Blackmagic Micro Cinema Super Guide and Why It Still Matters

[PannySVHS]

GX85 or LX10, also GH5 would show mush whereas the M2K produces a believeable low light image. Nice shots. Thanks for posting. Enjoy your trip. We will enjoy your findings and footage you might share.:)  @kye

[kye]

A few frames from yesterday..  Almost no grading done.

[kye]

Went to tea cafe / tea museum.  Very formal in a handmade sort of traditional way.

Barely graded stills:

 

[Clark Nikolai]

Very nice. I like the framing of some of these. It's great you brought it along. Good to have in your pocket.

It's too bad that BM doesn't just make it again. Doesn't need to even be 4K, just needs to be good and small.

[PannySVHS]

Colors and textures smoke the S line cameras imho under ambient and natural light. Great stills! @kye So cool and really worth it that you brought your little cinema camera with you! I bet you are having tons of fun with your footage. I still got 4 hours of Bmpcc clips from this summer to go through. It's an honest low light camera, giving you what the eye can see btw.

[PannySVHS]

Will be using mine tomorrow, not my p2k but the micro again. It has been a year or so since the last time. I'm charging batteries and cleaning lenses right now, a bit late to the party, silly me.😊

Exited to see more from you and to read about your adventures! @kye What lens did you use at the tea museum, the 12-35? I am wondering if @mercer has rebought a m2k again. Does @TomTheDPplay around with one or is the Alexa his only dual gain baby?

What I absolutely love about the og pocket and the micro are textures, motion and highlight rolloff. Just sayin.😊

[kye]

Shot with the BMMCC in Myeongdong for 2.5 hours in the (light) rain today.  It's a trooper.  Images barely graded as usual.

and a POV pic of the setup.

I might have gone a touch dark on the grade, but these were just taken from checking dailies to catch any tech or usage issues.  

I think I'm getting the hang of this.

[TomTheDP]

22 hours ago, PannySVHS said:

Exited to see more from you and to read about your adventures! @kye What lens did you use at the tea museum, the 12-35? I am wondering if @mercer has rebought a m2k again. Does @TomTheDPplay around with one or is the Alexa his only dual gain baby?

What I absolutely love about the og pocket and the micro are textures, motion and highlight rolloff. Just sayin.😊

I haven't been able to use my Micro yet as I have no cards for it. Really curious to test it out though. I used to own the original Pocket camera which I am fond of. 

@kye

Those frames look excelent, though probably mostly to do with your compositions. 

[inde]

Quote

I haven't been able to use my Micro yet as I have no cards for it. Really curious to test it out though. I used to own the original Pocket camera which I am fond of. 

I don't know if it's been mentioned here. I wonder if the issues the BMPCC sometimes get transferred onto the BMMCC. I just wanted to say I haven't done extensive testing (no slowmo) but cheap cards do work in the BMMCC at 24fps 3:1 compressed. Had zero issues with a pair of the 128GB 1667x Lexar. I wonder if the Micro has a UHS-ii slot? I remember seeing some tests with that card on a UHS-i reader and it doing 13MB/s? And it clearly does way better than that.

[bjohn]

Here's another short clip of that Cajun band from a few weeks ago, shot on the Angénieux 17.5-70 Super 16 zoom from the 1970s.

 

[kye]

On 8/21/2024 at 3:07 AM, PannySVHS said:

Will be using mine tomorrow, not my p2k but the micro again. It has been a year or so since the last time. I'm charging batteries and cleaning lenses right now, a bit late to the party, silly me.😊

Exited to see more from you and to read about your adventures! @kye What lens did you use at the tea museum, the 12-35? I am wondering if @mercer has rebought a m2k again. Does @TomTheDPplay around with one or is the Alexa his only dual gain baby?

What I absolutely love about the og pocket and the micro are textures, motion and highlight rolloff. Just sayin.😊

Yes, 12-35mm f2.8 for all stills shown on this trip so far.

My wife and I got sick for a few days, probably covid which is rampant here, but are on the mend.  

During this time I've been shooting a lot out of the hotel window, which has a pretty awesome view.  For this I've been using the GX85 + 14-140mm F3.5-5.6 and the BMMCC + 12-35mm F2.8 as well as the fast primes I brought for the dusk / blue-hour time when the lights come on, which are the 7.5mm F2, the 17mm F1.4 and 50mm F1.2.  

The extra crop factor on the BMMCC with the 50mm was welcome in focusing in a bit more on certain parts of the view.  I'd really like a small, light, F1.4 or faster prime though.  I've looked and it doesn't seem like there are any good options, except maybe the Rokinon/Samyang 85mm f1.4, but more research would be needed.

I'll definitely keep shooting the view from the window as I will have enough for a decent sequence or even a whole film just from this vantage point - there is so much happening here!

I've actually had an epiphany while being here and shooting with this camera, but that's a whole other thing and I'll share more when I'm back and have digested it a bit more, but spoiler alert, I think I'm now a convert to shooting fully manual with rigged cine cameras in public, and it has nothing to do with the image.

[BTM_Pix]

5 hours ago, kye said:

I've actually had an epiphany while being here and shooting with this camera, but that's a whole other thing and I'll share more when I'm back and have digested it a bit more, but spoiler alert, I think I'm now a convert to shooting fully manual with rigged cine cameras in public, and it has nothing to do with the image.

I’m curious as to whether this leads to what might seem to be the logical conclusion of swapping up to the Micro Studio 4K G2.

I say logical conclusion but barely anyone has from what I can tell.

 

[kye]

20 hours ago, BTM_Pix said:

I’m curious as to whether this leads to what might seem to be the logical conclusion of swapping up to the Micro Studio 4K G2.

I say logical conclusion but barely anyone has from what I can tell.

I definitely agree that it's the logical conclusion.  The rig doesn't change except for the addition of an SSD, which isn't too much of an imposition.

I've been thinking, incredibly non-seriously, about what I might do if I am ok to have a relatively light rig.  In theory I could have any camera, but it comes back to lenses of course.  A zoom is a must, and OIS is a must if there's no IBIS, so an MFT and 12-35/2.8 combo still seems the most suitable.
However, as usual, I'll force myself to work with what I have (which is incredible so no complaints) until I've proven that any purchases won't sit unused after the novelty wears off.
Also, the newer BM cameras don't have the same look, so unless I'll still be able to replicate it, potentially with the Film Look Creator and other tools, it would be a sideways move at best.

I've decided to focus on actually producing images so anything has to be in service of that.

[kye]

I've had a few issues with the BMMCC while shooting.

A few times I've had issues where the focus throw on the lens won't focus all the way to infinity, so I can't actually focus properly.  This is with both the 12-35 and the 14-140.  Resetting the camera seemed to fix it.

Another issue I've had with both lenses is where I'll focus then hit record and it will instantly change the focus to something wrong.  This focus-change has also happened when I've adjusted the aperture through the camera.

I suspect perhaps dirty lens contacts?  It's only happened a few times and otherwise the setup has been solid, but if anyone has any advice I'm happy to hear it.

[bjohn]

4 hours ago, kye said:

Another issue I've had with both lenses is where I'll focus then hit record and it will instantly change the focus to something wrong.  This focus-change has also happened when I've adjusted the aperture through the camera

That's the issue I brought up earlier in this thread; it's been reported by other users as well, always with Panasonic focus-by-wire lenses. It first happened to me during an overseas shoot. The same lens has never shown this behaviour on my OG Pocket, and the contacts on the BMMCC were clean (I cleaned the contacts on the lens and the camera, no change). I saw similar reports on the Blackmagic Design Cinematography forum and other forums. I think you just have to forget about focusing until you hit record. The cause isn't clear and it doesn't affect all users so it must be a camera-specific thing (the lens will be fine on one BMMCC but not another).

It doesn't seem to be firmware-dependent either: when it happened to me on my first BMMCC a few years ago I was running the final firmware update that BMD released for this camera. I subsequently bought a secondhand BMMCC as a b-cam and its firmware was a few generations out of date; before I updated it I tested it with the Panasonic 12-35 and it exhibited the same focus issue (defocusing after I hit the record button). Updating the firmware didn't change anything.

I've never had the infinity focus issue on mine. I only use manual lenses on my BMMCC now, but of course this means I have no access to any lenses with IBIS. I have an OG Pocket for lenses with electronics and IBIS.

[kye]

14 hours ago, bjohn said:

That's the issue I brought up earlier in this thread; it's been reported by other users as well, always with Panasonic focus-by-wire lenses.

Hmm, ok.  It hasn't happened that many times and seems to be fixed with a restart, so I guess I'll just carry on.  The whole thing of shooting slowly because it's fully manual seems to align with the idea that you miss things happening, so if a shot here or there requires a bit of fiddling then it's not a big deal really.

Speaking of carrying on, went for a walk in the backstreets of Yongsan last night.  I had to cheat another stop by going to 360 shutter as some places were seriously dark, but in post I was able to raise up images by a stop, and if I put a bit of NR then I could go even further without issue.  Of course, this requires grading the images properly - where blacks are actually black!

I'm actually surprised how good the low-light is.  This is only at F2.8 with a zoom and IS, and yet it's basically usable to replicate what you can see in real life, despite being S16 and almost a decade old.

Images even less graded than previously:

One thing I've noticed is that with the 12-35mm not being that long a zoom, and with my monitor set to show a 2.35:1 crop, I tend to compose with people smaller in the frame than with other cameras I've used.  I don't know how well this is translating, as in theory this should make the 'world' larger by showing people smaller in comparison, but as I only have my laptop and not my normal monitor I'm not used to judging.

[kye]

Gangnam.  It's all glitz and glam and occasionally quite disorganised telephone pole wiring, but it's no backstreets of Yongsan, which I'd take any day of the week over this.

 

[inde]

@Kye, how do you deal with moire? I've not seen any in the posts you've shown in this thread but I'm not very good at finding it. Do you have an OLPF? Using a weak promist style filter has some people say it helps and others have said (JB) the frequencies are not fine enough to be affected. If all it takes is a promist when someone wants to wear fine fabric or a suit and tie wouldn't that be great?

[BTM_Pix]

17 hours ago, kye said:

Gangnam.  It's all glitz and glam

Someone should probably write a song about that. 

Think it would probably do OK.

[Sven]

5 hours ago, inde said:

@Kye, how do you deal with moire? I've not seen any in the posts you've shown in this thread but I'm not very good at finding it. Do you have an OLPF? Using a weak promist style filter has some people say it helps and others have said (JB) the frequencies are not fine enough to be affected. If all it takes is a promist when someone wants to wear fine fabric or a suit and tie wouldn't that be great?

I tested a "1/8 Tiffen Black Promist" but still didnt remove the moire. And even though only 1/8 it gives a certain look that I didnt want baked in, rather add blooming in post if I want that.
I saw a video on Youtube where someone used a olpf from a Canon 300D, I tried it on both OG Pocket and BMMCC and works great without any colorcast and almost remove any type of moire from what I've seen so far. But the image gets softer, most noticable on wider shots, but can be sharpened in post.
Here's a breakdown of installing the filter (one filter can be cut in half and then perfectly fits pocket/micro):
(the material used for the "frame" around the filter is adhesive Black-wrap (aluminium tape)
https://imgur.com/a/canon-300d-olpf-to-bmmcc-pocket-og-kzz16VX

Altcine did olpfs that was cheaper than Rawlite, but I think he said they wont be making another batch:
https://altcinecam.com/product/altcine-optical-low-pass-filter/