Blackmagic Micro Cinema Super Guide and Why It Still Matters

[TomTheDP]

10 hours ago, kye said:

True!

I thought the Micro matched pretty well to the Alexa?  Unless you're talking about 4K+ Alexas and shooting a hyper-modern look with the latest high-end cine lenses?

This is a slight aside, but I've been seeing the promo videos they have for their new Signature Zoom lenses and dear god are they going for a sharp look with those videos!  I understand why of course, everyone who can afford to use ARRI knows you can soften lenses up in post of course, but I was thinking how I wasn't really a fan of that particular treatment!

If it was Christmas and my birthday and I won lotto too, I'd wish for a BM Pocket Cine Camera in the P2K form factor with an updated 2.8K sensor with the same colour science, and set to the global shutter mode rather than rolling shutter.  Still, the P2K and M2K (Micro) are pretty amazing for what they cost and how big they are.

I am sure the colors are nice but color matching two different cameras/sensors is always a pain regardless. I am confident with my S1 as emotive color does the work for me 😅. Probably would like to get a P4K or 6K at some point for the RAW though, a bit easier to match WB.

I like the Micro body over the OG pocket camera. The screen on the pocket cam was just kind of terrible and the micro HDMI was really brittle. 

[kye]

10 hours ago, TomTheDP said:

I am sure the colors are nice but color matching two different cameras/sensors is always a pain regardless. I am confident with my S1 as emotive color does the work for me 😅. Probably would like to get a P4K or 6K at some point for the RAW though, a bit easier to match WB.

I like the Micro body over the OG pocket camera. The screen on the pocket cam was just kind of terrible and the micro HDMI was really brittle. 

Interesting to hear you're getting good matching with the S1.  I'd be curious to see any images you're willing/able to post.

[TomTheDP]

On 7/9/2021 at 10:57 PM, kye said:

Interesting to hear you're getting good matching with the S1.  I'd be curious to see any images you're willing/able to post.

I had an Alexa in the bag but I put a hold on it. Going to decide tomorrow if I want to push the button or not. I was actually heavily considering an F35 as it has a much lower power draw and is actually cheaper, but I don't want to be limited to PL mount lenses. I love film personally but don't have the budget to shoot on it for most projects so I wanted what's second best. I think the F35 and Alexa are the closest you can get in the digital realm with the least amount of work. 

If you check the emotive color website he has a lot of comparison images though of course I am curious to see if I can obtain that same match that he does in random situations. Thats what the lut was designed for though, matching a cheaper B cam to an Arri. 

At some point being an owner/operator of a RED or ARRI was a big help in one's career. Looking at Sundance this year more and more higher profile projects are being shot on Blackmagic, still not the majority but it's changing slowly but surely. The benefit of owning a high end camera is getting less and less. 


 

[IronFilm]

1 hour ago, TomTheDP said:

I had an Alexa in the bag but I put a hold on it. Going to decide tomorrow if I want to push the button or not. I was actually heavily considering an F35 as it has a much lower power draw and is actually cheaper, but I don't want to be limited to PL mount lenses. I love film personally but don't have the budget to shoot on it for most projects so I wanted what's second best. I think the F35 and Alexa are the closest you can get in the digital realm with the least amount of work. 

Have you considered either a Panasonic Varicam LT or Sony FX9 as well as cameras at a similar-ish ballpark price?

[DFason]

If anyone is looking for a micro package I have one for sale! I would love to sell to someone on here that would really appreciate the camera. 

-Dave

[kye]

19 hours ago, TomTheDP said:

If you check the emotive color website he has a lot of comparison images though of course I am curious to see if I can obtain that same match that he does in random situations. Thats what the lut was designed for though, matching a cheaper B cam to an Arri. 

I have it and for my shooting in uncontrolled situations with varying WB I couldn't get good results out of the LUT at all unfortunately.  Maybe in controlled shooting it would be different, but it was too fragile to work in the situations I work in.

The BMMCC, however, gets spectacular colour right out of the gate.  It's literally giving me better colour after a 2 minute effort than I could get from my GH5 with hours of effort, regardless of the colour profile and use of LUTs, CSTs, of manual grading.

I believe people think about cameras in the wrong way.  The conversation is about "how good is this camera" or "how good is the image from this camera", and the answer to that is almost always "as good as the operator".  But some cameras are really easy to get great results from, and others are almost impossible to work with and only the best operators in the world can get great results from them.

The question should be "how good is the image from this camera when used by an above average user under normal circumstances and with a moderate amount of effort in post?".  In this instance, the OG BMPCC / BMMCC have to be some of the best cameras ever made.

[PannySVHS]

The OG Pocket is very appealing. They get rare and prices are rising though. I found a used one with cage and a Pana 14mm 2.5 for 300EU. I waited one day in order to think about it. It was of course sold to somebody else by then. 

The good deals are gone for sure, especially for the BMMCC. In the end the p4K is a good choice for s16 shooters and beyond, with higher framerates, Braw, S16 crop.

[kye]

9 hours ago, PannySVHS said:

The OG Pocket is very appealing. They get rare and prices are rising though. I found a used one with cage and a Pana 14mm 2.5 for 300EU. I waited one day in order to think about it. It was of course sold to somebody else by then. 

The good deals are gone for sure, especially for the BMMCC. In the end the p4K is a good choice for s16 shooters and beyond, with higher framerates, Braw, S16 crop.

300EU is a steal.  Had you done the background research, you wouldn't have waited one minute, let alone one day.

It may seem like that's a lot for an older camera, but you're buying the image.  Used Alexas are still $10K because you're buying the image, so spending 3% of that on a camera that can be perfectly intercut with an Alexa.

The P4K is a great camera, but it's not the same as the OG BMPCC / BMMCC.  When you grade the OG BMPCC / BMMCC for two minutes you get something that looks like film, when you grade the P4K for two minutes you get something that looks like the Sony a7s3.  

It is possible to grade the P4K to match the OG BMPCC / BMMCC, but if you have that level of skill then you may as well buy almost any camera and grade it to look like whatever you want, because both tasks are about the same level of difficulty.

[TomTheDP]

On 7/11/2021 at 11:25 PM, IronFilm said:

Have you considered either a Panasonic Varicam LT or Sony FX9 as well as cameras at a similar-ish ballpark price?

Yes, the varicam lT seems to be pretty nice, but it's a bit clunky to use, and I would prefer an Alexa at that point. Not big on the FX9, I think my S1 delivers just as good of an image. 

 

On 7/12/2021 at 5:35 PM, kye said:

I have it and for my shooting in uncontrolled situations with varying WB I couldn't get good results out of the LUT at all unfortunately.  Maybe in controlled shooting it would be different, but it was too fragile to work in the situations I work in.

The BMMCC, however, gets spectacular colour right out of the gate.  It's literally giving me better colour after a 2 minute effort than I could get from my GH5 with hours of effort, regardless of the colour profile and use of LUTs, CSTs, of manual grading.

I believe people think about cameras in the wrong way.  The conversation is about "how good is this camera" or "how good is the image from this camera", and the answer to that is almost always "as good as the operator".  But some cameras are really easy to get great results from, and others are almost impossible to work with and only the best operators in the world can get great results from them.

The question should be "how good is the image from this camera when used by an above average user under normal circumstances and with a moderate amount of effort in post?".  In this instance, the OG BMPCC / BMMCC have to be some of the best cameras ever made.

My use for it as a B-cam would generally be in somewhat controlled environments for interviews or narrative work. For me it looks way better than any other lut I've used. The contrast and highlight roll off it gives is hard to mimic manually.

 I'd want a Ninja V to get RAW out of the Panasonic tho to get more fine tuned adjustments. Getting the wide balance right is critical with the Luts, which is why I think a Blackmagic camera would be ideal. 

I'll definitely consider the Pocket or Micro as a B-cam if I do decide to get an Alexa. It's nice to hear it cuts well with the Alexa from Charters. Cinema DNG is definitely the best codec. Maybe I'll get one and send it to Alex from emotive color to construct a lut for. 

[kye]

4 hours ago, TomTheDP said:

I'll definitely consider the Pocket or Micro as a B-cam if I do decide to get an Alexa. It's nice to hear it cuts well with the Alexa from Charters. Cinema DNG is definitely the best codec. Maybe I'll get one and send it to Alex from emotive color to construct a lut for. 

I'd suggest that you wouldn't need to get a LUT.  I've graded a small amount of Alexa footage and my impression was that the OG BMPCC / BMMCC was just as easy to grade and get good result from as Alexa footage.  It's really hard to describe how effortlessly the footage responds to grading, it makes GH5 footage feel like there's something wrong with it in comparison.  It's also hard for people to imagine that the Alexa images aren't instantly magical, unless you've worked with them before, but poorly shot Alexa footage looks basically just like poorly shot footage from almost any other camera.

If you want a match that would survive a forensic investigation then there are some LUTs from Juan Melara that translate the P4K or P6K to Alexa colours, which look like they do a great job and Juan is obviously a very talented colourist so I don't doubt that he would have done a meticulous job.

But to re-iterate the benefits of the OG BMPCC / BMMCC, you can get an Alexa-like image just converting the colour space to 709, but it takes a serious colourist to get Alexa-like image from the P4K/P6K.

I'd be tempted by the P4K / P6K because those LUTs are available from Juan, but the form factor is just absolutely ridiculous, the RAW is crippled, and they're quite expensive too.  I'd shoot 1080p Prores HQ because it is downsampled form the whole sensor and would avoid aliasing issues of the OG cameras.  You really need a 2.5k sensor to get true 2K, so that's potentially the only weakness of these cameras.

But, if size matters, at all, in your work then there's no comparison:

[leslie]

23 minutes ago, kye said:

But to re-iterate the benefits of the OG BMPCC / BMMCC, you can get an Alexa-like image just converting the colour space to 709, but it takes a serious colourist to get Alexa-like image from the P4K/P6K.

I'd be tempted by the P4K / P6K because those LUTs are available from Juan, but the form factor is just absolutely ridiculous, the RAW is crippled, and they're quite expensive too.  I'd shoot 1080p Prores HQ because it is downsampled form the whole sensor and would avoid aliasing issues of the OG cameras.  You really need a 2.5k sensor to get true 2K, so that's potentially the only weakness of these cameras.

But, if size matters, at all, in your work then there's no comparison:

the p4k isnt much bigger or smaller / heavier or lighter than most other dslr's that can do video. whats more it doesn't overheat  either. It is what it is. Some may not like the form factor. Personally coming from digital camera, and before that the very sexy t90 i dont mind the shape. If you have an original p4k you can do cdng as well.

Not sure what you mean by the raw is crippled If you referring to braw as crippled, Well there are many who would disagree.. braw might not be true raw, but it does  gets us round the patent issue with you know who. 

I also think the whole looking like an alexa footage thing, is over rated.  unless your a business or movie producer and can write it off on tax. What normal person could afford an alexa and another cinema camera of any type ? ( Of Couse  that perspective comes from a pensioner lucky to have one cinema camera )  😉

[kye]

29 minutes ago, leslie said:

the p4k isnt much bigger or smaller / heavier or lighter than most other dslr's that can do video. whats more it doesn't overheat  either. It is what it is. Some may not like the form factor. Personally coming from digital camera, and before that the very sexy t90 i dont mind the shape. If you have an original p4k you can do cdng as well.

Not sure what you mean by the raw is crippled If you referring to braw as crippled, Well there are many who would disagree.. braw might not be true raw, but it does  gets us round the patent issue with you know who. 

I also think the whole looking like an alexa footage thing, is over rated.  unless your a business or movie producer and can write it off on tax. What normal person could afford an alexa and another cinema camera of any type ? ( Of Couse  that perspective comes from a pensioner lucky to have one cinema camera )  😉

LOL, every time I comment about camera sizes there's always someone who replies and says that in comparison to the size of the universe that the thing we were talking about is much smaller and therefore must be tiny and any size discussion must be meaningless, but that "everything is relative" approach doesn't really work when you apply it to the real world, where things are judged according to size, both in good and bad ways. 

It's about context, and this is a thread about the BMMCC, which is literally a cinema camera you can mount on a helmet:

The P4K is huge for a consumer camera, just like the GH5 and A7S3 and Canon 5D are as well.  

Try putting a P4K on your helmet, or try putting a bunch of them into a vehicle and see how far you get.  BTW, the BMMCC gets radically more battery life than a P4K as well.

Colour science is definitely a thing, and in case you don't know, the Alexa revolutionised the look of digital by making it look like film, which was a huge driving force in the widespread adoption of digital in Hollywood and other high-end cinema markets.  At the time this was the absolute bleeding edge of film emulation, but we've gotten a lot better at that look now and this has become the dominant look of all medium-high budget TV and movies.  Yes, I have seen that look from other cameras, but I have never seen that look from any camera apart from the OG BMPCC or BMMCC unless there was a professional colourist involved.

If you're happy with a large camera that shoots Sony-looking images then that's fine, and is a matter of taste, but this thread is about tiny cinema cameras that have an image that is remarkably like an Alexa, which the P4K is most definitely not.

[IronFilm]

14 hours ago, TomTheDP said:

Yes, the varicam lT seems to be pretty nice, but it's a bit clunky to use, and I would prefer an Alexa at that point. 

But Alexa doesn't have the: extreme low light, P48 audio, slow motion, or 4K!
 

[TomTheDP]

16 hours ago, kye said:

I'd suggest that you wouldn't need to get a LUT.  I've graded a small amount of Alexa footage and my impression was that the OG BMPCC / BMMCC was just as easy to grade and get good result from as Alexa footage.  It's really hard to describe how effortlessly the footage responds to grading, it makes GH5 footage feel like there's something wrong with it in comparison.  It's also hard for people to imagine that the Alexa images aren't instantly magical, unless you've worked with them before, but poorly shot Alexa footage looks basically just like poorly shot footage from almost any other camera.

If you want a match that would survive a forensic investigation then there are some LUTs from Juan Melara that translate the P4K or P6K to Alexa colours, which look like they do a great job and Juan is obviously a very talented colourist so I don't doubt that he would have done a meticulous job.

But to re-iterate the benefits of the OG BMPCC / BMMCC, you can get an Alexa-like image just converting the colour space to 709, but it takes a serious colourist to get Alexa-like image from the P4K/P6K.

I'd be tempted by the P4K / P6K because those LUTs are available from Juan, but the form factor is just absolutely ridiculous, the RAW is crippled, and they're quite expensive too.  I'd shoot 1080p Prores HQ because it is downsampled form the whole sensor and would avoid aliasing issues of the OG cameras.  You really need a 2.5k sensor to get true 2K, so that's potentially the only weakness of these cameras.

But, if size matters, at all, in your work then there's no comparison:

Having to grade footage to match side by side is much different than just grading standalone footage. Footage that is pleasing to your eye and footage that matches an Alexa are two different things. I've heard a lot of people say the OG BM pocket has a very nice image, more organic than the new P4K/6K. I've never seen any comparisons of one against the Alexa though. If I ever decide to get the Alexa classic it would be a cheap enough test considering the OG pocket can be had for 500 bucks. 

Emotive color also has power grades for the URSA and Pocket cameras. Juan doesn't have different luts for different lighting situations which makes me think Alex's luts/powergrades are likely superior. I did just ask Juan Melara about his recommendation for a camera that could cut with the Alexa. Hopefully he'll find the time to share his thoughts with me.

The OG Pocket is small but the Pocket 4k is also tiny as far as cinema cameras go. The screen is also much more usable too. A big downside of the OG pocket is it sucks to rig up, all the ports on it, HDMI etc... really suck. The micro has full HDMI fortunately and would be my choice if I were to buy one of the two, of course you need a monitor for it.

Poorly shot footage always sucks but it'll look better on an Alexa than most other cameras. 

[kye]

2 hours ago, TomTheDP said:

Having to grade footage to match side by side is much different than just grading standalone footage. Footage that is pleasing to your eye and footage that matches an Alexa are two different things. I've heard a lot of people say the OG BM pocket has a very nice image, more organic than the new P4K/6K. I've never seen any comparisons of one against the Alexa though. If I ever decide to get the Alexa classic it would be a cheap enough test considering the OG pocket can be had for 500 bucks. 

Emotive color also has power grades for the URSA and Pocket cameras. Juan doesn't have different luts for different lighting situations which makes me think Alex's luts/powergrades are likely superior. I did just ask Juan Melara about his recommendation for a camera that could cut with the Alexa. Hopefully he'll find the time to share his thoughts with me.

The OG Pocket is small but the Pocket 4k is also tiny as far as cinema cameras go. The screen is also much more usable too. A big downside of the OG pocket is it sucks to rig up, all the ports on it, HDMI etc... really suck. The micro has full HDMI fortunately and would be my choice if I were to buy one of the two, of course you need a monitor for it.

Poorly shot footage always sucks but it'll look better on an Alexa than most other cameras. 

I couldn't find any direct comparisons between the BMPCC and Alexa either.  

However, my rationale for suggesting they are similar is that I have spent many hours looking at the response of both cameras against properly shot colour charts, and examining the various diversions each has from a 'correct' rec709 response, of which there are a great many.  Essentially I picked apart the response of the Alexa in order to try and reverse-engineer some of the colour translations that make its colour science so delightful.  

I found that they share many similarities.  For example, their response to pure red, and the range of colours between pure red and orange, is very similar, pushing reds to pink.  The way they handle various hues of green is similar too.  Which hues they desaturate are similar.  The irony is that they're both emulating film, so essentially have a broadly common goal.

A third point of enquiry is using the GH5 and applying the Emotive LUT, then comparing how it pushes colour around the colour checker hues gives a third point of triangulation.  I found this similar to the Alexa response (of course!) and also similar to the BMPCC / BMMCC.  I've directly compared GH5+Emotive Colour vs BMMCC footage before and it matched very well.  

So while I haven't intercut footage from the same shoot on both cameras, I'm familiar with the main 'flavours' of their colour science and am pretty confident that they're pushing in the same directions.  
It doesn't mean they'll instantly match in an edit together, but if you're at the level where you're shooting with an Alexa then you're at the level where every shot in an edit requires individual adjustment in post anyway, and I'd be surprised if the level of adjustment required to match a BMPCC shot to an adjacent Alexa shot was much larger than matching two adjacent Alexa shots that were taken from two different angles with different lighting setups.

[TomTheDP]

2 hours ago, kye said:

I couldn't find any direct comparisons between the BMPCC and Alexa either.  

However, my rationale for suggesting they are similar is that I have spent many hours looking at the response of both cameras against properly shot colour charts, and examining the various diversions each has from a 'correct' rec709 response, of which there are a great many.  Essentially I picked apart the response of the Alexa in order to try and reverse-engineer some of the colour translations that make its colour science so delightful.  

I found that they share many similarities.  For example, their response to pure red, and the range of colours between pure red and orange, is very similar, pushing reds to pink.  The way they handle various hues of green is similar too.  Which hues they desaturate are similar.  The irony is that they're both emulating film, so essentially have a broadly common goal.

A third point of enquiry is using the GH5 and applying the Emotive LUT, then comparing how it pushes colour around the colour checker hues gives a third point of triangulation.  I found this similar to the Alexa response (of course!) and also similar to the BMPCC / BMMCC.  I've directly compared GH5+Emotive Colour vs BMMCC footage before and it matched very well.  

So while I haven't intercut footage from the same shoot on both cameras, I'm familiar with the main 'flavours' of their colour science and am pretty confident that they're pushing in the same directions.  
It doesn't mean they'll instantly match in an edit together, but if you're at the level where you're shooting with an Alexa then you're at the level where every shot in an edit requires individual adjustment in post anyway, and I'd be surprised if the level of adjustment required to match a BMPCC shot to an adjacent Alexa shot was much larger than matching two adjacent Alexa shots that were taken from two different angles with different lighting setups.

That's encouraging. Part of the appeal of the Alexa is how it responds to all different types of lighting though. How is the response to tungsten and mixed lighting on the OG pocket. 

They are both emulating film but so are all the Pocket cameras to some degree, or trying to emulate the Alexa itself.

 

12 hours ago, IronFilm said:

But Alexa doesn't have the: extreme low light, P48 audio, slow motion, or 4K!
 

True, I've heard some very positive things about it from various trustworthy people. Internal 444 is nice too. A big downside is you have to reboot the camera which takes about 1 minute whenever changing frame rates. I suppose that's not a big deal on the type of shoots you'd be using it on. Oddly enough I am also considering the ole Sony F3. 

[osmanovic]

It's like kye writes, the og bmpcc is much closer to alexa. the og bmpcc is also often used professionally for filming, but unfortunately it does not always appear as the camera used.  an example would be the movie tenet, where the og bmpcc was also used. 

[kye]

4 hours ago, TomTheDP said:

That's encouraging. Part of the appeal of the Alexa is how it responds to all different types of lighting though. How is the response to tungsten and mixed lighting on the OG pocket. 

They are both emulating film but so are all the Pocket cameras to some degree, or trying to emulate the Alexa itself.

The response of the BMPCC / BMMCC is strange in that it isn't strange.  You adjust a control and the adjustment gets made and your eyes see what they were expecting to see.  That might sound strange, so let me provide some context.

My first attempts at colour grading were trying to match low quality footage (GoPro, iPhone footage, etc) shot in mixed lighting.  Even using relatively advanced techniques, and animating various adjustments over the course of a shot, it was hard to get things to match, and footage would break.  It was enormously frustrating.

I then bought the XC10, which I now know I didn't use properly, as I used it with some auto-settings and so was seeing its poor ISO performance, as well as sometimes trying to bring up shots there were underexposed etc.  This was similar to trying to adjust the bad quality shots, and also got bad results.  The 'feeling' is that the footage is very fragile and that any adjustment will break it, and the feeling is also that the sliders in Resolve were fighting with me all the time.  You adjust WB and instead of the image getting neutral and good, the colours go from being too blue or too purple to just being awful, so you make localised adjustments and the closer you get to neutral the more it looks like you shot the whole thing at ISO 10,000,000.

Then I bought the GH5 and it was like a revelation.  The 10-bit footage could be pushed and pulled and you basically can't break it even if you try ridiculous things.  The 'feel' of the footage is the same as watching a colourist grade footage from a RED or Alexa on a YT video - they pull up a slider and the image just does it without falling apart.  The footage comes to life when you adjust it, rather than falling apart.
However, when you're shooting on auto-WB (like I do) and every shot requires manual WB adjustments in post, and occasionally have to be animated in post too if the lighting changed during the shot, there is still an element of the colours not cooperating, and kind of feeling like they're degrading under your controls.  It's night and day better than the XC10 shot outside its sweet spot, but still not ideal.

Then I bought the BMMCC and it was a revelation.  I've shot both RAW and prores and really pushed and pulled the footage in post and the problems are just gone.  You push and pull it and it just does what you tell it, the footage doesn't break and the colours don't feel like you're fighting them.  Adjusting colours feels more like you've been given a spectacular image that has been deliberately degraded in post to look flat and dull and that you're un-doing the degrading treatment.  The image gets better as you play with it and get it to where you want it.

I posted this video earlier in the thread and it's useful as a reference point:

I shot that earlier in the year, in Prores HQ with a fixed WB of 5500K and ETTR.  The footage was nice, but didn't match shot for shot (my vND has a green tint) and some shots are obviously exposed very differently to each other depending on if I was protecting the sky or not.  

One thing you will notice in post is that there is a small knee to roll-off the highlights, but it's a very linear response across the whole range.  So if you shoot a shot 3 stops under the exposure of another shot and adjust them in post to match (either by lowering the brighter one or raising the darker one) then you'll get very similar looking images, taking into account the raised noise floor and clipping of course.  It's like an Alexa like that, with a broad and very neutral response, unlike other cameras.  

Here's the shots on the timeline with a 709 conversion and not much else:

and here's the final grade:

As you can see, I've played a lot with the colours, and especially the green/magenta balance that is the key to a great sunset.  

Hopefully that helps to explain what "the footage just does what you tell it" actually means in practice.

2 hours ago, osmanovic said:

It's like kye writes, the og bmpcc is much closer to alexa. the og bmpcc is also often used professionally for filming, but unfortunately it does not always appear as the camera used.  an example would be the movie tenet, where the og bmpcc was also used. 

I agree.

I feel there's a whole other world out there that's invisible due to NDAs and "professional appearances".  During my time owning the XC10 I really had this made clear to me, as on the one hand the entire keyboard warrior camera forum world was saying how the XC10 was a disaster and that no-one would ever use it, and simultaneously I was subscribed to a YT channel where the guy was posting a BTS still from some high-end production or other where an XC10 was visible on set in the background.  Of course, if you google "XC10 <movie name>" then there are no hits, so it seems like it doesn't exist, but the pictures are unmistakable.

So a camera can have huge press because it's YT camera reviewer flavour of the month, and yet a consumer camera could be in-use daily on high-budget sets across the world and you'd never hear a peep about it.  The amateurs make all the noise and essentially the pros move silently.  I've heard people say that this is false and that there's heaps on info about what happens on-set available online, but when you see the XC10 in the BTS pics of a half-a-dozen feature films and not a single google hit across any of them, you know that there's an entire world of professional use that's simply invisible.  I suspect the BMMCC is firmly in this camp.  After all, name another camera that was released in 2012 and is still available as a current product by a major manufacturer...  

[kye]

I should also say that I shot a few outings (walk on the beach / visit to a park / etc) in Prores LT and even Prores Proxy and what was interesting was that although you can see the compression artefacts, the 'feel' of the footage didn't change, it still felt malleable and cooperative.

I'd be tempted to say that the linear response and overall cooperative colours isn't matched by other cameras because they do something in their colour science to tint or otherwise process the shadows differently to the mids and highlights, which is why when you underexpose or overexpose and then adjust levels in post you don't get the same kind of image as if you shot it with the right exposure.  However, I'm not sure if it's true.

In theory if you process all colours the same, regardless of their luma value then you should be able to pull up underexposed shots or pull down overexposed shots and still keep the same colours.  But it's more complicated than that to get a "neutral feeling image", because it doesn't work like that with magenta/green shifts in WB, like I obviously have in the above.
If you have a WB control that essentially moves the whole vector scope around then you have to process all hues the same otherwise you'll bend the colour response.  For example, imagine a scene where there is a white wall lit by three lights, one is neutral, one has a CTO gel and is mostly on one side and the other has a CTB gel and is on the other side.  If you WB the camera properly, you should get a straight line on the vector scope going from orange to cyan through the middle of the scope.  
Now imagine we introduce a magenta shift in the WB of the camera.  We'll get a straight line on the vector scope, but it won't go through the middle of the scope, it will pass on the magenta side of the curve.  Here's the kicker - the BMMCC rotates and desaturates hues on the magenta and green sides of the vector scope, which will bend that line.  If we then adjust that line in post we won't have to pull it towards green as far because the magenta got desaturated (quite a lot actually) and that will mean we still have magenta in the warm and cooler parts of the image - the middle of the wall will look neutral but the sides will look magenta.  If we adjust further towards green the sides of the wall will be warm/cool but not magenta or green, but now the middle of the wall will be green.

I haven't done this test, but I do know that the camera desaturates the magenta and green parts of the vector scope.  It's actually quite a long way from neutral, you'd be amazed at how something so distorted could look so nice.

I don't have the BMMCC one handy, but this what the Kodak 2382 film emulation LUTs in Resolve does, which the BMMCC and Alexa would be doing similar things to.

Unprocessed vs processed:

Note that hues are rotated, saturation is compressed, blues and green are desaturated and yellows are quite saturated.

Having said all that, I don't know what the BMMCC is doing because if you shoot something and then adjust the green/magenta WB it doesn't feel like it's falling apart or that colours are going off in that way.  Maybe they are but I just haven't noticed, or maybe there is some 'buffer' built into the skin tone areas so that if you get the WB wrong the skin tones will behave predictably when you try and recover them in post.  Who knows.

[IronFilm]

3 hours ago, kye said:

but when you see the XC10 in the BTS pics of a half-a-dozen feature films and not a single google hit across any of them, you know that there's an entire world of professional use that's simply invisible.

Definitely not being used as an A Cam or B Cam! Unlikely even as a C Cam. 

But perhaps the XC10 might be kinda semi popular ish for EPK, maaaaybe. 

Can you share these BTS pics you're referring to?