chrisso

Have a Speedbooster for BMD Pocket coming, also the Sigma 18-35mm. Never used Nikon. What are a couple of choice Nikon primes to compliment the Sigma on a Speedbooster? Maybe something smaller than the Sigma for around town footage.

For professionals grading and colouring is a full time job, for a separate individual with years of experience. It's ridiculous to complain about home filmmakers not doing a good job. It's an art, and requires skill and experience, not to mention properly calibrated monitors costing $thousands. We've really been thrust into this with cameras like the BMD Pocket camera. I think people are doing the best they can. It's the same across the creative community. Bloggers are challenging newspapers and magazines. Musicians are recording, producing and mastering instead of just playing their instrument. It's often not pretty, as workers with great experience and skill are being bypassed by the need to produce work on low or no budget. A mastering engineer in music is similar to a grader/colourist. I've been a professional musician for 30 years and have no mastering experience. Needs must, but I'm under no illusion that my masters are anything like as good as a professionally mastered track. It's often the choice between releasing my music, and not releasing it.

Before I bought mine I researched the official BMD forum, plus BMCuser. There were hands on reviews Cheesycam, Bloom etc back in mid August. I paid in full pretty much knowing what I was getting into.

Didn't you know any of this before you bought it? Five minutes on Google would have informed you on battery life, lack of in camera formatting and no touch screen. I've had mine for a couple of months and I'm really enjoying it.

There was an issue with 180 only using 24p I think. Anyway, it's been fixed with the latest firmware BMD released about a week ago.

Eizo CS or CX as mentioned above. Images look 'eye candy' on the iMac screen, but flatter and darker on my Eizo. You want a true representation for correct grading.

The iMac monitor is brighter and more punchy than a proper grading monitor. I use a second, flatter monitor with it. I think you can probably use the current top level iMac with a fully upgraded graphics card, or one of the more powerful Macbook Pros with retina.

Most of the Eizo's are far in excess of $1000, let alone $300. But yeah, I looked around for the cheapest colour correction monitor a couple of years ago, and went with the Eizo Flexscan, which was about $1100 at the time. You can probably find cheaper deals now.

iMac 27" 3.4ghz - 2012 Edits raw and runs Resolve

Too many generalised comments going on in this discussion. For a start, there are hundreds of different c-mount lenses. It's just wrong to say every c-mount lens shows a weird swirl on the pocket camera. I have several myself and the statement is wrong. The BMPCC has no moire filter, or noise reduction. It has more moire than other cameras I've used. I've found shooting raw that moire is much more common, with any lens but obviously pronounced with sharper, modern lenses. I find raw a big step up from pro-res, if only for one thing, the ability to craft your image in post. I had to fiddle a lot more when processing pro-res. When I upload raw it only takes a few tweaks and the footage looks crisp and well balanced almost immediately. Personally I think the raw from this camera is superb and I can't see raw from any other camera being completely better looking. Resolve is hard to use and I'm not finding it easy to produce great grades. I've used Capture One to grade footage from my Pocket Camera and have been blown away by the clean crispness and colours. It most CERTAINLY isn't 'a dud'. I'm getting outstanding footage, obviously dependent on my own skill limitations. The camera is not a lowlight camera, and in many daylight conditions it requires ND's for filmic depth of field. I shot something at f1.4 on a stormy day over the weekend and the footage is sharp and balanced. Not at all weird or compromised. However, if you are looking for an easy to use, run and gun, no accessories needed camera, the Pocket Camera is not for you.

So do I take it from the above that you've never used the BMPCC?

I love the way people shift responsibility for their actions onto someone else. Resolve 10 lite works perfectly on my relatively cheap 2012 iMac. Maybe you need to adjust your set up? Focus peaking works perfectly on my pocket camera. Yes, the screen is hard to see in daylight. There is a $165 Kinotehnik loupe available. You didn't need to spend anything more than a m4/3rds lens and an sd card to use the pocket camera. Everything else you bought was your own decision and can't be blamed on BMD. And honestly, I can't believe your complaining that you had to download the latest firmware!!!! How hard is that? You have to download the latest version of everything you buy these days. That's the Internet age for you. As above, I'm really loving my pocket camera. The image quality is superb, but yes, it is a bit quirky.

The BM pocket doesn't do 60fps, and if you have the 'perfect' screen on your Canon, likely you'll be disappointed by the BM screen.

In general I agree with you. Audio compression is not the same as a compressed format like mp3 or Pro-Res though. Hard limited audio compression really took hold before mp3's. It makes your song sound powerful and loud on the radio and mtv. Back to the camera...... Yeah I haven't had a single issue with mine either. I'm really blown away by the raw. I'm enjoying it much more than the pro-res from the camera, although I'm happy with 422 once I've exported my raw to that.

I couldn't disagree with you more. You are mixing up two different forms of compression for a start. mp3 doesn't beat anything for depth of tome, detail and general sound quality. They key to it's widespread adoption is small size, convenience and portability. Most people are listening to music on bad sound systems (earbuds, iPhones, PC's), so an mp3 is adequate. Other than that, an mp3 is similar to the worst kind of baked in jpeg. I'm not an audiophile, or an expert on video codecs, but I've been a professional musician since 1980, and been involved in the journey from vinyl, to CD through to mp3's.

The feature people are going to like are Pro-Res and Raw, not so much a particular camera or company. Once an affordable Sony or Panasonic camera offers pro-res 4-2-2 and raw (without hacking), I think people will dump their pocket cameras. It's a finnickety camera to use, it has QC issues, and is expensive to kit out due to the standard features you get with Sony and Panasonic that BMD have left out.

Don't forget I own and use the camera. The screen is pretty useless in daylight. Without quality ND's you are shooting at f16-f22 in most daylight. It costs more than $1200 to make the camera usable for most applications. As well as affordability, overall people want convenience and instant gratification. I actually think most people shoot pix and video using smart phones these days. Ultimate quality has never been a great selling point in consumerland. I'm in the music industry, and we've been decimated by the popularity of very low quality mp3's. We smugly thought higher quality sound would prevail, but no, most people want cheap, convenient, portable mp3's. I can't see the pocket camera being anything more than an enthusiasts tool. It has too many inconvenient aspects, and requires time and effort to process the footage.

I love the camera, but I don't see it as a consumer product. Everything about this camera is expensive, apart from the initial, price of the body. Yes, with almost nothing extra you can make decent home movies, but the potential from this camera screams to be used more intelligently. So far I've spent over $1000 on the body, and close to $1000 on everything else. And I'll probably be spending another $1000. Cages, variable ND's, lights, better lenses, a rig, a monopod, more batteries, more expensive sandisk Extreme Pro SD cards etc, etc…. Not being negative, I love this thing, but affordable and easy to use for average video consumers, I think not.

In reality you can basic grade a raw file in two minutes. Similar to what you have to do with BMD Pocket Pro-Res anyway. Apart from the Resolve learning curve that I'm grappling with, and the subjectivity of grading colour, I find raw easier to grade than Pro-Res. Raw is open, pro-res can come in with issues from your shoot (colour cast, poor exposure, wrong white balance) and it's much harder to put right than in raw. The big deal for me is the file size of raw. You can really only use a couple of SD cards with the pocket camera shooting raw. The high end cards give you about 20 minutes of footage. And no deleting or reformatting in camera. With pro-res you can shoot hours of footage on an Atmos Ninja or similar. One minute of pocket camera raw is about 1.65gb on my set up. So you need large and fast external drives for grading, uploading and archiving. For a day of on the road shooting you're going to need four or five 64gb Extreme Pro cards, or a handy laptop to load off onto and reformat. I don't think there is ANY real quality compromise with pocket camera raw. But the logistical challenges are something you need to consider.

You still can't buy a Canon speed booster yet, right?

No hot pixels here. But I don't shoot at 1600. I don't think the pocket camera is a low light camera. I mostly shoot at 400, but 800 is the default of course.

Looks nice. As I write I'm importing my Capture One TIFF's into a demo of After Effects. But yeah, with sync sound and everything, Resolve is probably the way forward on this. Is there a tutorial series you recommend?

As a stills guy new to video, all of the concepts in Resolve are new to me. Everything in Capture One is familiar. Capture One is solid on my 2012 iMac, Resolve 10 Lite has crashed a couple of times. After a quick 5 minute grade in Capture One I'm gobsmacked at the quality of the raw from the pocket camera. My 5 minute grade out of resolve still looks flat and lifeless by comparison. So far using other people's LUTs in Resolve has resulted in my pocket raw looking garish and OTT. I'm sort of depressed about this camera for the first time. The look in Capture One is awesome. Everything I want it to be. The look in Resolve Lite is meh. There is a free video tutorial for every step of the process in Capture One. So far I've seen no proper tutorials for Resolve 10 (free or paid). All being for Resolve 9 which i think is somewhat different. I've spent two days trying to get my Capture One grade into FCPX. One minute of footage takes about 1 1/2 hours to export from Capture One. FCPX grinds to a halt trying to work with two thousand separate HQ clips. It might work ok with just over 100 clips, making up 4 seconds of footage. I'm dreaming over a motion version of capture One, but it looks like I'll have to get to grips with Resolve.

I'm using the same Sandisk card and haven't had any delay when starting and stopping record. It's instant on my cam. I'm formatting my cards in a standard way using 'erase' in disc utility on an iMac.

I've had the raw option on my pocket camera for a day.Truthfully the editing workflow is different so all I have shot is a couple of one minute sequences of my Jersey cow in our field. I can't even post that, let alone some meaningful narrative short, as the raw files are grinding my 2012 iMac into the ground. My rural internet connection could mean it will take eight hours to upload two minutes of HQ footage to Vimeo. That said, the raw footage I'm getting is superb. So far I've tried Resolve 10 and Capture One 7. CO7 is very easy to use and the graded raw looks fantastic - crisp, clean and rich. The stills editor workflow is a pain however. Will try and import my CO7 grade into FCPX today. And will try again with Resolve 10.