cantsin

I recommend downloading the sample images at DPReview and opening them in a raw editor that does not apply software-based distortion correction. Turns out that this lens isn't optically corrected and distorts heavily unless software correction is applied. Software-corrected out-of-the-cam JPEG: Raw image without software correction: I wouldn't recommend this lens on any camera that does 1:1 sampling of sensor pixels (which includes the GH4 and Blackmagic cameras) since you'll lose quite a substantial amount of resolution. Panasonic's pricing of this lens is, well, ambitious....

Resolve will never be as fast as NLEs like Premiere and FCPX since it prioritizes display quality over playback performance. As a color grading program, it has to do so. In this respect, it is quite comparable to After Effects (which has been designed with the same quality-over-speed priority).

To simplify the discussion: a 42.5mm/f1.2 lens on MFT has the sane DoF as a 42.5mm/f1.2 lens on FF, but a narrower angle of view. To obtain the same DoF AND angle of view of a 42.5mm/f1.2 MFT lens on FF, you'll need a 85mm/f2.4 lens.

Here's another take on the issue: I don't think that anything is wrong with Sony's white balance per se. When shooting raw stills, I rarely have to override the camera's WB values in the raw developer software (Lightroom, DxO, Raw Therapee). Auto WB is quite good and reliable, even in mixed light situations. - The real problem seems to be the JPEG/MPEG engine, its abysmal color science and the dead/plastic colors it produces; which, of course, can't be bypassed when shooting video instead of stills.

What an image...

Well, if companies like BM no longer focus on announcing new cameras, but put their efforts in fixing issues and improving their existing cameras, this can only be good news. For example, the BM Pocket had sensor calibration issues, lacked raw recording, produced false colors in Rec709 mode and had faulty LUTs for the Log mode, lacked audio levels and a histogram when it came out. Thanks to a large and vocal user base, all this was fixed over time, and the Pocket turned from a problematic to a truly great camera - IMHO the most (positively) disruptive camera after the 5D MkII and the GH2. Seems as if this history now needs to repeat itself with the Ursa Mini.

Many programs (Resolve, Avid and Vegas for example) rely on Quicktime even for their playback of non-Quicktime, h264/mp4 and other material.

Unfortunately, this is not true. The vulnerabilities are in the player component which Adobe & Co. use for most playback and rendering of Quicktime-based formats.

The other side of the coin is that Adobe, Avid, Grass Valley, Sony and Blackmagic have been thoroughly unprofessional, too, by relying on a piece of software that's only listed as compatible with Windows up to Windows 7. All these companies have released NLE/postproduction software for Windows 8, 8.1 and 10 relying on a component that never has been officially compatible with these operating systems. Yeah, I know - but I happen to use Resolve only for the CinemaDNG footage from my BM Pocket, and I always render to MXF (and only from there to delivery formats like mp4 with ffmpeg which only uses its own codec libraries). So I can actually work in Resolve without Quicktime. But I'm fully aware that this won't be the case for maybe 95% of people. I just tried to relativize your statement "If you use Resolve and don't have QT you are screwed" a (little) bit.

That depends on your personal workflow though and the footage you're working with. If you record CinemaDNG, RedRaw... and render to, say, DNxHD/HR in MXF, you'll be fine.

Well, these fcp.co forum guys must have insights that nobody else in the industry has, including Adobe (with its recent press release that they're working on a complete replacement of CC's Quicktime dependency because of the security issue)... - Also, fcp.co is not exactly objective or non-partisan in matters related to Apple.

The problem is that "player" does not only refer to the QuickTime Player app, but to the playback component that most Windows NLEs (including Premiere, Avid, Edius, AE, Resolve, Vegas) use for loading and playing back .mov files. (The Trendmicro/CERT advisory is written in such a techie language that most people don't understand its full scope.)

And we don't know how exactly this malicious code could be inserted - most likely, by some manipulated .mov file. So it's not really a scenario of concern if the .mov files you're dealing with are the ones which you have recorded/transcoded yourself, but still... It's an unsustainable situation anyway that Quicktime for Windows hasn't been supported for any Windows version past Windows 7 yet all Windows NLEs still rely on the component.

Well, you wrote "The Digital Bolex was just two people with a dream." On http://www.digitalbolex.com/about/, it says: "Digital Bolex is joint venture between Bolex International, S.A. and Cinemeridian, Inc., founded in 2011 to develop the Digital Bolex project." The CEOs of Cinemeridian (http://www.ienso.com/cinemeridian) are not the two people you are referring to. And Bolex International S.A. is a Swiss company.

Well, that's the marketing story. In reality, a bigger company (Ienso/Cinemeridian, http://www.digitalcameradesign.com/) had been behind the project from its very beginning.

Yes, you can. ;-) And no, QuickTime isn't Resolve's playback engine at all. Resolve 12 Manual, page 979: "Video Format: [...] The available options depend on whether you have Final Cut Pro and QuickTime installed, and on the operating system you're using".

Not following you there - you can also use Resolve without Quicktime. - But anyway, everyone editing under Windows is now facing massive problems working with ProRes footage (since ProRes has become so ubiquitous that it is now also a major acquisition codec...)

But Premiere has the same issue as Resolve - it depends on Apple QuickTime for all its QuickTime (and ProRes) support on Windows. (I read that it's the same for other NLEs such as Edius.)

There is no gain, but in most cases a loss of image quality since medium format lenses have lower resolutions per film/sensor square millimeter. You will get a softer image, but likely less vignetting than with a 35mm lens.

@giostrante, your picture is severely underexposed. You need to learn that you need to expose a Blackmagic camera differently than a conventional DSLR or video camera, i.e. according to the ETTR/expose to the right principle. (You expose to the possible maximum/just under the clipping point even if it looks like overexposure on the camera display, and pull back your exposure/gamma in post.)

Does anyone know whether the BMMCC suffers from the same IR pollution issue as the Pocket - i.e. do you still always need to have IR cut filters on the lens, or has the camera's internal filter stack been improved?

The 50d is limited to 30p (while you can also record other frame rates, this is not sensor native but only achieved by dropping frames of the 30p signal), has no sound, can be unstable and occasionally lock up under ML. I even had wiped-out recordings. Dynamic range is no longer up to modern standards. Here's a quick video I made with the 50D - if you look close, the footage nicely illustrates the possibilities and limitations of the camera: For me, this is still a more pleasant picture than I get, for example, with the Sony A7s with its dead-looking 8bit video colors. But since I've been using a Blackmagic Pocket (since 2013, actually, when the camera came out), I've never looked back. In this video, I only used the 50D because I also took stills and because I thought it would be adeque to use a hacked camera to document circuit-bent sound gadgets. The Pocket would have handled highlights much more gracefully, would have produced better resolution, same colors, would have more been pleasant to handle (thanks to native 24p, in-camera sound recording with a decent mike/preamp, more economic use of card space and cheaper media thanks to losslessly compressed raw & SDXC, and robust operation vs. the fiddliness and instability of ML snapshot releases running on top of Canon's firmware.)

@Don Kotlos: So many thanks for this! Great job!

Here are some frames. Admittedly, they are extreme - because they just use a primitive color-chart based color conversion to Rec709, resulting in blown-out highlights (that I could have pulled back/recovered in Resolve). Nevertheless, you see how the overexposed areas of the image create strange blue/green banding artifacts with your Fuji LUTs. I'm posting 50% scaled down jpeg screengrabs here, but could also send you 1080p 16bit TIFFs + the out-of-the camera DNG frame. - The first image is the 'pure' Rec709, the following images are the same image with your LUTs applied: Rec709 Astia Provia Classic Chrome Velvia

@Don Kotlos: I created the Rec709 image from Blackmagic Pocket CinemaDNG material using an X-Rite Color Chart and Resolve's automatic color chart matching function, then your LUT(s) on a second node. (Yes, it is possible to dial down the effect of a LUT in Resolve by dialing down the strength of the node it sits on.)