pablogrollan

A product's price is SOLELY determined by what consumers are willing to pay. Manufacturing costs condition wether that product is actually viable or not in the market. Pricing is really subjective, it is a "notion" consumers have based on personal beliefs and preferences... that's why Blackmagic may be seen by other manufacturers as destructive, not disruptive. Not long ago, a 35mm film camera with extras could go up to 300.000$. A Betacam could be bought for 30.000$ to 60.000$. Now cinema & broadcast gear seem to have dropped a zero... Our "notion" and subjective idea of what their price should be changed the minute we could have a 5D MKII or 7D -which we though was really cheap-. BM is no real rival for Canon or Sony because they will sell thousands of units, not millions, and their lineup is pretty limted and "niche", but it has had an effect on how we see Canon prices now... Probably the manufacturing cost of a DSLR is lower than we think -like 100$- but if Canon, Sony or Nikon decide to gon the BM way with prices, they may actually change the whole concept of "how much it should cost" and hurt their future business...

Could it be that the new 7D becomes the first DSLR to implement the new h.265 codec in video mode? That way it would not be 422 nor super-high-bitrate and certainly would be aimed at a different crowd than the Cinema EOS line... Same video file size but double the quality, slightly improved dynamic range and low light performance and maybe a headphone jack. Sure they could add peaking and zebras (costs nothing really) + some other firmware related features, but delivering the same concept of "non-gradable" video with the much improved quality of h.265 would make it competitive in certain segments.

Totally agree. That's the first thing I thought when I saw the MOVI demo. I couldn't believe that experienced cameramen an DPs weren't even mentioning that they ares useless for most tracking shots. Nowadays it seems that if a tool works to shoot skaters or surfers it is "awesome" or a "game changer". Then it becomes so ubiquitous that we forget it wasn't at all right from the beginning and end up accepting it as normal and downgrading our expectations of what professionally shot means. Shoulder mounted gimbals coud work... at least the idea is in tune with the narrative of film and broadcast.

What I would like to see is a real world comparison with the BMCC m4/3 with speedbooster. 4K is great, and at $3K better, but given that the "s35" sensor has a x1.85 crop factor vs. the x1.53 of the BMCC m4/3, it would be interesting to see if the pros outweigh the cons... 4K vs. 2.5K: no argument here, though 2.5K is already an improvement scaled down to 1080 and allows re-framing. Global shutter vs. Rolling shutter: global shutter all the way, obviously... although we've learnt to live with rolling shutter 12 stops vs. 13 stops: how noticeable in real situations? better shadow detail? less risk of highlight clipping? x1.85 vs. x1.53: IMHO the crop of the BM4K is excessive -as was the BMCC before the speedbooster-. Doesn't seem like metabones will release an EF speedbooster, though it was rumored some time ago. It would be interesting to see how both cameras do on the same shoot. One is $2.5K with the speedbooster and the other $3K, so maybe even Blackmagic have seen the need to give an additional incentive -price reduction- to secure sales of the BM4K.

Why? C300 is still a hot rental and I understand C100 is selling pretty well, too. I don't think they are too concerned with BM or Panasonic at the moment. BMPCC seems attractive (4K, high dynamic range, etc) but not very practical. Audio recorded separately, the inability to format media in camera or know the available rec time remaining, the price of SSDs, the internal battery, poor ergonomics and a crop factor of 1.86 (what they call s35 is not completely s35). So far BM cameras have felt like they've been released in beta stage (and firmware still feels like that) Panasonic: excessive crop factor + known drawback of the m43 sensor, poor ergonomics with the added brick, the need for an additional recorder and respective batteries... The C-series is probably overpriced and a little outdated specs-wise compared with these new releases but it is still one of the few ready to shoot "camera solutions" with a true top notch s35 sensor, known and tested dynamic range, XLR conectors, built-in ND filters and proper ergonomics.And they have the 1D C in case you need 4K and full frame. Don't get me wrong, both the Panny and the BM sound like very nice cameras but right now I can imagine the people at Canon thinking "Unbelievably, we dodged another bullet!". When they released the C series there was some 8-bit dissapointment and the feeling that competitors had a perfect chance win certain segments. Unexplainably, it still hasn't happened. No one has cared to release a C300 clone with some added/corrected features and a 5.000 € price range. Why??

Well, you're probably not going to edit in resolve (though I believe the new version is somewhat of an NLE, too), so you should choose according to your post workflow. Premiere is available for both Mac and PC, and the Suite (now called CC) includes Speedgrade, After Effects, Media Encoder, etc. If you go the Adobe way, a nice GPU is key: stick to Nvidia (Mac usually comes with ATI cards and the range of Nvidias available for Mac is short). Any GTX with more than 1GB of RAM will work, but a higher end card will mean a big difference. GTX 660, 680, 760 or 780 depending on your budget (660 is less than 200$) or combine two identical cards in SLI. Get a Core i7. Core i5 is the minimum quadcore. You'll see the difference in more CPU intensive programs such as After Effects. 16GB is also the minimum I'd recommend: 32 GB would be more like it. Add a nice Asus motherboard, a premium brand 750W-1000W PSU, a 500GB SSD (Samsung's EVO 840 work great), some media HDs and a nice large case from Corsair and you can get a very decent editing station for about 1500$.

Couldn't agree more with HurtinMinorKey. That camera setup sounds perfect for a Sachtler ACE. In my opinion, the best tripod for small form factor cameras in terms of quality/weight/price.

If shooting 30p, I'd use 1/60 (180º shutter angle equivalent) unless flickering suggests otherwise. Having said that, the only reason behind the shutter angle rule is that the footage has a natural motion blur, and by "natural" I mean what our eyes are used to seeing on the screen. A very high shutter speed (1/300) will produce a staccato effect with hardly any motion blur, desirable sometimes for aesthetic reasons (remember Saving Private Ryan?). A very low shutter angle (1/30) will produce a very "creamy" image with too much motion blur, almost ghosting (moslty undesirable). Between 1/50 and 1/60 at 30fps there won't be a great difference...

Kind of a personal question, but if it were me, in a commercial with a small crew I'd avoid risks. Is it for broadcast or for web delivery? BM4K sure will be a nice camera for an affordable price and is due sometime in the near future but... when? Will enough SSDs have been tested to be sure you're not going to run into unexpected behaviors? Same could be said about 5D Mark III RAW. Much as I love what ML is doing, it is still alpha or beta stage... not reliable enough for paid work IMHO. Red One MX, despite it's disadvantages, has been around for a while and a good DP will make the most out of it. Same with Scarlett though I've heard of some people having trouble with it (reliability). Is RAW that big a deal? If not, there are other options. Sony F55 is around the price of the MX, C500 (or C300 for quite a lot less). Definitely BMC4K is expected to be the best bang for the buck... when it's released... and tested.

Thanks TBJ. I'd like to see Andrew's GX7 test, too. No IBIS in GX7 video mode? Bummer. Since the GM1 is said to offer pretty much the same (in terms of video), that means that it's only real andvantage over the GM1 is the tilting EVF, which is cool, but not sure worth the money... I'm really liking the EM-1 but find hard to justify 2K € on a "leisure" camera -personally- considering our jobs are often money blackholes rather than money pits when it comes to keeping up to date... Guess I'll have to wait until the EM-10 is properly tested (or shut up and spend close to 2000€ after adding speedbooster).

Hi everyone, I'd also like to know opinions of this camera (regarding video) vs. the Panasonic GX7. It also has IBIS -though not 5 axis- but, is it any good? It uses the same codec AVCHD 24mbit but on 24 fps, has a nice EVF and a lower price point. Is image quality that different? I suppose the Oly has better stills features but, do you think the EM-1 has video features to justify paying the difference? I'm looking into buying a camera for casual shooting, but I'd like it to feel "off duty" (no rigs, no external recorders, no tripod, not even decent sound is required). I like the BMPCC but with no IBIS, the need for a ton of batteries and media cards, etc make it less attractive. I was thinking about EM-1, GX7, GM1 or EM-10... as these cameras are "pocketable" with decent picture quality in spite of the codec. Do you see any of these with a clear advantage video-wise? Thanks!