Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K

[webrunner5]

9 minutes ago, Shirozina said:

It's all relative - a 12mm lens for M43 is just a scaled down 24mm lens for full frame so it's not technically very special 

Yeah but a true native m4/3 lens is not the same animal as a adopted FF lens formula, optics wise. You are Only using the center on the m4/3 body using a FF lens. Even a poor lens on FF is not too bad looking on a PK4. Actually the poor lens probably has a better Cine look to it to be honest on the PK4. ?

[matthere]

At least there is some decent Laowa 7.5mm footage out now.. although it's not known what aperture this was shot at.

Some nice footage from James Miller too.

 

[Anaconda_]

Has anyone found some nice LUTs yet? I've been playing around with this one and it's quite nice. http://moaifilms.com/downloads/moai-cn-lut-for-blackmagic-ursa-mini-pro-and-pocket-cinema-camera-4k/

Here's a quick example, no other adjustments, only the LUTs applies.

OG Frame

Film to Video

Film to Extended Video

Moai LUT

[Chrad]

It would be good to see some infinity focus tests on the Voigtlander 17.5 - that lens has quite a bit of field curvature.

[Shirozina]

There seems to be a lot of hysteria surrounding ultra wide lens edge performance but in real world shooting is this really a problem. Shooting moving images with an ultrawide lens is problematic for many reasons including weird perspective effects like excessive motion at the edges of the frame when combined with camera movements, unnatural perspectives and simply people looking fatter at the edges of the frame. In the cinema it may be used to convey a sense of distorted reality in a scene but in general use that 'ultra wide shot' has few uses. 

[Chrad]

3 hours ago, Shirozina said:

There seems to be a lot of hysteria surrounding ultra wide lens edge performance but in real world shooting is this really a problem. Shooting moving images with an ultrawide lens is problematic for many reasons including weird perspective effects like excessive motion at the edges of the frame when combined with camera movements, unnatural perspectives and simply people looking fatter at the edges of the frame. In the cinema it may be used to convey a sense of distorted reality in a scene but in general use that 'ultra wide shot' has few uses. 

It depends on how you shoot. It might not be a major issue for many, but I draw a lot of inspiration from the aesthetic of directors who make prominent use of ultra wides like Terry Gilliam, Terrence Malick and Michael Mann (of late), so it is for me.

[AaronChicago]

Here a compressed DNG from the pocket 4K that I shot last night. 3200 ISO w/ the Canon 24-105.

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/mbk8e83mxlqc05x/A008_10171621_C016_000004.dng?dl=0

 

 

[Snuff]

 

[Shirozina]

I'd say cam A is the GH5s based on the sharpening in the fine details.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Snuff]

 

 

[wyrlyn]

how is the slow shutter speed possible?

 

[MattH]

8 minutes ago, wyrlyn said:

how is the slow shutter speed possible?

 

It's an inbuilt time lapse funtion.  It would be impossible with real time playback.  But you can tell everything is sped up.

[MattH]

The PROAV dynamic range tests are pretty useless.   They don't understand that ISO is not exposure.    So they have not actually increased the exposure at all steps in these tests.  In some they have just changed the iso.  Which just shows how the camera reacts to the same exposure at different iso's.   Thats why you see such a masive difference at the so called "+3 stops" on the pocket4k test.   Between "+1 stops" iso 400 and "+2 stops" 800 thats actually exaclty the same exposure and native iso with a different tone curve aplied.  So there would be no difference in what clipped.  Whereas with the "+3 stops" thats the same exposure but with a real 2 stop iso boost, so the clipping point has gone down 2 stops in a single step.

A better test would be to keep the iso the same and change the actual exposure.   You could then do the same test at different iso's to see how iso effected dynamic range.

 

[Snuff]

 

[deezid]

1 hour ago, Snuff said:

 

Makes me really wonder why Blackmagic still refuses to add an OLPF to any of their cameras. Would really help a lot. 
They should work together with Rawlite who do an impeccable job with ther Ursa Mini Pro and 4.6 filters.

4 hours ago, MattH said:

 

The PROAV dynamic range tests are pretty useless.   They don't understand that ISO is not exposure.    So they have not actually increased the exposure at all steps in these tests.  In some they have just changed the iso.  Which just shows how the camera reacts to the same exposure at different iso's.   Thats why you see such a masive difference at the so called "+3 stops" on the pocket4k test.   Between "+1 stops" iso 400 and "+2 stops" 800 thats actually exaclty the same exposure and native iso with a different tone curve aplied.  So there would be no difference in what clipped.  Whereas with the "+3 stops" thats the same exposure but with a real 2 stop iso boost, so the clipping point has gone down 2 stops in a single step.

A better test would be to keep the iso the same and change the actual exposure.   You could then do the same test at different iso's to see how iso effected dynamic range.

 

wait what??
That's crazy lol. That's basically like jumping from over 13 stops of DR with priority in highlights to below 12 stops with shadow priority. Makes no sense at all.

[leslie]

so now that people are receiving their cameras, what has been peoples experiences on fitting adapters or speed boosters on it,  is there issues with the ffd or sensor stack thickness. i have read that there was issues with an earlier model  at the start or is it a non issue this time round ?

[Anaconda_]

I’ve used a the Viltrox EF adapter exclusively and have no issues. I posted a grab a while ago if you wanted to see how it works. 

[Newway12]

 

[Shirozina]

As of yesterday I'm a P4k owner! Here are a couple of initial observations;

The battery door is not a problem once it's removed   The battery is recessed quite a way in so is unlikely to be dislodged by accident.

The battery compartment has rails like the ones on the charger which is unlike any camera I have owned before so this may well be the cause of batteries getting stuck.

The menu system and controls are first rate as an intuitive user interface. 

The lens mount has worrying amounts of play in it compared to my GH5 and BMPCC and with heavy lenses like the 18-35 a gap opens up at the top of the mount between the lens and body flange. If you hold the lens with one hand and the body with the other you can easily rock the lens on it's mount with very little force. I think the spring tabs on the rear of the mount are not strong enough. For heavy lenses I'd want a lens support on the rails. ( anybody else confirm this?)

Battery life is as expected - i.e not great but workable with enough batteries. I have 5 genuine Canon LP-E6's which display % or volts but the BM one has just a crude bar. 

My native M43 lenses - 12-35 2.8, 12-40 2.8 and 12-60 2.8-4 show massive barrel distortion at the widest settings due to the lack of in camera correction but as it has a bigger sensor than standard M43 you do get a significantly wider FOV as a result. I can correct distortion in Resolve fairly easily so it's not a deal breaker but it's quite distracting when shooting to see this amount of distortion. CA is also present on some lenses which can be fixed in post but is more fiddly to do so I'll be choosing my M43 lenses for this carefully.

Tap to focus works well enough but focus assist ( peaking) is very good and much more accurate than on the GH5.

WB function is great as you can just point at a grey card and push to set without digging down into a menu. ( a proper video camera feature)

I've got 128gb Cfast and V90 cards but they don't hold much footage so I reckon a 1TB ext USB-C drive is a must for serious use and a lot cheaper!

The screen is good but pretty unusable outside - it's just crying out for a hood or loupe. I'll probably bodge up a cardboard hood for now until Zacuto or Kinotehnik start making them.

I've only done a few image tests but so far compared to the GH5 it looks like it has colour aliasing on fine edges and is slightly softer. This was to be expected from a non downsampled sensor with no in-camera sharpening or NR but I'm not expecting these issues to be a problem. DR looks to be noticeably but not dramatically better but more testing needed although I don't doubt the tests I've seen already showing a couple of stops advantage. 

It's pretty much as I expected and will be an addition to my GH5 but not a replacement - yet.

Coming tests will be ProRes vs RAW and what lenses work best. 

Oh and for the price it's an absolute steal esp when you get a free copy of Resolve Studio - it's just insane at this price point.

 

[Kisaha]

55 minutes ago, Shirozina said:

As of yesterday I'm a P4k owner! Here are a couple of initial observations;

The battery door is not a problem once it's removed   The battery is recessed quite a way in so is unlikely to be dislodged by accident.

The battery compartment has rails like the ones on the charger which is unlike any camera I have owned before so this may well be the cause of batteries getting stuck.

The menu system and controls are first rate as an intuitive user interface. 

The lens mount has worrying amounts of play in it compared to my GH5 and BMPCC and with heavy lenses like the 18-35 a gap opens up at the top of the mount between the lens and body flange. If you hold the lens with one hand and the body with the other you can easily rock the lens on it's mount with very little force. I think the spring tabs on the rear of the mount are not strong enough. For heavy lenses I'd want a lens support on the rails. ( anybody else confirm this?)

Battery life is as expected - i.e not great but workable with enough batteries. I have 5 genuine Canon LP-E6's which display % or volts but the BM one has just a crude bar. 

My native M43 lenses - 12-35 2.8, 12-40 2.8 and 12-60 2.8-4 show massive barrel distortion at the widest settings due to the lack of in camera correction but as it has a bigger sensor than standard M43 you do get a significantly wider FOV as a result. I can correct distortion in Resolve fairly easily so it's not a deal breaker but it's quite distracting when shooting to see this amount of distortion. CA is also present on some lenses which can be fixed in post but is more fiddly to do so I'll be choosing my M43 lenses for this carefully.

Tap to focus works well enough but focus assist ( peaking) is very good and much more accurate than on the GH5.

WB function is great as you can just point at a grey card and push to set without digging down into a menu. ( a proper video camera feature)

I've got 128gb Cfast and V90 cards but they don't hold much footage so I reckon a 1TB ext USB-C drive is a must for serious use and a lot cheaper!

The screen is good but pretty unusable outside - it's just crying out for a hood or loupe. I'll probably bodge up a cardboard hood for now until Zacuto or Kinotehnik start making them.

I've only done a few image tests but so far compared to the GH5 it looks like it has colour aliasing on fine edges and is slightly softer. This was to be expected from a non downsampled sensor with no in-camera sharpening or NR but I'm not expecting these issues to be a problem. DR looks to be noticeably but not dramatically better but more testing needed although I don't doubt the tests I've seen already showing a couple of stops advantage. 

It's pretty much as I expected and will be an addition to my GH5 but not a replacement - yet.

Coming tests will be ProRes vs RAW and what lenses work best. 

Oh and for the price it's an absolute steal esp when you get a free copy of Resolve Studio - it's just insane at this price point.

 

These are the comments I am expecting to see here. Really helpful, thanks.

The non-in camera corrections is a significant issue, as the camera seems less and less appropriate for run n gun. If you have to correct everything in post, this increases the post time significantly.

I am wondering if it is going to be fixed by a firmware update (supporting at least a few popular zoom lenses, like the Olympus 12-100mm I was considering), but it may not be possible at all (noone will give them the rights to do so).

Speedboosting a FF or APS-C lens should yield better results I guess.

Does IS/OIS works with this camera?

Why the monitor is unworkable outside? Is it too dim? I can only work with my Focus anyway, so it won't surprise me.