Ehetyz

You should definitely go for it. I started out as kind of a backyard indie moviemaker and imho the lo-fi guerrilla filmmaking actually is some of the most enjoyable, and I find myself returning from more produced works to doing these tiny crew - small budget affairs. It's more freeform and more intimate, and lets the creativity flow better. My most interesting/off the wall camerawork is always in these guerrilla productions. Productions like that aren't always easy, but they remind me of why I fell in love with filmmaking in the first place. And I'm still kind of in love with Canon cameras, that's why I mentioned about returning to 5D2 occasionally still. It's just so much fun to use. I developed a habit of just bringing it along to client/commercial shoots alongside my main camera and just stealing a few shots here and there - more often than not they made it to the final cut. With the Ursa, I feel I'm still in the process of coming to grips with it. I picked it up about two months ago, when a lot of studios were switching to the UM Pro and offloading their original 4,6K:s on the cheap. I've shot some commercials and a short film with it so far. I'm looking to shoot another feature film with it in autumn - by then I should be familiar enough with it to make the most of the camera. I am continually astonished at how good the footage from it is. It's one camera I feel might have enough DR to actually shoot in natural light again with pleasing results. The low light isn't terrible either contrary to popular belief. Here's a screencap from the short film I shot with it - it was also the first time I used the UM. A maiden voyage for it, if you will.

Thanks for the kind words. At the moment I'm shooting with an Ursa Mini 4,6K. With cameras, I've gone from Canon HV30 to 550D to 5D2 to BMCC to UM - with a the 5D2 making a comeback recently with ML Raw. I could whole-heartedly recommend the UM4,6K, too. The ergonomics are excellent and it produces gorgeous images all across the resolutions.

So here's an odd one. It's a full feature film I directed, produced and shot back in 2012, shot completely on the trusty old Canon 550D. I released it recently online. The movie is a moody post-apocalypse tale about a man looking to redeem his past mistakes in a ruined world. It was heavily influenced by James Dickey's novel "To the white sea", in that both portray an existential struggle of a man who's teetering on the edge of humanity, trying to survive in a hostile environment. Visually I wanted the film to be reminiscent of Nicholas Winding Refn films, especially Valhalla Rising, and Tarkovsky's Stalker, especially when it came to tracking shots etc. We shot the movie in about one month in the summer of 2012. The crew was mostly myself alone with the actors, and the gear consisted of a 550D, a few lenses (EF50 1.8, Samyang 85 1.4 and a Vivitar 28 2.8), Manfrotto tripod and a Glidetrack slider. I quickly learned to use the sparse equipment inventively, and even turned the Glidetrack into an improvised jib. I shot most of the movie in natural light - only the opening scene and a few flashback scenes have actual lighting. The film is very rough by modern standards, but I think a lot of the camerawork still holds up. The movie played at some domestic and foreign festivals back in 2013 and had a run at a local movie theatre, but after that I buried it because I wasn't happy with it. Recently I did some re-edits to tighten up the pace and now released the new version online. It's still not an easy movie to stomach, it's very slow and ponderous, but I think at the very least it serves as a reminder of what can be achieved with very little gear or resources.

One shouldn't try to do satire while butthurt, it'll shine through.

At the moment looks like a lot of production studios at least around where I live are offloading their Ursa Mini 4,6K:s to get the Pro versions - which makes it actually not a bad buy, because you can get a tested, little-used one with warranty for a very discounted price. I ended up picking up one with the V-lock adapter and a handheld kit at a very reasonable rate.

Even in Prores Blackmagic cameras are writing data rates far exceeding any flavour of AVC. Your argument about prores is moot. I've never had any 5D overheat period. ML however allows you to monitor the camera temperature in real-time, and it does jump up a lot faster when recording raw, even in freezing temperatures. On the other hand multiple Sony bodies overheat when recording just plain X-AVC. Unless there's actual research data on their operating temperatures, I don't buy the "less hot running sensors" on their part for a second.

It's not about the bottleneck, it's about the amount of data being continually transferred. That produces heat. There's a reason BMD RAW cameras have giant heatsinks and fans. Even the good old 5D2 has a substantial upswing in temperatures when shooting ML RAW.

I see a lot of magenta areas in the wider shots. Are those in-camera?

I too am excited about getting my hands burned by a Sony camera that's melting from recording 5 minutes of RAW.

Thanks for the kind words, again. The cheek effect is great - I'm not the one to take credit for it though, I had very talented individuals working on it, FX artist/sculptor Minja Tuomisalo made the appliance and makeup guru Ari Savonen did the on-set makeup on it. I think the RX10 MK2 works alright when you have enough light, and if it's just on its own without direct comparisons to higher bitdepth cameras, the image can work fine. It gets a lot of use for me as an automated camera as well, because it's light and I can be tethered to a cellphone via bluetooth. So on some live shoots I can use BMCC as the main camera and have my cellphone on top of it to control the RX10. It does have its place in my toolbox. Unfortunately there's no video BTS footage of the movie. We were running on a tiny crew so there was no BTS videographer. The assistant director/producer did double duty as a BTS photographer, though, and of course crew members took a ton of cellphone photos, so we have a huge bunch of behind the scenes pictures.

Thank you for the kind words. I agree, neo noir is hella cool, I'm a sucker for the genre in general, watched a lot of the staples of the genre back in my childhood and it has stuck with me. Now that you mention it, yeah, there might be a little bit of Blue Velvet in there as well. I've found that large part of my inspirations are often unconcious and become apparent to myself only later. The movie was pretty much zero budget. Everyone worked for free (we had a crew of 6-8 people, depending on the day), I self-funded everything else, which meant the FX, props etc, and all the running costs like travelling and food. Probably spent around 1500-2000 euros on it. We have a studio and own all our gear so we had free access to lighting equipment, dollies etc, and other things we had already built for other productions like a rain machine we had previously made for a music video. That allowed me to keep the costs very low. As for the BMCC, I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with it. For the price, it's absolutely the best, most robust image you can get - if you rule out hacks such as ML. I shot the whole thing in RAW, and it's just a priceless asset, and combined with the dynamic range it absolutely gives you the tools to make a truly filmic, beautiful image. I can see where the mini alexa is coming from. But there are downsides. To get the most out of the image you really need to dip deep into the grading process, and often manually separate colors and tweak them individually (whereas ML RAW gives you the same beautiful color separation out of the box), the crop factor is obviously a buzzkill, and the form factor can get very restrictive. It's a bitch of a camera to operate handheld, even rigged. We had a beatdown scene where I wanted to get a really deep low angle view for a few shots, and I was really struggling due to the form factor and the integrated screen. But, on the other hand, it has kept me firmly employed and in-demand as a freelancer, and I can use it on anything from food videography to documentaries to purely cinematic filming. It's a versatile image and you can get a lot a mileage out of it. Technically it's been rock solid performer, too. On BMPCC vs. BMCC, I'd go with a BMCC, with an MFT mount to alleviate some of the crop factor with a speed booster. I've used the BMPCC a few times and I'm not a huge fan. The user interface is slower to operate than BMCC (the BMCC touchscreen UI is really nice once you get the hang of it), the screen is somehow worse and I've always found myself preferring the image of the BMCC when shot side-by-side, even with the BMPCC speedboosted. It just feels like it holds more information. As far as RX10MK2 goes, the trailer has one shot taken with it, the burning corpse. It was only used as a slow-motion camera. I shot with the Cine profile with some tweaks I'd picked online, as since we were mostly shooting at night, there was simply not enough light to go for S-log at 250fps. Hate to say it, but side by side with ML RAW or BMD RAW, or even the BMCC prores flavors, the Sony image often looks just straight up unpleasant. It just lacks the tonality the other two cameras have, and the colors always seem thin and somewhat off. Matching the shots always takes a lot of work. I've noticed using some diffusion alleviates the problem a little, but it still has a very digital look to it, which ML RAW or BMD RAW do not have - unless you intentionally grade them that way. I'm frankly not too fond of the little Sony, but in this production it was the only way to get the slow motion shots I wanted (pyrotech, FX shots). And as for the troubles - yeah, filmmaking can be gruelling at the best of times. After the principal photography of this I went to DP another movie after only a weekend's rest, and that went on to take 3 weeks with no days off. That one had less production trouble, but it was more cumbersome (3x larger crew) and somehow at worse conditions. Lots of long nights outside in the Finnish winter. Afterwards I jokingly woved to never shoot anything again outside of the studio - but I've found I do that after every movie production. And I always find myself coming back... :D

Here's a trailer for a short film I've been working on, called Homecoming. It's a neo-noir revenge film set in the mid-90's recession era Finland. We shot it on and off during the early spring and late fall of 2016. Originally we were supposed to wrap the whole movie during spring with one flashback scene shot in the summer, but we had continuous trouble with the weather and with the health of several crewmembers. I spent the first week of shoot on a high fever and was functioning on painkillers alone, and later when we were supposed to shoot the finale our lead actor became bedridden with measles and we had to postpone the finale to late fall. But now it's slowly coming together and it's starting look like an actual movie. The trailer is NSFW, it contains some extreme violent images. (Click CC for english subs) We shot the movie 95% on BMCC 2,5K EF, with some shots here and there taken with 5D2 ML RAW and Sony RX10 MK2. I'm using kodachrome LUT as the basis for the post-process, with heavy color separation and high midtone sharpness to give the BMCC footage an 80's film/RED footage kind of pop. A lot of visual cues are taken from Scandinavian/Finnish films from the 80's and 90's. The movie was mainly shot with Sigma 18-35 1.8, Super-Takumar 50 1.4, Samyang 85 1.4 and Tair 11A 135 2.8, with some special shots shot on Petzval 85 2.2. I often use diffusers and other physical filters but here they're used very sparingly, only on flashback scenes. Instead I went with self-made vignetters to shape bokeh on the daytime scenes to look like brushstrokes or scattered drops. The effect is not very obvious in the trailer as it focuses on nightscenes. If you have any questions about the process or the movie, shoot away!

Do you have "Render at maximum depth" checked? If so, try unchecking. It has caused some similar artifacts with flares and glowy FX for me.

Goddamn some of you people get way too butthurt about Canon. 5DMK3 et al are still quite good enough for most things - at least regarding web content - provided you know what you're doing. If you don't, well, no camera is going to save you, is it now? Also no sharpening in-camera is always preferable. In-camera sharpening is pretty much an express ticket to videoville.

No lie, if one fell into my hands I'd start writing up a project just for the camera. It was like a holy grail of cameras for me before the HD(V) days. I got to shoot a few projects with its little brother XM2 and that thing was bliss. Those old pro/prosumer Canons were so easy and so much fun to use my producing partner actually dropped out of cinematography when they became obsolete and we moved to HDSLR:s and Cinema cameras.

Fluorescent tubes on the foreground, 800W Redhead with 1/2 CTO on the background. Same phenomenon applies under all lighting conditions though, from daylight to full tungsten.

My remarks weren't on the resolution or dynamic range. Resolution-wise BMCC wins, and dynamic range is debatable - I've said here previously that the DR of BMCC is better and I was promptly told I'm wrong. I don't care either way, both cameras have enough DR for me. Blackmagic has "cinematic" colors, but especially the color separation is very lacking and demands heavy post work to bring out full lush tones out of the image, while 5D Raw doesn't. I've had both cameras for about 2-3 years and have been shooting ML RAW and BMCC side by side since early summer now. Here's an example where both were used side by side in mixed light. Same lighting, same grade and Raw interpretation on both cameras. See how the warm tones pop on the 5D:

Yeah Blackmagic gets closest at the price range, but Canon still edges out. Especially when you have codec parity - with ML RAW 5D2/3 color beats the daylights out of the BMCC. Way better tonality and color separation - which you can pull out of the BMCC footage as well, but with Canon you have them out of the box.

Maybe Trump will Make Canon Great Again.

Another nail in the Ursa Mini coffin (at least in my view), yesterday in forum discussions about corrupt clips it came to light that Ursa Minis no longer officially support Windows 7 and it was heavily implied reading Ursa footage on Windows 7 could possibly lead to clips becoming corrupted, due to the way Firmware 4's file system works. https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=53174 And thus I have completely stopped considering a Blackmagic product as the successor to BMCC. Time to look elsewhere.

I watched until the blackmagic part and then stopped out of fear of getting brain cancer. "Hey let's compare 12-bit 1080p to 8-bit 4K, they look the same, therefore 8bit and raw are the same. Don't mind the resolution. Resolve has similar knobs for both, they're the same! Let's shoot this test with optimal light so as not to strain any of the codecs, yay!"

Anecdotal, but when I picked up the RX10MK2 after about 8 years of shooting Canon & Blackmagic, the first thing my colleague said was "Sony, eh? Have fun with the menus". It's not just a Canon shooter thing, Sony's menus and ergonomics in general simply leave a lot to be desired.

Here's a music video I directed and DOP'd recently, using BMCC 2,5K, 5D2 (ML RAW) and RX10 MK2. We shot it over the span of two nights, the chosen location caused some heavy time constraints but it was visually perfect for us. I wanted it to have an authentic old school film noir look and feel, so I ended up using some heavy diffusion on RX10 and BMCC, and vintage lenses on the 5D, and also lighting it in a very vintage fashion. Of the three cameras, 5D definitely delivered my favourite images. The set of lenses used on it were Petzval 85/2.2, Super-Takumar 50/1.4 and Takumar 35/2.3. They gave it the signature swirly bokeh and naturally soft, dreamy look. I continually keep being blown away by how good ML RAW looks. BMCC was a solid performer, but due to the crop using vintage lenses on it becomes an exercise in futility. I had the Petzval on it for a few shots, but most of the Blackmagic footage was with Sigma 18-35 and some heavy diffusion filters (Cokin-P Diff1/2 and Pastel). RX10 was used only for the slow motion at the end, and even with about 5KW of lighting blasted at it, it still struggled - which is nothing new, really. The shots turned out acceptable after some heavy filtering. The Petzval lens was a new one for me, as prior to this I'd had only time for some small walkaround tests with it. I'm actually amazed at how beautifully that lens performs. Definitely a keeper. Any feedback is welcome.

Well that's Sony for ya. The same company that touts 250fps on a bridge camera with a 1-inch sensor, f2.8 lens and a max usable ISO of 800. They're more concerned with feature lists than actual real world usability.

It's a cosmetic scuff. I personally wouldn't even give a damn about it.