Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K

[kye]

2 hours ago, Kisaha said:

Yeah, I am not a good clicker! 

I have some big decisions to take the next couple of days (1. full set of lenses for whatever camera system - split between E and EF at the moment, probably EF+P4K 2. Led lights 3. "Huge" backpack 4. Flowtech FSB4/Ace/GH06 5. 360 camera 6. Big investmemt in sound 7. Logo/site e.t.c e.t.c) so I am missing a lot of the smaller things at the moment!

Thank you guys keeping me inline, true e-pals!

Lol, neither is mine.. I checked the link before I posted and again on my phone. I failed both tests! ???

[Kisaha]

2 hours ago, Shirozina said:

I'm just about to take delivery of a GH06 head so I'll test it against my FSB4 for you.

Wow! That would be amazing, because I am litteraly ready to put my order. Are you going to have some news until tmrow do you think?! (I was litteraly speaking about the litteraly part! I just did one impulse buy today, do not want to do another one for such a serious thing. Just payed for the Insta X, going to get it now).

I do not see much vignetting on the 18-35mm, even the ultra seems usable, maybe with a slight crop. Them agsin, I am watching on my phone.

As it is, I believe the trio of Regain/Ultra/Viltrox EF-M1 make for an excellent set of adapters for all lenses and all uses. If I am getting a m43 camera, that is what I am doing.

[CaptainHook]

On 3/19/2019 at 7:45 AM, Anaconda_ said:

Is anyone using the Braw player on Mac? I can't get it to work with the .sidecar files, whether they're in the same folder as the clip or not, I always see the raw video, with none on my colours etc. I've done a grade in Resolve, and clicked the 'Update Sidecar' button in the raw properties, but still nothing. Any ideas why?

What version of the player and what Resolve version are you using?
What GPU and OSX version?

[drm]

10 hours ago, Kisaha said:

Wow! That would be amazing, because I am litteraly ready to put my order. Are you going to have some news until tmrow do you think?! (I was litteraly speaking about the litteraly part! I just did one impulse buy today, do not want to do another one for such a serious thing. Just payed for the Insta X, going to get it now).

I do not see much vignetting on the 18-35mm, even the ultra seems usable, maybe with a slight crop. Them agsin, I am watching on my phone.

As it is, I believe the trio of Regain/Ultra/Viltrox EF-M1 make for an excellent set of adapters for all lenses and all uses. If I am getting a m43 camera, that is what I am doing.

Kisaha, I have used a wide range of lenses with the P4K and have been happy with them. Perhaps this will help you.

Here are a few:

NOTE: My Metabones doesn't AF with any of my lenses (that I recall). I also don't get vignetting with the 0.71 adapter (that I recall).

• Metabones 0.71 + Sigma 18-35 EF
• Metabones 0.71 + Tokina 11-16 EF
• Metabones 0.71 + Canon 24-105 EF
• Metabones 0.71 + Canon 100-400 EF
• Metabones 0.71 + Sigma 20mm f/1.8
• Panasonic 12-35 f/2.8
• Panasonic 35-100 f/2.8
• Olympus 12-100 f/4
• Sigma 16 f/1.4
• Sigma 30 f/1.4
• Panasonic 42.5 f/1.2
• Rokinon Cinema DS 85mm T1.5

[buggz]

8 minutes ago, drm said:

Kisaha, I have used a wide range of lenses with the P4K and have been happy with them. Perhaps this will help you.

Here are a few:

NOTE: My Metabones doesn't AF with any of my lenses (that I recall). I also don't get vignetting with the 0.71 adapter (that I recall).

• Metabones 0.71 + Sigma 18-35 EF
• Metabones 0.71 + Tokina 11-16 EF
• Metabones 0.71 + Canon 24-105 EF
• Metabones 0.71 + Canon 100-400 EF
• Metabones 0.71 + Sigma 20mm f/1.8
• Panasonic 12-35 f/2.8
• Panasonic 35-100 f/2.8
• Olympus 12-100 f/4
• Sigma 16 f/1.4
• Sigma 30 f/1.4
• Panasonic 42.5 f/1.2
• Rokinon Cinema DS 85mm T1.5

>>>>NOTE: My Metabones doesn't AF with any of my lenses (that I recall).

Why is this?  Does it not work with the BMP4K?

[drm]

1 minute ago, buggz said:

>>>>NOTE: My Metabones doesn't AF with any of my lenses (that I recall).

Why is this?  Does it not work with the BMP4K?

I actually don't know why it doesn't work. I assume it is a firmware issue with Metabones. It works fine on my GH5 & GH5s cameras.

My understanding is that other people have the same issue with their Metabones 0.71 adapters. I think that I recall seeing comments like that on this forum.

[Anaconda_]

4 hours ago, buggz said:

Why is this?  Does it not work with the BMP4K?

AF doesn't work on any adapted lenses, it's not just Metabones. 

9 hours ago, CaptainHook said:

What version of the player and what Resolve version are you using?
What GPU and OSX version?

Turns out it was user error. It was working, but wouldn't show my LUT which did a lot of the work in the darker areas of my frame, so when I opened it in the player, the scene looked very different. Last night I whacked the curves right down to make a black image, saved sidecar, and then the played showed a black image. My bad.... Do you know if .sidecar will support LUTs in the future? Can the Raw Player look into DaVinci's LUTs folder on the system to connect to them?

[CaptainHook]

2 hours ago, Anaconda_ said:

Turns out it was user error. It was working, but wouldn't show my LUT which did a lot of the work in the darker areas of my frame, so when I opened it in the player, the scene looked very different. Last night I whacked the curves right down to make a black image, saved sidecar, and then the played showed a black image. My bad.... Do you know if .sidecar will support LUTs in the future? Can the Raw Player look into DaVinci's LUTs folder on the system to connect to them?

Resolve 15.3 has a build of SDK 1.3 which does support LUTs in the sidecar, they just need to be manually placed in the sidecar at this time (we would like to add the ability to add LUTs to the sidecar through the Resolve UI in a future update).

If you're brave I've attached a sample sidecar with a 3DLUT (B&W to make it easy to tell its working) which shows the syntax needed. Open the sidecar in a text editor and you can copy in any Resolve formatted 3DLUT (can also open LUTs in a text editor) into the sidecar file data section (inside the quotes) and make sure the "post_3dlut_sidecar_size" number matches the "LUT_3D_SIZE" from the 3DLUT. Just rename the sidecar file to the same as your clip. If you are going to add it to an existing sidecar, put it at the top of the sidecar data inside the curly brace (the current build in Resolve requires it but a future build will not be as strict) and put a comma after the LUT data quote (this is JSON syntax). If you already have the clip in a Resolve timeline, you'll need to remove the clip from the timeline and from the media pool and relink it as Resolve will cache and not pick up the sidecar change. If you just want to test, making a new project and bringing in the clip might be faster.

You'll need to use Blackmagic RAW player 1.3 which is inside the Resolve app bundle so make sure that version is the one being used when viewing clips not using Resolve.
In general though so you are aware the sidecar is just for the controls you find in the RAW panel, the SDK (and applications using it) can't recreate all the complex colour grading operations you can do in Resolve. 

I've also attached a sample Blackmagic RAW frame with an embedded 3DLUT. If you view this in Resolve, go to the RAW panel and change to clip decode and you will see you can enable/disable the 3DLUT, and change from the embedded 3DLUT to the sidecar LUT. This gives you more options for making sure when passing around clips the intention of how you want it to look is preserved non-destructively in any app that supports SDK 1.3+ (when released) which i think is pretty cool!

 

sample.sidecar sample.braw

[Emanuel]

You should include CinemaDNG as well.

Yet more crystal clear:

 

[thebrothersthre3]

Definitely noticeable with that crop. Though still an amazing option. I had the chance to use the Pocket 4k today, having a 12:1 option is amazing. 

4 hours ago, Emanuel said:

You should include CinemaDNG as well.

 

 

 

[Shirozina]

4 hours ago, Emanuel said:

You should include CinemaDNG as well.

Yet more crystal clear:

 

DNG 'looks' like it has sharpening applied with it's overly emphasised edges. Anyway who looks at a film at 300% an come to think of it who look at a film at 100%??? 'sharpness' is not the reason to choose BRAW anyway. Having the post production flexibility of not having and ISO curve and WB baked in is a bigger advantage than apparent 'sharpness' gains at 300%.

[MeanRevert]

Can anyone recommend a good LUT pack out there?

[JordanWright]

I would just use the Davinci built in LUTS

[Emanuel]

1 hour ago, thebrothersthre3 said:

Definitely noticeable with that crop. Though still an amazing option. I had the chance to use the Pocket 4k today, having a 12:1 option is amazing. 

 

Indeed. CinemaDNG lossless would surely be too : )

 

49 minutes ago, Shirozina said:

DNG 'looks' like it has sharpening applied with it's overly emphasised edges. Anyway who looks at a film at 300% an come to think of it who look at a film at 100%??? 'sharpness' is not the reason to choose BRAW anyway. Having the post production flexibility of not having and ISO curve and WB baked in is a bigger advantage than apparent 'sharpness' gains at 300%.

Nothing against softness approach to create cinematic pictures. We can apply it or not with the tools we have, not else though. Without mention the introduction of artifacts such as moiré and aliasing. Take a look in those tests from the 2nd link there, no doubts on. It is what it is.

[MeanRevert]

Anyone successfully used the SanDisk Extreme Pro 170 mb/s card for 4k/60p? I just tried and it stops after 3 seconds. 24p was fine. I could have sworn I read someone posting on the Resolve forum that this worked.

https://amazon.com/gp/product/B07H9VX76D

[drm]

2 hours ago, MeanRevert said:

Anyone successfully used the SanDisk Extreme Pro 170 mb/s card for 4k/60p? I just tried and it stops after 3 seconds. 24p was fine. I could have sworn I read someone posting on the Resolve forum that this worked.

https://amazon.com/gp/product/B07H9VX76D

There were a few memory card posts, including by me, around page 360 in this thread. Mine were at DCI4k/30, ProRes 422, though. I found a couple of posts on the BM forum here: 

https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=87098&p=488690&hilit=SanDisk+Extreme+Pro#p488957

They said they were only to get the card to work at 12:1 & Q5 raw for 4k/60p.

That card is only a V30 card, so it isn't too surprising to me that it can't record at the higher data rates required for the higher quality raw formats. Just FYI, I use the T5 and it records all formats on my cameras. There were also some really cheap CFAST cards mentioned a few days back on this thread that should work.

[MeanRevert]

6 minutes ago, drm said:

 

That card is only a V30 card, so it isn't too surprising to me that it can't record at the higher data rates required for the h

Great, thank you for sending me the link.  I'll see if one of those will work. I'd really like to stick with either SD or CFAST so I don't have to bother with mounting an SSD but it looks like a T5 is the cheaper option.  How do you have yours mounted?

[drm]

4 minutes ago, MeanRevert said:

Great, thank you for sending me the link.  I'll see if one of those will work. I'd really like to stick with either SD or CFAST so I don't have to bother with mounting an SSD but it looks like a T5 is the cheaper option.  How do you have yours mounted?

I have the SmallRig cage on all three of mine, with the SmallRig SSD mounts. The cage, holders, and drives work well.

I would also like to have the drives internal, as having the wires and stuff in the way is a bit of a bother. But for now, having 1TB of storage on each camera is very nice. The normal CFAST drives are just silly expensive for 1TB of storage for each camera (~1000 US per TB). Whereas, the Samsung T5 1TB is currently $177.99 on B&H. So, for 5x the price storage, I will put up with the USB C cable being in the way

[xzobinx]

 

any knows which store has this battery and ships to Australia? Thinking about switching to this power option when my shinobi arrives 

[drm]

46 minutes ago, xzobinx said:

any knows which store has this battery and ships to Australia? Thinking about switching to this power option when my shinobi arrives 

@xzobinx I am sure that you know this already but, the 12V port on the camera is designed to take 12V-20V. The battery outputs 8.4V-6V. I am surprised that the camera even turns on with only 8V plugged into the 12V port. I suggest that you get a 12V output battery sled like this one: https://amzn.to/2Fp0I4u  I have 3 and they work fine for me. I also use dtap straight from a v-mount battery to the 12V port and it works great. The camera lasts basically all day with one big v-mount battery.

If you run a cord straight from the battery, I recommend that you use a dummy battery. The camera is designed to use lower voltages from the battery port. If you use a dummy battery, you will also lose the ability to hot swap your battery during a long shoot.

I have 15-20 of those batteries and they work great. I have had only had one of them die over the past 2 or three years of regular use. I have the batteries numbered, but I don't keep track of when I buy them, so I have no idea how long the batteries lasted before dying.

IIRC, I think that Tom Antos mentioned killing some of his monitors that provide power to the camera because of the heavy power draw from the BMPCC4K, so I would hesitate trying to draw power from the monitor.

Unfortunately, I can't recommend a store that will ship those to Australia.