Other: BlackMagic Cinema camera!!!! 2.5k for 3k...

Erich Ocean said:
The way I see this camera, it's worth it, today, for $3K. But more importantly, buying it, giving feedback, and getting BM feeling great about selling cameras is going to give us more of what we want in the future, but at similar price points.
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Exactly why it's good to encourage them, and communicate to them your thoughts in constructive ways. They'll listen, because their in the business of trying to give customers what they want, what they need. One can not exists with out the other to some degree. Everyone benefits in the end..

Pappas
http://PAPPASARTS.WORDPRESS.COM
http://TWITTER.COM/PAPPASARTS
BlackMagic Digital Camera Info Thread: http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthrea...mera-Technology-Announcements-amp-Latest-Info
 
Is there any reason a lens like the Noktor 12mm 1.6 couldn't be mounted with an adapter to give you a nice wide?

Similarly could the micro four third lenses be used with an adapter?
 
"Similarly could the micro four third lenses be used with an adapter?"

Where there's a market, there's an adaptor. There's no physical reason why a manual 4/3s lens couldn't work.
 
Cosimo Bullo said:
"Similarly could the micro four third lenses be used with an adapter?"

Where there's a market, there's an adaptor. There's no physical reason why a manual 4/3s lens couldn't work.
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Wouldn't they have to go further into the tube to actually work? That means hacking part of the tube off then mounting a 4/3 mount.

I suspect this is what's going to happen to a lot of cameras once someone figures out how to do it properly. Barring that the only electronics in the tube are the wires for the EF mount, it'll get a nose job and a 4/3 or PL put in its place, and then you adapt up from that. Then you could just have a tucked pin connector to keep the EF option alive.
 
What I should have done when I went to NAB was bring an SSD then put it in the BMC then get some real footage then...take the SSD home and see what the RAW footage looks like. :)
 
arroway said:
And no HDMI means no EVF...
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This has probably already been covered in one of the thousands of posts in this thread, but a Thunderbolt to HDMI adapter is 10 bucks. Which goes to show you what a great company BlackMagic Design is. They could have left Thunderbolt out and forced you to buy one of their $300 SDI to HDMI converters!

If you have $10 extra to spend after you fork over $3000 for the camera, your EVF should work just fine.

Bill
 
Barry_Green said:
No, they will have similar angle of view and identical looks in regards to compression and composition.

The only thing that will be different is, at an equal f-stop, the DOF will be different. But if you compensate for the DOF difference by changing the iris, and otherwise equalizing exposure, you can make them all look identical.
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Edit Again:

I'm editing this (reposting whatever) because I remember the conversation we had, and it is definitely just a "me" thing. I don't think many people would notice what I call "very different".

So I take that back, it won't be very different unless you have very sensitive eyes or something, or the distortion maybe plays into the composition a little too much.
 
The EOS mount is pretty wide... I wonder if lenses like the 25mm f.95 - that have a pretty small rear end (if you will...) and the aperture adjust on the front will be okay.

But I see your point. I think I was thinking of it backwards.
 
That would be awesome if it were possible. Fit the 25mm and 17.5mm m4/3 voightlanders with "negative" adapters and use the EF 11-16 Tokina and you'll have your wide angles mostly covered with great and cheap glass.
 
StephenM said:
I spent some time with the camera at NAB today and here are some impressions, and answers received from the staff. Any opinions are mine, coming from an indie filmmaker point of view, and as such may not be relevant for run-n-gun or event shooters.

Mount: The camera is an EF mount only. They are now correctly saying ZE in the booth rather than ZF. So, no direct F mount support in this version. They mount itself looked quite robust, lots of steel and torx screws.

Sensor: It is not a 4/3 sensor as has been discussed fully here. IMHO, the error may have come from the talking points the staff were given. One of the fellows said that it was a 4:3 sensor using less than the full sensor, and thought that some of his associates may simply misinterpreted 4:3 as 4/3. Anyway, just an opinion. They also confirmed that it scales the full image when shooting in 1080, it does not crop the sensor. They also confirmed that it is a CMOS sensor, and I did observe some rolling shutter artifacts during whip pans, as would be expected.

Anamorphic: I mentioned that I would be interested in seeing anamorphic support and they wrote it down, like they were counting how many people asked. They definitely thought it might be technically possible but didn't think we'd see it in the first camera.

TimeCode: There is not timecode currently. They did say that discussions were on-going about using the audio input in some way to jam sync, but again no promises. For my part this is the one thing that I really wish they had added.

Battery: The battery is internal, just like the Hyperdeck. It takes an external source of 12-30v (yes 30) for charging the battery. IMO, this is just fine as it allows for changing of the external battery without stopping the camera. I can't count how many times over the years a brick has run out on me in the middle of a take. With this internal battery, it will act like a UPS on a computer. Again, I shoot narrative, so having a larger rig with bricks is not an issue for me. Your mileage may vary.

Frame Rate: 30 fps is the maximum. They stated that the reason is processing power and the speed of the SSD's. IMO, I don't think we should expect it to increase in the first version. I asked them about faster rates for ProRes given the smaller data output size, but the answer given was that camera does all it's processing at 2.5 raw before sending it to the scaler/compressor and is such still subject to the raw performance implications.

Freebies: The inclusion of DaVinci and Ultrascope is terrific. This is a raw camera so post processing is part of the workflow. Including arguably one of the finest CC tools for free is terrific. BTW, I spent a long time with the new DaVinci 9. The new interface changes are (mostly) great and should make it a lot easier for new DaVinci users to get started without losing any of its power. Ultrascope is very nice as well, particularly if you already have a thunderbolt laptop.

Overall, it looks like a terrific camera, especially given the price. I'm going to pick one up.
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I missed this, but thanks for all of the first hand info! After mulling it for a while, I came to the same conclusion on the battery deal. Two externals and one charger should be enough to run endlessly.

I'm surprised about the timecode... but, I guess I don't even use it enough to justify it. Still, hopefully they can figure this out for multicam shoots, I imagine there'll be plenty o'that going on.
 
Rick Burnett said:
Really? Red and Arri and Sony were quite vocal about the DR of the Epic, Alexa and F3 from my memory. Heck, even Red talked about their HDR mode and how many stops could be used. It's clear to me that companies understand the desire for higher DR. But really, what happens typically when a company announces a higher DR, everyone comes out of the woodworks to complain "Yeah, but it still doesn't mean you don't need to light" and then devolves into arguments about do you really need higher DR.
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I didn't mean super high end cameras. Of course they will market it, because they know their market. I mean lower end cameras like T2i, GH2, 5D Mark II, 5D Mark III, etc. Consumer and most prosumer cameras never mention "13 Stops of Dynamic Range" on the box or in the technical specs, for example. They just don't bother mentioning it, because it's rarely worth mentioning.

For me, Dynamic Range is the top priority, but others play a big part, yes. Obviously I want RAW or low compression at least with a custom gamma curve like Canon's allow and 10-bit or 12-bit is up there as well for being pretty important. I don't think if you have more dynamic range it means don't light, but I do believe PART of the reason why we need to light with "more complex setups" more often is DUE to cameras not seeing at nearly the same range as the human eye and honestly 13 stops isn't even nearly close enough to compare to the way the human eye sees high contrast scenes or naturally lit areas in most high contrast scenes. Take a natural lighting environment lit by one single lamp in a room. Through your eyes it's near perfect if you have decent enough eyes. The bulb is not blown out and you can see extremely dark shadow detail and great tonality all around without having to bring up the shadow with other light sources.

Another thing about lighting is if you have a source with a very bright highlight the extra lighting brings up the overall brightness allowing one to bring down their ISO in order to have less blown out highlights and even less noise. The range of the human eyes means this is not necessary, but even a Red Epic can't compare there with native DR. If you're going for very specific looks lighting will always be part of the game, but if you're going for a natural look without high dynamic range you're going to have to make compromises and choose this or that. Skin tones or highlights at the expense of shadows or shadows at the expense of highlights and possibly skin tones. If a camera were to come out with the NATIVE range of the human eye. I believe one could get away with natural lighting much easier, assuming it has good low light ability. Lower dynamic range creates much harsher contrast in even moderately high contrast rooms/sets where lighting is not controlled, where your eyes would have no issues at all.

So, no I don't agree high dynamic range means not to light. Light is important, but I believe if can lead to less complicated setups or better looking natural light setups.

I agree with you, I think higher DR is very important, but only partially. I also think you need higher DR with a higher bit depth. Do I want 18 stops in 8-bit? No. That's the beauty of what this camera offers. 12-bits and 13 stops. Because, at the end of the day, you ARE going to fit those bits down to 8-bit, and having the freedom to push and pull those 13 stops of information around in a multitude of ways. Those two together are the real + of this camera in my opinion. (Or even 10-bit when not doing RAW).
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12-bit color is really great, but if a camera truly offered 18 stops of native dynamic range at 8-bit I would personally take it over 13 stops at any bit. Sorry. I think the difference would be huge. May not be able to push it as far, but I believe anything lit naturally would be far fare more film like and natural looking more like how the eyes see. I think you could still push it a lot further than 8-bit with 9 or 10 usable stops. I could work with 18 Stops at 8-bit for sure. Sign me up. lol. :P Now if it were like 15 stops at 12-bit vs 18 at 8-bit I'd probably go with the 15, but 18 vs 13 I think would be a massive difference in those very hard to shoot scenes. lol.
 
Kholi said:
I missed this, but thanks for all of the first hand info! After mulling it for a while, I came to the same conclusion on the battery deal. Two externals and one charger should be enough to run endlessly.

I'm surprised about the timecode... but, I guess I don't even use it enough to justify it. Still, hopefully they can figure this out for multicam shoots, I imagine there'll be plenty o'that going on.
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Yeah, I personally think internal battery w/ external power supply is actually a nice feature in the end. And I didn't really expect TC sync in a $3k cam - never had it in DSLR's and the ol' clap sync method still works great every time. It's very minor quible that won't affect many users, I think.
 
Clap sync not quite good enough for those of us dabbling in stereo3D :(

Fantastic camera, very exciting, I might buy a couple anyway and see if I can get them to work on a mirror rig ;)

Just thought I'd jump in before we got to page 100 - read the whole thread last night up to page 86 and find there's another 8 new pages after 5 hours sleep. Incredible.

Well done BMD, great to see such free-thinking - and I bet they've made it as software-adaptable as possible, so it's feature set and performance will improve over time, just like they did with the Shuttle.
 
xntrggr said:
I only have one major gripe with the design and that's with the placement of the I/O ports, which should never be on the left side of the camera. This makes any sort of shoulder mounted design ridiculously hard to implement, because cables will be sticking out into your face or in the way of an external monitor/EVF. No other camera out there has ports on the left. I hope somebody has raised this up with them at NAB. Otherwise, this is bloody amazing.
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That is my main concern too. I see that camera as begging for a rail mount config with a 12v power kit (also serving as a counter balance) matte-box, and EVF... which all kinda becomes a PITA when all the inputs and outputs on the operator side of the camera. Still really interested in this camera, but I really hope they put the connectors on the right side of the camera.
 
Greydad said:
Clap sync not quite good enough for those of us dabbling in stereo3D :(

Fantastic camera, very exciting, I might buy a couple anyway and see if I can get them to work on a mirror rig ;)
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Well, you want shutter sync - which is more than just timecode. Hey, I want that too!

Yes, definitely interested in doing a mirror rig setup if it can be hacked together (Blackmagic may be friendly to this?). Maybe some combination of clever power cycling / LANC triggers / etc.

But man I would much rather have genlock or some sort of USB link... even GoPros have it!

Kholi said:
I missed this, but thanks for all of the first hand info! After mulling it for a while, I came to the same conclusion on the battery deal. Two externals and one charger should be enough to run endlessly.

I'm surprised about the timecode... but, I guess I don't even use it enough to justify it. Still, hopefully they can figure this out for multicam shoots, I imagine there'll be plenty o'that going on.
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Hack for timecode is to feed it timecode from an external sync box as analog audio! Then use Avid "read timecode from analog audio" button.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
Oliver Rush said:
That is my main concern too. I see that camera as begging for a rail mount config with a 12v power kit (also serving as a counter balance) matte-box, and EVF... which all kinda becomes a PITA when all the inputs and outputs on the operator side of the camera. Still really interested in this camera, but I really hope they put the connectors on the right side of the camera.
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Maybe the dudes at Blackmagic are left handed, and thought they'd finally release a more left friendly camera.
 
Probably already been mentioned, though I can't go through the full 90 odd pages of thread...again.

When is the ETA on the PL Mount - It's a Cinema Camera - I want to put Cinema Lenses on it.

Hopefully some third party likely to be able to make an adapter for the meantime, if it's a while off.


Neil.
 
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