Andrew Reid

You are right some lenses won't suit this camera at the wide end, as I said before my GH2 loves a fast 12mm but kills the raison d'etre of a fast 18mm designed for Super 35mm and I don't just say raison d'etre to look clever by using a bit of French. It really does. But you my friend - ahh - spent $60,000 on a single camera - and god knows how much on L glass, and you are not willing to fix this problem with $500 on a Sigma 8-16mm. Or a full frame B-camera for more extreme wide angles than 25mm equivalent. Or an anamorphic. No one camera will ever be good at everything. For example if you go full frame your telephoto end is a pain (expensive and heavy). Also the Alexa makes a crap helmet cam! I don't think the cinema converted (or standard Tokina) 11-16 is in any way 'destroyed' by the Blackmagic, they are a good match. 11 is nice and wide on it. Not ultra wide angle (I find that look something of a gimmick and special usage any way), but a nice 25mm equivalent on full frame. Wider than the standard 28mm. It is FINE.

Don't be too harsh on him, he's not to know. The blacks look crushed on my footage as well when I wear my sun glasses indoors at the desk.

Because 1080p doesn't upscale to nearly 4K anamorphic as well as 2.5K does, that's why! You could do that but why bother? 1920x720 shows what most people who will shoot ProRes will do - a crop for a wider aspect ratio on Vimeo, and no anamorphic lens.

[img]http://www.eoshd.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/bmcc-raw-design.jpg[/img] Why is the [url="http://http://www.eoshd.com/content/tag/blackmagichttp://www.eoshd.com/content/tag/blackmagic"]Blackmagic Cinema Camera[/url] the way it is? It's a long time since we saw such a creative camera with this much creative depth, rather than an another run of the mill industry tool that merely does a job. Grant Petty, CEO at Blackmagic Design explains...

No LOMO + BMC unfortunately. They don't mount on Canon EF. Iscorama, LA7200 and Kowa a better solution for the Blackmagic. I can't wait. ProRes can eat my shorts.

Seems the problem swapped to VLC and QT was fine, this after using my laptop display and then reconnecting the monitor. Seems like a colour management / display profile bug in OSX?

It is early days yet people.

Hmm run & gun is not the BMCC's forte. I'd chose the FS700 for that. It is more flexible, more versatile, does more things, adapts to more lenses, even has AF for run & gun if you need it. Now my advise to narrative filmmakers / music video producers / and many others is different, and it comes down mostly to the image and price as there are quite large differences between the two in those regards. The main issue about the FS100 and FS700 is their highlights, quite digital looking and I think the BMCC has a better image in day light, more cinematic, finer noise grain. But the FS100 (and I love mine) has great low light, so does the FS700 to a slightly lesser extent. Good dynamic range, but 8bit colour and AVCHD. 240fps is beautiful, I like it for slow-mo. They compliment each other, if you can afford the expensive gear - $8000 for an FS700 it isn't too much to stretch to another $3000 for the BMCC. If you can only get one, get the BMCC and spend the remaining money you were going to spend on the FS700 on lenses. Lenses are important.

A £300 NVidia CUDA card like the GTX 670 [url="http://www.ebuyer.com/367979-palit-geforce-gtx-670-2gb-gddr5-displayport-hdmi-dual-dvi-pci-e-graphics-ne5x67001042-1042f"]http://www.ebuyer.co...x67001042-1042f[/url] And DaVinci Resolve, which comes with the camera. 8GB RAM minimum, i5 or i7 CPU eSATA / USB 3 for external drive storage At least 3GB RAID internally External 6GB to start with either in multiple USB drives or a NAS.

[img]http://www.eoshd.com/images/anamorphic-prores-vs-raw.jpg[/img] The end :D

You can transcode from Raw to 2.5K ProRes 444, saving half the space. But you will need some sort of USB 3.0 / eSata or Firewire 800 SSD reader. You can't transcode the ProRes on the same SSD as the raw, you won't fit it all under 480GB. Buy a 3GB internal HDD and an eSata 3.5" HDD / 2.5" SDD IcyBox reader / dock with two slots, Firewire connectivity on the back for your Mac. Don't use USB 2.0.

They put sake in the Panasonic team's Kirin!! GH3 is going to be amazing.

Have you tried grading CineForm yet JG? Doing some research into that compressed raw codec.

I'll see if I can fix it in AE. But odd that GH2 H.264 straight off the card looks different in Quicktime compared to Premiere & VLC Player. What is going on there? Seems like more of a OSX issue than AE to me. Windows box may not have same issue as I am seeing.

Now ProRes 444 will always have the edge on 8bit H.264 but something is not right with Quicktime. At the point of transcoding the Blackmagic Cinema Camera raw (Cinema DNG) in AE CS5.5 to H.264 and importing that file to Premiere CS5.5, H.264 looks superb. Grab that same file and play it in VLC - looks as good. Play it in Quicktime and it turns a pale yellow, and the reds de-saturate. Also notice her sparkly green/blue eyes in the ProRes version - but really washed out on the QT H.264 screen grab. Again, VLC Player doesn't have same issue with H.264 nor does Premiere. Now Mountain Lion can finally play AVCHD I also notice this with my GH2 H.264 based AVCHD as well. Quicktime lifts the blacks and washes out the colour. So Apple... Questions to answer I think. This is major problem because H.264 is the most common codec in the world for us filmmakers to deliver material to the viewer. Click to enlarge - [img]http://www.eoshd.com/uploads/prores-h264-red.jpg[/img]

It is early days yet. People are still working it out for themselves and thinking out loud. If you have seen my twitter feed you will realise Bloom is not alone in that.

There are certain lenses that look better on S35 and some that look better on a 2x crop sensor. Nice to have a choice, I'd certainly prefer to use a 18mm T1.6 on S35 rather than Blackmagic. But then I'd rather use an 85mm F1.4 on the Blackmagic or GH2 as a super fast telephoto than on full frame where it is a standard boring portrait lens with uncontrollable DOF :) All the comparisons to full frame and claims of 'small chip' are bunk. S35 is large, Blackmagic is medium, consumer camcorder is small.

[quote name='pietz' timestamp='1346517519' post='17102']thinking that a couple of guys with new ideas would make it better than professionals, without actually knowing how and why they do it that way, makes you ignorant. [/quote] I'm entitled to think that. There's always good ideas around, both inside the industry and outside. I'm not ignorant of the smoother, faster, convenient workflow of ProRes, it is great to have. But personally I will not be chopping 20% of my resolution down for the sake of avoiding a bit of transcoding. I'd rather transcode from raw to ProRes and delete the raw files than record directly to ProRes, boxing myself into that decision and unable to reverse it later for even a single shot.

[quote name='tabac' timestamp='1346517569' post='17103']I sat in on the Skyfall rushes last year (ArriRAW), looked amazing. Is it essential? No, most would fail to spot the difference without a bench test. I am only talking Alexa here, I fully intent to shoot both RAW and DNxHD on my BMC, that is the beauty of this cam, it can do both.[/quote] ProRes on the Alexa is superb but don't forget with the BMCC you can transcode to CineRaw and still have a raw workflow at 1/5th of the storage requirements. Or even H.264 at 8bit but a high bitrate and you maintain the benefit of 2.5K then, even if when you throw the raw files away you lose some ability to grade. And the camera costs to buy what an Alexa raw unit costs for 2 days rental. Ha.

[quote name='tabac' timestamp='1346521306' post='17105'] "important projects are done in ARRIRAW ..." thats just wacky. No low budget feature I know of has been shooting ArriRAW, I asked for it. Got shown the numbers, then thanked god the Prores 4:4:4:4 on the Alexa looks damn near as good. (Low budget being 500K to 4Mil) [/quote] You can't afford to shoot raw with a 4 million dollar budget? Amateurs are editing raw in their bedrooms on laptops for the price of the camera. Is creativity completely dead in the high budget movie world now? Is it all about the numbers and the money? Maybe try spending less on marketing and more on workflow? £1000 per day for the Codex is a lot of money but it pales into significance relative to everything else in a $4m budget surely?

[quote name='Chris Santucci' timestamp='1346521323' post='17106'] The crop factor makes it unusable in my world, raw or not. [/quote] Why?

[quote name='Glenn Thomas' timestamp='1346505570' post='17092'] Yes, it is fast, and works well for 8 bit footage too as the files are converted to 10 or 12 bit. If you grade using First Light and don't use any NLE effects, pans or crops, videos will render faster than real time.[/quote] I'm trying out a Windows beta version of CineForm Studio Premium which supports CinemaDNG from the Blackmagic thanks to David Newman. Did you convert CinemaDNG to CineForm in that too Glenn, or in another program using the CineForm codec for Premiere?

[quote name='Xiong' timestamp='1346485280' post='17077'] One of the weirdest(and maybe lazy) things I hear people say is "we don't need RAW." I'd have to agree, we don't 'need' it, its just very VERY nice to have. Its not that they are taking your Prores format away from you, they are adding RAW along side to it! Lets say we don't have alot of gear, only a few lights, simple boom mic to H4N. Its fine when we're in a controlled set/environment, but if we try to move to say a parking garage? Or an office building with bad yellow florescent light? Wouldn't we want to shoot in RAW? Where we have the option to try and fix these issues? [/quote] Indeed, a large production would spend a lot more than they spend on post, to fix issues with a location and lights. We, the ones who are smart and think differently, will be able to do a lot of that in raw now. Every time we get more power allocated to us at $3000, the politics fire up... Is it any wonder hey?

[quote name='pietz' timestamp='1346485079' post='17076'] i work for a commercial production studio and we just shot a job with a budget of 2.5 million $. with this kind of budget you would expect the freedom to shoot on every possible camera out there and youre right. we shot on the arri alexa in 1080p prores for so many reasons. i find people here who say "people who dont see the benefits of raw, dont know what they are talking about" and the funny thing is that i get the feeling that many of YOU dont know what they re talking about. for example mattbatt, if you honestly believe that in a few years prores will be seen on the web, you have NO idea what youre talking about and clearly dont know a thing about prores. honstely. ProRes was created to be graded in professional purposes. you absolutely cannot compare this to a high bitrate H264, it will never be the same! you cannot put the argument out there saying raw gives you 12bit and prores only 10bit if you dont know what it means in real life. there is absoluty no way in hell and physics that you can tell the difference between 10bit and 12bit material. its so far from being possible. 10bit means more then 1 billion different colors that can be created. even if you decide that you want 75% grey to be white, thats more than enough. also andrew 13 stops is not a plus for raw, it doesnt have anything to do with that. the alexa has 14 stops and records in prores, whats the point youre trying to make? as one of the people in the 2012 camera shootout said, "its much more about workflow these days" you can import the alexa files directly into AVID and also use them for grading. thats about as easy as it gets. not only the space on HDDs but the transfer speeds and computing power you need to seemlessly edit uncompressed is extremly pricy. if you havent compared Uncompressed footage to ProRes you should not be talking here. do your homework and come back with evidence, because it blows my mind every time i realise that prores seems to have no boundaries and its about a tenth the size. [/quote] What a condescending tone. ProRes on the Alexa is not the same as ProRes on the Blackmagic. I don't yet know how ProRes performs on this camera, I very much doubt it will give you 13 stops of usable dynamic range or as much as raw. It certainly doesn't give you as clean resolution or as much or if or a way to reduce aliasing by downsampling in post to 1080p and equally it doesn't up-res as well to 4K. So let me get this straight, with your $2.5k budget you spend a boat load of cash on a monitor, 20 people to construct a tent so you can see it, a truck with a generator so you can power it and then two more trucks so you can move it around. Takes you an hour to move 100m with that crap. And you have this Alexa beast that shoots ArriRaw... AND... You choose NOT to shoot raw to gain a little hard drive space. Insane! I'm not anti-ProRes. I'm just in love with the look of CinemaDNG on the Blackmagic and that extra resolution provided by 2.5K and the way the raw material can be pulled around so much in post. Image quality all the way for me. I feel that if the film and TV industry really wanted convenience and to save money, ProRes is the last thing I'd look at frankly. If only you guys listened to all that new blood with the better ideas THEN you would save time and effort, instead of dismissing them as not knowing what they're talking about.

[quote name='Glenn Thomas' timestamp='1346489211' post='17080'] I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Cineform Raw here? This would give you the best of both. A true raw workflow, but with much smaller file sizes. I've been using Cineform for years, and the image quality has always been top notch. [/quote] I'm looking into CineForm. Performance wise it does sound promising too, the transcoding is mega fast - does in 5 seconds what AE takes 2 minutes to do.