bjohn

I saw one editor speculate that an Avid editor with 20 years of experience would take twice as long as an FCPX editor with 5 years of experience to edit the same sequence. It is not just fast, but intuitive; there's that famous demo video called "Editing at the Speed of Thought" and I always feel like that's an apt description of Final Cut. There's some front-end work to do in terms of assigning roles and such, but then once you get down to cutting a timeline you can just get into the flow instead of thinking, okay, which of my 80 tracks to I need to select for the audio and video of this clip that I'm about to add? I saw that 10.8 update this morning, looks like they've added some useful new features!

The C800.

True, but if you're shooting raw it doesn't matter so much because you'll be adjusting in post anyway. That's why sometimes I just write down (or make a voice memo) with my color temperature meter's reading; with voice memos if ensure your camera's clock time is roughly the same as your phone's you can match them up later if you're taking multiple readings at different times. My cinema camera's WB settings are in roughly 200-Kelvin increments but my meter is of course more precise. So if I take a meter reading I can apply that in post and not even bother changing it in the camera. I tried using a color temperature meter on my phone (I bought a dome to go over the phone's camera) but it has to be calibrated to a professional meter so I ended up having to get a professional meter anyway (since I don't know anyone else who has a color temperature meter). The cheapest good color temperature meter I've used is the incident meter by Reveni Design, about $250, which does measure color. It's within 200 kelvin of my Sekonic but not as precise, but that's probably close enough as you can adjust to taste in post.

Another, albeit more expensive, option, is to use a color temperature incident meter to read the color temperature of the light that's falling on your subject(s). You can either use that to set the correct temperature in the camera or if you don't want to bother, just note it down somewhere and dial in that Kelvin temperature in post. The problem is that color temperature meters are expensive: my Sekonic one cost twice as much as my camera. But it is quite accurate. A free but less accurate alternative is to use a phone app like Cine Color Checker (I think that's the name) or the Blackmagic Camera app, which will show you the color temperature of whatever scene you're pointing the phone's camera at. The Blackmagic app will only give you reflected readings, though; incident readings are generally more accurate.

I also have both and would recommend Resolve. I'm not sure how much of a future Final Cut has anyway, although it's a far more powerful tool than most people who've used it casually, even for a few years, realize. It just operates very differently from other NLEs and thus most editors used to traditional track-based workflows don't do well with it. Once you understand roles and how to use them it becomes quite powerful and its audio abilities are actually quite sophisticated (which you'd never guess at first). The Ripple Training tutorials opened my eyes. But Resolve has many more features, is based on a traditional track-based model, and overall I much prefer using it. Obviously for color grading Resolve is better, and Final Cut doesn't have anything like Resolve Colour Management, which greatly speeds the process of bringing footage from multiple cameras into your working color space. With Final Cut you're limited to using camera LUTs, which is a poor solution in comparison. Resolve's audio module (Fairlight) is also much easier for traditional track-based editors to comprehend. Resolve definitely has a high learning curve, but lots of good tutorials are available. The free ones from Blackmagic Design will go a long way to getting you started; if you watch a variety of youtube video tutorials from different people you'll get confused as everyone has their own preferred workflows and a lot of the youtube people don't know what they're talking about. Ripple Training has a good (Blackmagic-certified) set of tutorials on Resolve that are a good investment, and they keep them updated as new versions are released.

That might be the nicest, least video-like footage I've seen from that camera; it just adds to the already convincing weight of evidence that the lens makes the biggest difference to the straight-out-of-camera look of your footage. IBIS for stationary shots is not a challenge but I'd like to see how it handles slow pans and tilts...I'd want to be sure it's not playing catch-up and trying to correct those movements, resulting in jerky footage. There were a few short pans in that video that looked fine, so maybe it's okay.

Right, but that's why he tested with and without NR. Sony applies NR in-camera and you can't remove it, so he added some NR in Resolve to mimic what Sony was doing for a more fair comparison. But he showed both the super-high Imatest result plus the "real world" lower actual DR you'd get on the Z6iii.

Did you watch Gerald's review? He tested DR in Nlog and h.265 on different timelines (4K vs 6K), with and without noise reduction, and even with different log curves; the DR is better if you apply a Vlog (Panasonic) curve to NRaw.

Gerald Undone did test dynamic range in his video review; he didn't experience any overheating but hey, he's in Canada and he admitted that his testing environment wasn't very warm. It does seem like a great camera; wish the IBIS was better....I think Panasonic still has the lead there.

The BrightinStar 28mm pancake is actually better in terms of image quality on full-frame thick-stack sensors, and it's a fraction of the price. The MS Optics has a focusing tab and I actually love those for manual focus. You develop a sense of where you are in terms of focal range by the position of the tab; this is how street shooters do zone focus, by the feel of where the tab is. Quite a few rangefinder lenses have that tab; some people hate it but as a focusing aid I love it and it's very fast.

I've had good luck making pretty radical changes in white balance in ProRes HQ 422, like from 3200 to 5200. I haven't been able to break ProRes yet, although I'm sure it's possible, but it's a lot more malleable than I expected. I can shoot CDNG raw with my video cameras but usually just shoot ProRes.

Maybe true for an SLR pancake but my pancake lens is an MS Optics Apoqualia M-mount lens; with the adapter it's so small I can literally slip a Sony APS-C camera in a pocket.

I still feel the main advantage to L mount is the ability to adapt almost anything to it, like you can with MFT, E-mount, Z-mount, etc. If I got an L mount camera the first thing I'd do is buy adapters so I can use my tiny rangefinder lenses, or my Minolta Rokkor lenses, or my Nikon F-mount lenses. I almost never buy native lenses, although I would if I used autofocus.

What about CDNG raw, though? There's an uncompressed version (in the Sigma fp and in older Blackmagic cameras including the original Pocket, BMMCC and some of the Ursas). The BMMCC also has a compressed (3:1) version of CDNG raw as an option.

I have used that Angénieux Super 16 zoom a fair bit on my Micro Cinema Camera and the original Pocket; neither of those cameras do well in low light but with careful noise reduction and crushing the blacks a bit you can get very usable footage in even dim light.

No luck there, I'm afraid. The only Nikon mount it has is F/G, the legacy system.

They did advertise it but I haven't seen any Super 16 footage shot with this camera, a shame. I would love to use my Angénieux 17.5-70 Super 16 lens (in PL mount) on that camera; might try renting one just to test it.

Good question, you'd have to look into it; the Ursas come with a choice of mounts: PL, EF, Nikon F/G if I remember correctly.

I thought the FX3 had a Super 16 crop but maybe I'm thinking of the FX-30. The new Blackmagic Cinema Camera 6K (full-frame, L-mount) has a Super 16 crop, which has a decent readout rate (8.29 ms), almost as good as that of the Pocket 4K in Super 16 mode (7.98 ms). The Ursa Mini 12K (which is Super 35) has the fastest Super 16 readout speed, in 4k mode, at 3.89 ms.

According to Apple's spec page on ProRes RAW, it's compressed. Seems like it applies variable compression just like Blackmagic Design does with some of the flavours of BRAW: https://support.apple.com/en-ca/102124 "You can choose between two ProRes RAW compression levels: ProRes RAW and ProRes RAW HQ. Both compression levels achieve excellent preservation of raw video content, with Apple ProRes RAW HQ providing additional quality at a higher data rate. ProRes RAW data rates can vary significantly based on image content, because the codec is designed to maintain constant quality and pristine image fidelity for all frames."

The OG BMPCC only went up to 30fps; it was the BMMCC (Micro Cinema Camera) that added 60fps.

Yes, I use lens support for the Sigma always; it's a long, heavy lens and the MFT mount on the Blackmagic cameras is weak. So I use a baseplate with rails, and a lens support on the rails for the lens. I have occasionally used that lens on the Pocket, supporting it with my hand, but when I'm handholding the Pocket I usually use lighter lenses (my favourite is the SLR Magic 10mm Hyperprime cine lens) and my Zacuto Marauder Mini. I do think just a pistol grip plus another point of stabilization would work; I also have the Zacuto viewfinder that clips onto the LCD and I use that as my second point of stabilization. The concert was an interesting challenge to film; the room was smaller than I expected and the music started before sunset; there was a bright shaft of sunlight coming in. I had my expensive Sekonic colour-temperature meter with me and took readings on the lead singer's face before the concert, but of course all that went out the window as the evening progressed and the sun went down; at that point they were lit by two colored stage lights on the floor beaming up toward them plus the two lamps that they placed to their right and left. I am glad I shot raw (3:1 CDNG) for the maximum flexibility in exposure and white balance, although I'm sure ProRes could have handled even the huge adjustments in white balance I had to make.

Here's one from last week's concert. Shot with BMMCC and the Sigma 18-35; not my lens of choice but it's the one I bring when I don't know what I'll be getting into, and I'd never been to this venue before. It was basically a house concert, but amplified and with some stage lighting on the floor; there was a bit of feedback in the sound system that I tried to notch out with EQ in post and succeeded in attenuating most but not all of the ringing. Some handheld b-roll at the beginning.

Just be careful to avoid stopping down too much, because diffraction softening sets in pretty quickly on this tiny sensor. In general I try not to go above f5.6; with some lenses I can go to 8 but the image starts getting soft in an ugly way. I used my OG Pocket earlier this year to film some music performance in a very dark club, and it worked! I used my Micro Cinema Camera last week to film a 2-hour evening concert and that worked out well too. I'll be using my two Micros and the OG Pocket later this summer for an all-weekend filming and photography gig. They're still great tools. I think stabilization is really the biggest challenge...for handheld I'm using a Zacuto Marauder Mini, which is no longer made, but it works pretty well for stabilizing while giving a handheld look. I also have a glidecam and might ultimately get a gimbal but I'd rather not have yet another thing that requires batteries and charging.

I think for the target audience, the main competition is smartphones. Everyone this camera is aimed at is probably using their phone now to take photos and shoot videos; this camera allows them to post to social media just as quickly but with higher quality. But as cell phones get better, IQ gets better, raw capture improves, lens options improve, etc., bridge cameras like the S9 seem doomed.