Not camera people. Did I mention that there’s no display for f-stop?
There’s no display of your f-stop. Yet.
This Canon-mount camera prominently places a single button called “Iris” that allows the camera set your Canon lens stop auto-magically, and then not inform you of its choice.
Maybe it’s not such a bad thing that Blackmagic Design was not able to start shipping the BMC in quantity until they could address this insane shortcoming with a firmware update (pseudo-announced December 18th).
Back to the present: You can set your stop manually. But you won’t figure out how without another trip to the manual:
You can also manually adjust the iris of your lens by using the forward and reverse button on the Transport Control panel.
Of course. You use the (unlabeled) playback buttons to do the single most basic thing about shooting images. And even when making this adjustment manually with these repurposed buttons, you (for now) get no visual confirmation of your setting.
This is Blackmagic Design’s first attempt at making a camera, and the iris control situation is where you’ll notice that.
Of course, it’s entirely possible that you’ll be using EF-mount glass that has a manual iris ring, which renders this limitation meaningless. But a major selling point of this camera is its smart EF mount—yet to use it currently requires abandoning traditional control of the one setting that every cinematographer’s forefingers are born to adjust.
Or maybe you’ll opt for the Micro Four Thirds version of the camera. Certainly this mount makes more sense for the size of the BMC’s sensor. With the Canon mount, you’ll struggle to find fast, wide glass. But with the MFT mount, you might struggle to find glass that allows you to set your stop at all. If you’re a Panasonic shooter (you know you are if you’ve stopped reading long ago to leave a long-winded comment about how much better the GH3 will probably be than the BMC, especially with a firmware hack, ermahgerd), you’ll find that the “dumb” MFT mount won’t control your sealed-up, no-manual-iris-ring lenses. So the MFT BMC will only work with the subset if MFT glass that has a manual iris ring. Or, more likely, you’ll use the MFT mount as a permanent home for a PL-mount adapter. At which point you will be back to selecting among lenses optimized for a larger sensor. Exhausted yet?
It takes a really great camera to earn this kind of criticism from me, and this camera is really great (if you were looking for the five words in this post that no one will read or remember, there they are). That it is available for a mere $3,000 is a miracle—in fact, a miracle that has yet to come true. I have every confidence that Blackmagic Design will work out their production kinks, about which they are being quite candid, and start shipping this thing en masse, soon.
But one has to wonder how many of these cameras, announced at NAB 2012, will be shipped before NAB 2013—an event at which, given the trend, we should expect to see 4K Super 35 digital cinema cameras being 3D-printed on demand from vending machines in hotel lobbies...
In a surprise unveling at the International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography (Camerimage 2012) in Poland Panavision has indeed signalled their intention to join the market and have shown the first fruits of their labour with a new prototype.
Aimed at bettering the Arri, Sony and Red. It has a huge by cinema standards 70mm sensor (similar in size to full frame 35mm).
Here’s what we know about Panavision’s beast…
Good to see yet more competition and innovative technology in the high end digital cinema camera market. The trend here, like with the Blackmagic Cinema Camera seems to be that more and more technology from the scientific community is being picked up by cinema camera manufacturers and put to artistic use.
If the full force of NASA’s technology is brought to bare on a Pavavision designed camera we could be in for something out of this world.
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Source Article: Here
It is finally here, the ipad with the new hi-res display...and much more!
You can read all about it here - or watch the video of the event here.
For a comparison of "What has changed" check out this article.
In short: pretty much everything. We made zillions of improvements that cover the front end, the back end, and the parts in between to create a Vimeo that is bigger, faster, smarter, and more fun.
I don't know about you, but I'm excited about the changes!
Check it out for yourself! Vimeo.com/new
Here are a couple of articles that I found to be very insightful and that I highly recommend especially for filmmakers! I really enjoyed the info about the post production process from editing to film prints! Both articles are very in depth and instead of re-posting them here in their entirety I have instead included links for you to check out. To get you started, here is a short excerpt:
Articles By: Steve Hullfish
"This article and the follow up will discuss the entire workflow of getting the R3D files from the camera, archiving them, transcoding them, organizing the files, making editing decisions with the director, and eventually, delivering the edit and raw files to PostWorks in NY and following the entire on-line post-production workflow getting the RED files and a Final Cut Pro 7 sequence up on the big screen in over 1,200 theaters nationwide.
Sherwood Pictures’ last theatrical release was the number one independent movie of 2008, “Fireproof,” which beat out “Slumdog Millionaire” for the honor. That film focused on a firefighter struggling with his heroic image at the firehouse compared to the image his wife had of him at home. At its heart, it was a movie about saving a marriage. For “Courageous”, the heroes are cops who are courageous on the streets, but need to show that honor begins at home, as they struggle with their roles as fathers when their beat is done.
My role started after principal photography had been completed. Director Alex Kendrick had planned on editing the feature himself, along with the help of on-set editor, Bill Ebel, who was also an editor on “Fireproof.” However, the previous Sherwood Pictures releases had been edited from approximately 40 hours of footage each, but when the final day of shooting on “Courageous” was done, there were over 130 hours of raw footage coming from multiple RED cameras. (The production took place in the spring and summer of 2010, so it was shot Red One, pre-MX.) Getting through 130 hours of footage to deliver a first cut in just a couple months would be impossible for one or two people. Just watching 130 hours of footage would take a month..."
"Technology continues to bring us wondrous advances in filmmaking to improve how we view movies.
While it's exciting to consider the possibilities stemming from this era of innovation -- which directors and futurists for decades have envisioned -- that allows us to watch a movie "anywhere, anytime," the more preoccupied we become with the technologies of how movies can reach us, the less we seem to ask the most important question: How do we really want to experience a film?
In my view, the only way to see a film remains the way the filmmaker intended: inside a large movie theater with great sound and pristine picture. Music and dialogue that doesn't fully reproduce the soundtrack of the original loses an essential element for its appreciation. Simply put, the film loses its power.
Short of that, the technically sophisticated Blu-ray disc, of which I've been a supporter since its inception, is the closest we've come to replicating the best theatrical viewing experience I've ever seen. It allows us to present in a person's living room films in their original form with proper colors, aspect ratio, sound quality, and, perhaps most importantly, startling clarity.
Which is why it has never made sense to me that those preoccupied with how movies are delivered have for years written off "physical media" (i.e., movies on discs) as "dead" even though the evidence shows it isn't happening and won't for years to come. Technology will need to make many more huge leaps before one can ever view films with the level of picture and sound quality many film lovers demand without having to slide a disc into a player, especially with the technical requirements of today's 3D movies.
Granted, the older DVD technology is phasing out. But it is yielding to the Blu-ray just as videocassettes once gave way to the technically superior DVD. This is evolution. Far from being dead, physical media has years of life left and must be preserved because there is no better alternative. Pundits aside, Blu-ray for the foreseeable future remains the finest technology to preserve the impact and enjoyment of watching movies at home.
We've come a long way from those flickering, silent screens which were accompanied only by a person playing a piano. What has remained constant is that people then and now have always sought out the magic one feels after watching a truly memorable film. For movie lovers it doesn't matter whether that magic comes at a theater or through a disc, an electronic stream, a satellite or a wireless device as long as it is delivered through the best possible experience."
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Source Article here.
Scott and Rich discuss video style tripods (which are helpful for both Timelapse and DSLR video). Many traditional photography shooters are switching styles and trying them out too as they are easy to quickly recompose a shot then lock it down solid for HDR too. Learn about Miller tripods and what features matter (and which are overkill).
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