Blackmagic Micro Cinema Camera

[Jonesy Jones]

1 hour ago, fuzzynormal said:

Let's all hang out at my house in Borrego Springs and film some tests.

I'm in. 

[graphicnatured]

Sweet! Love Borrego.

2 hours ago, Jonesy Jones said:

I'm also in San Diego, so if you want to let me borrow it...

 I'm always down to do some shooting. From what I've seen online they look pretty similar. I'm stoked on the obvious frame rate and battery situation, but it will be interesting to see if an IR cut is still necessary. Anyone know?

[BenEricson]

30 minutes ago, graphicnatured said:

Sweet! Love Borrego.

 I'm always down to do some shooting. From what I've seen online they look pretty similar. I'm stoked on the obvious frame rate and battery situation, but it will be interesting to see if an IR cut is still necessary. Anyone know?

I wouldn't get your hopes up for that. I saw some heavy IR contamination on one of the first videos. Moire is hopefully reduced... 60p is so huge though. Cheesy Cams stuff looks good from a technical stand point

[Xavier Plagaro Mussard]

9 hours ago, Andrew Reid said:

Oh yeah! Who can forget THAT!?

What the duck! ;-DD 

Unfortunately there is no way to make this record RAW. 

 

[Phil A]

7 hours ago, Xavier Plágaro Mussard said:

What the duck! ;-DD 

Unfortunately there is no way to make this record RAW. 

But it's 4k 10-bit 4:2:2 via the SDI in a probably quite natural rec.709 color that you could record to ProRes HQ 422. If you don't want to grade too far into stylistic ways or bend the colors, that could actually give good results for a lot of people. The question is just how much dynamic range you'd have with that in comparison to everybodies MILC darlings that do a flat 8-bit 4:2:0 image... plus whatever the low light behaviour is.

[Jimmy]

the colour is straight up beautiful.... Looks like s16 film

[MattH]

This vid purports to show the rolling shutter of the BMMCC.

Dosn't actually seem that bad considering how fast he is moving.

 

[squig]

I'll do a measurable rolling shutter test shortly.

[MattH]

And this one

 

[Zak Forsman]

16 hours ago, ZachGoodwin said:

Anyway back to Blackmagic Micro Cinema cameras...

ha, look who doesn't want anyone going off on a tangent. love you, man.  

[squig]

Initial impressions.

I haven't done any proper lighting setups yet, I’ve just been pushing it to find its breaking point.

It's a good sensor, but it's not the 5D MK3 ML raw killer I thought it might be. It's not far behind the 5D raw, but the 5D image is a little more robust (more predictable & solid overexposure and low light results). The image is less saturated than the 5D but it's red heavy. I can get them to match pretty well by boosting saturation 25%, cooling the color temp to match the 5D, and slapping filmconvert or a KD5207 LUT on both.

One thing I do like is it doesn't have fixed pattern noise like the 5D, the noise is more filmic, but it does need a bit of denoising to get rid of the blue chroma noise.

So far I think the 5D raw has a slight edge in resolution, color, low light ability (at equal DOF), and IQ. Dynamic range is closer than I expected, there's not much in it. At this point I think the BMMCC is going to be B-cam to the 5D, but I've got more testing to do to be 100% sure.

It’s better than every 8bit H.264 DSLR I’ve tested including the A7s.

[MattH]

4 hours ago, squig said:

Initial impressions.

I haven't done any proper lighting setups yet, I’ve just been pushing it to find its breaking point.

It's a good sensor, but it's not the 5D MK3 ML raw killer I thought it might be. It's not far behind the 5D raw, but the 5D image is a little more robust (more predictable & solid overexposure and low light results). The image is less saturated than the 5D but it's red heavy. I can get them to match pretty well by boosting saturation 25%, cooling the color temp to match the 5D, and slapping filmconvert or a KD5207 LUT on both.

One thing I do like is it doesn't have fixed pattern noise like the 5D, the noise is more filmic, but it does need a bit of denoising to get rid of the blue chroma noise.

So far I think the 5D raw has a slight edge in resolution, color, low light ability (at equal DOF), and IQ. Dynamic range is closer than I expected, there's not much in it. At this point I think the BMMCC is going to be B-cam to the 5D, but I've got more testing to do to be 100% sure.

It’s better than every 8bit H.264 DSLR I’ve tested including the A7s.

Is that just raw from the bmmcc youre talking about.  How does prores hold up.  If prores could almost match 5d3 raw then that would be an acheivment, especially at 60p.

[Cinegain]

It be interesting to know how it compares to the BMPCC in a direct face-off.

[Tiago Rosa-Rosso]

Anyone did a rolling shutter sensor read out? 

[Zak Forsman]

3 hours ago, Cinegain said:

It be interesting to know how it compares to the BMPCC in a direct face-off.

Did a side by side with my Pocket & Micro. BMPCC Speed Booster + Sigma 18-35mm. Here's what I saw. No earth-shattering differences but differences nonetheless. My feeling is that you would *have* to view them side by side to know which was which.

• Noise is mildly reduced on the Micro and a touch more monochromatic.
• Moire is also slightly less aggressive on the Micro. Maybe 20% less?
• Micro exposes a hair lower than the Pocket. An adjustment of -.15 on the exposure slider in DaVinci on the Pocket footage brought them in line. 
• Slight color difference between the two. An adjustment on the tint slider of about 6 or 7 points evened them out.

[Nikkor]

Rollingshutter and battery life, zak?

[Zak Forsman]

for rolling shutter, i want to be able to stack the cameras on top of each other. haven't done that yet. for battery life I didn't time it out but I'd say it's in the neighborhood of 2.5 times longer than the BMPCC battery would last.

[Cinegain]

Thanks for that, now that's helpful info! So there's no real need to go there, unless you like the form factor/application it offers, the battery life and the 60p. For me in the end it's about the image, battery issues can be solved, the BMPCC doesn't need an external screen to be used stand alone. So it really depends. Global Shutter would've put me over the edge though. Hope they'll manage something like it in the near future.

[Andrew Reid]

53 minutes ago, Zak Forsman said:

for rolling shutter, i want to be able to stack the cameras on top of each other. haven't done that yet. for battery life I didn't time it out but I'd say it's in the neighborhood of 2.5 times longer than the BMPCC battery would last.

That's great news.

[richg101]

2 hours ago, Zak Forsman said:

Did a side by side with my Pocket & Micro. BMPCC Speed Booster + Sigma 18-35mm. Here's what I saw. No earth-shattering differences but differences nonetheless. My feeling is that you would *have* to view them side by side to know which was which.

• Noise is mildly reduced on the Micro and a touch more monochromatic.
• Moire is also slightly less aggressive on the Micro. Maybe 20% less?
• Micro exposes a hair lower than the Pocket. An adjustment of -.15 on the exposure slider in DaVinci on the Pocket footage brought them in line. 
• Slight color difference between the two. An adjustment on the tint slider of about 6 or 7 points evened them out.

reduced moire, reduced colour noise, and 60p are all very much needed improvements.  

do you know how many stops the -15 in resolve equates to?