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Not clickbait, despite sounding like it. I'd say that it threw a spanner in the works, but it was more like a hand-grenade. I went to South Korea on holiday, and despite having a mostly-sorted setup based on GX85, I took the BMMCC and ended up shooting almost the whole trip on it. The rig The rig consists of: OG BMMCC - the 1080p one from almost a decade ago 12-35mm F2.8 lens IR/UV cut filter cheap vND filter (tried to buy a new one there but retail shops didn't stock what I wanted) Ikan 3.5" monitor Smallrig monitor mount (tilts forwards) curly HDMI cable from amazon (really tidies the rig up) 3 x LP-E6 batteries (two are older Wasabi ones and one was genuine a Canon one I bought there) Peak Design arca-swiss (mounted on the bottom) random wrist strap (looped through the arca-swiss plate Sandisk 128Gb SD card This ended up being a killer setup. A few highlights of the rigs performance are... Professional equipment The BMMCC is a cinema camera with fans and designed to shoot in harsh environments. The 12-35 is a professional lens. No BS overheating snowflake influencer crap here. This gave me confidence to use it in (light) rain, heavy humidity and serious sweatiness, and basically to not baby it. Fixed aperture zoom lens When setting up for a shot the vND setting from the last shot is probably in the ballpark for this current shot, even when going straight from a one end of the zoom range to the other. Flexible zoom range The zoom range was from 30mm to about 100mm. Sometimes it wasn't quite as wide as I'd have liked, but it suited the environment as Seoul, with a population of around 10M people, is one of the worlds megacities and is seriously compact, so most compositions would simply contain too much stuff if they had a wider FOV. You always miss shots when travelling, but I felt like I didn't miss that many. OIS on a cinema camera, even at the wide end Not a lot of OIS options for 12mm lenses outside of zoom lenses. Light weight This is a full cinema camera rig with 12 items, and yet weighs about 850g / 1.9lb. My GH5 weighs 750g / 1.65lb with battery and SD card, BUT NO LENS. Dynamic range No choosing between the sky or shadows. When shooting uncontrolled situations like this you often see things in post that you didn't see while you were shooting, so the flexibility is super-useful. Ok, so that's all lovely and all, but what was so transformative about it? These are things you could probably work out from the specs... Grenade #1: Shooting slowly is (mostly) shooting honestly. It's a cinema camera, so it's slow as f to shoot with. Yes, I know that practice makes you faster, but my phone will expose and focus in the blink of an eye, so comparatively it's far slower. So, you see a composition and you stand in the right place. Then you adjust the monitor angle if not shooting from the hip (as I prefer). Then you adjust the ND to expose. Then you adjust the zoom for the composition. Then you adjust the focus. With this kind of setup you have to rely on peaking, so you adjust it back and forth to see how much peaking is the maximum, then zero in on that. Then you hit record. This means several things: You are immediately obvious when you stop and start fiddling with a camera in public. There's no hiding. People aren't stupid, especially these days. You cannot be this obvious without getting comfortable with it. If you don't learn to be comfortable then you'll mentally implode before getting any shots, forcing you to relax and just play that role. By the time that you actually hit record, most of the people who were staring at you will have gotten bored and gone back to what they were doing. They don't know you hit record, so the shot will contain people who aren't suddenly paying attention to you. This was a revelation for me because it forces a different way of shooting. When you have a fast camera, you can act like a street photographer. You watch the people, you see something about to happen, you quickly point the camera, and capture THE DECISIVE MOMENT. This means you are shooting specific people doing specific things. Good freaking luck doing that with a fully-manual cine camera. When you have a slow camera, you probably can't anticipate moments far enough in advance to be ready in time, so you think differently. You find a composition and shoot it, and anonymous people drift in and out of frame in ways you didn't specifically anticipate. Sure, you can frame up a background and then wait for people to walk through it, and you could even see someone interesting a few hundred meters away and be ready when they walk past, but it's still a good distance from seeing something 2s before it happens and grabbing it. This has a massive caveat though. It's not a good way to shoot people you know, unless you're directing them or they're basically stationary. The way I've come to understand the difference between cinema cameras and video cameras is that video cameras are designed to capture the world as it happens, and cinema cameras expect the world to bend around them. There's lots of overlap now with that line blurring, but the concept is still a useful one, and the cameras with the best image quality still tend to be very self-centred. Grendade #2: Fixed WB is awesome. I used to shoot auto-WB because I used to think that you wanted 'correct' WB. This mostly works, but leaves you with tiny WB 'errors' that change during the shot. I used to think that the alternative was a fixed WB that would either be correct (if you took a manual grey-card reading at every location or whenever the lighting changed) or you'd use a fixed WB and then have to change it in post. This is probably still true if you're doing something where the WB has to be 'correct', but the only situations I can think of where this would apply is for professional work. I shot the whole trip on 5600K. So, why wasn't this a 'problem' creating shots with 'wrong' WB? Well, shots with warm light sources look warm: Shots with cool light sources (like a blue sky) look cool: Shots taken on a 'grey old day' look grey: ... and light sources that aren't on the warm/cool line will show as being coloured but don't look wrong - they just sort of look like that's what they looked like: and sometimes can even look beautiful: More to come, too many images to attach!

Very true. Cameras are really good these days, it really comes down to the user experience and which small niche set of features work best for you. Should you pick up a Lumix because they're cheaper, or a Canon because you own EF lenses? Do you want the overall feature set of the Sonys, or are you trying to mix and match with something else? Those the real considerations these days. I'm working on a show right now that we shot with an R7, S1, GH5, Gopro 7 and the DJI Air 2. Everything looks fine in post, it's just a matter of working out their individual quirks. The S1 is overall the best image, the cleanest and best DR. The R7 and GH5 look about the same DR wise, but the R7's color is a bit nicer. The gopro looks good, but a bit of over sharpened compression mush. The DJI isn't too bad, just some wonky magenta shifts that are a pain to deal with. At the end of the day though, no one would watch the final show and think a specific camera stands out, they would just judge the show to be what's interesting to them or not.

You may recall that they have been using the Hasselblad logo on their drones/lenses for a while now. Definitely remember the first time I saw one and it did make me think, "Wow, they're upping the image on these drones now"...

Thanks! But realistically, what matters in film-making is story. If pretty visuals were all that mattered then all the mindless and forgettable action films would be winning oscars and changing the world..

It just seems odd to me that people judge cameras or lenses by the resolution / sharpness. If you're interested in making quality finished edits, looking at 100% crops from a 6K sensor is about as relevant as an article discussing the shape and size and edge profile of the ridges in the rubber of the hand-grip. It's just disconnected from reality.

Well that’s a bit of a shame then, considering the price… I haven’t watched a single review but based purely on the YouTube thumbnails I have seen plus the price, dismissed it out of hand for my needs. I do however like the fact that it exists as I do anything ‘different’. Even the Pixie camera.

this post makes me to want to have a bmmcc v2. I hope v2 has the gyro info so gyro flow can be used for stabilization.

Phones was one the missus and I were discussing just the other day and how, other than some photo/lens options, there hasn't been anything we have been slightly interested in with the last 3 or 4 iterations of the iPhone. Nope, nothing, nada. I think I have peaked for my needs on all things tech whether cameras, audio gear, laptop, phone... Now it's not even a case of 'want', but rather 'might like' at some point if it floats my boat. I'd rather see innovation now rather than incremental steps of 'progress' of essentially 'the same thing'.

I started researching the 4D camera a little closer and I have to say it rally hits a lot of the points I want in a camera. I can't see how they are possibly breaking even on this stuff, but I really hope they continue to make more of those. I'd have to assume that if they enter the hybrid market, their angle will be these cool accessories, like wireless video and Lidar autofocus. Because the one thing they don't really have is a great image. I mean there's nothing wrong with their image, there's just nothing special about it.

Delivering in 4K isn't very important to me but there's no real reason not to shoot in 4K even if you are delivering in 1080p. That's not to say that you can't get great results with a good 1080p image (the og Pocket gave me my favorite image out of every camera I've ever owned) and can even deliver in 4K with most people not even noticing (i know people who do it with their C100s), but there really isn't an argument for 1080p actually being better than 4K. People that say that are just being contrarians.

I would love to see a show of hands of anyone that is doing actual client work outside of feature films at prores 422 HQ 4K on a regular basis...as fun as that sounds, practicality always calls the shots. Also, the return on investment is very very low for shooting raw or prores on most cameras. You can get 95% of the same flexibility shooting a good compressed codec with 75% less headache, it's one of the best trades you can make IMO.

I never crop in, 4K and 6K is totally overkill for anything that I do.