Leaderboard

From Cinema5D

'The Camera Cage for Black Magic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K features a completely customizable, modular design. Fill out your camera cage as you see fit. An optional right side handle features a small finger wheel that can allow you to control the upcoming Nucleus Nano motor and also features an SSD card holder as well as a battery compartment for Sony F970 batteries to allow you to extend the battery life of your camera. More info and pre-order available soon.'

So the Pocket 4K fares 11.6 stops @iso400 by Cinema 5D's strict methodology, almost half a stop more than the old Pocket. That's pretty awesome.

To load 33 point LUTs they have to be created in Resolve. For all other creation methods it will only load 17 point ones.

Really? Don't shame folks on here, this guy did nothing too you. That's low bro.

Thank you! I'd certainly like to do that, now that V3 is out That's a way to do it, ironically its just as tricky (cam to cam, vs profile to profile) @hypp Others could probably better speak to the resources out there. I highly recommend shooting films and diving in headfirst, its a great bootcamp (the method to my madness) I'd especially like to emphasize luminance placement, which has perhaps the single biggest effect on image perception. Conform to cinema standard luminance, and things really start to click. Read through the second half of page 2 of the Pdf, and study these waveforms GHa Documentation V3.pdf Supplemental Waveforms (PDF).zip

From the look on his face, I think he's actually doing this ...

This is the next video in my travel tutorial series. Hopefully I explained everything correctly? This YT thing is still pretty new to me... Thanks and let me know!

I'm not going to say what this project is about. But, if you watch the clip, does it arouse any curiosity in you? You know how it is, you get deep into the project and it's hard to hold onto objectivity. Thanks in advance for any feedback.

Very interesting test, imo.

I agree that it would be nice to have additional tools but I have to say that I think that with Pocket 4K having false colour available (especially on a hardware switch) it will get a lot of people, myself included, closer to where they want the exposure to be a lot quicker. The very quick contextual overview it gives you works better - for me at least - than a waveform so I'm going to say that from a purely selfish point of view, BM chose the right option for the initial release

What's so disappointing about the X-T3 120p? I can't see any other camera doing 1080/120p with that much detail for the price. The Sony A7R III and A7 III are a lot more expensive. GH5 and GH5S have smaller sensor and aren't cheaper either.

That looks excellent. I thought I'd quote the post again right under to make people scroll through 6 huge images instead of 2.

Sony fanboys getting triggered.. Let it go mate.. Calling Andrew biased towards Canon is the joke of the year. I don't think anyone has been as hard on Canon than Andrew in the past half-decade..

DR advantages are only useful if you can expose the footage accurately enough to exploit it and exp controls on the P4k are pretty basic (Even the GH5 has a waveform). I'd like to see an RGB parade display on the P4k.....

According to their more strict tests (1/SNR=0.5, number in bold on the right) the OG pocket has 11.2 and P4K has 11.6. The pocket 4K has about half a stop more of dynamic range.

OT Pocket has 12,5 , it's about 1 stop more ?

Pretty impressive, since the other cameras do denoise the footage.

Screens from the videoreview posted above.

You go out of your way to try to disprove/discredit another reviewer for their fair criticism and still deny you're biased?

I'd say that's the way to go with this camera, yes.

Lol that was funny I am always enjoying your choice of words. They (and by "they" i mean all those giant companies) are always funding and embracing that waiting game. Actually we are all waiting for the next one (whatever this is). The only difference is that some of us can afford every single step while waiting for the next one while others will wait till the end of humanity for a product that will never exist. I am somewhere in the middle with a moderate GAS syndrome. The whole "mavic" concept was genius and innovative. If we set the Sony RX100's output as a golden standard for 1 inch sensor cameras at this specific time, then Phantom 4 is pretty close and that could be the case with Mavic 2 Pro. But apparently it's not. I bet this has to do with marketing decisions and not overheating problems or the lack of processing power. Sadly, this is the result of modern marketing in the camera manufacturing world: "great sensors being wasted due to marketing decisions for sustainable profit". We finally get this. Don't get me wrong. It's a great drone. It's very convenient and probably the right tool for many jobs. But it's not what most professional content creators expected. Of course we can't blame DJI for delivering a product that can't satisfy professional content creators in this price range. But it would definitely not be a "miracle" if they decided to do this. The "Lord" has it all: great sensors, blazing fast tiny processors, great developers and a massive audience.

exactly , these firts shots are just DNGs without metadata. Once you blow out the lights in the camera, there's no way back. (Zebra 100%) provided DNG BMPCC was underexposed! And ,yes BMPCC has more noise in the shadows, but with the right exposure it is far better. P.S. .....do not take it wrong, someone has to keep up with the great enthusiasm of BMP4K ?

Well that is only typical of pro photographers. The D5 is a great pro camera. I am all for the 28-70 F2 and 50 F1.2, as pro lenses. They are an improvement on two of the most popular EF lenses for pros. That said, you are also entitled to have different preferences and I am different to Fro as well. I am more interested in the artistic side than the 'get the job done' mentality. I would suffer an old blurry manual focus Arriflex lens on an adapter or an anamorphic just to get a certain look. I don't think Fro would, because he's at the mercy of his clients. That side does not interest me at all. When Canon find out the cluster bomb crater the EOS R has made in their 5DIV and 6DII sales they will swiftly bring out a bunch more models and lenses. Canon have made their own bestsellers obsolete, which is probably why they put off doing this camera for so long in the first place. They didn't need to, as the previous obsolete cameras were still selling so well.

I see you two are as hard as the most tough Greek philosophy school... LOL : ) Embrace the excuse you want for that waiting game but... IQ??! The same you find along any 10-bit capture tool (applies for 8-bit or 12-bit devices anyway) if you don't care for your acquisition ballpark. There are no miracles outside the realm of the Lord : )) That's it (E : -)

I had the same problem with FilmConvert, for some reason only 17 cubed LUTs ended up working for me, not 32 or 64.

Take it for what it's worth, but I find the performance of the two cameras nearly identical in the highlights, after grading -- meaning the same amount of data is preserved in both cases. At least, this is the case with limited testing. The shots above are not actually "blown out", so there's nothing to recover. It's just that the highlights are mapped into the super-white regions in the debayered .dng. But the data is intact, it just has to be brought down. You'll see the same thing on the original Pocket.

It is a nice idea but a couple of points.... I would be wary of putting anything that close to the exhaust vent on the front of the camera. In the video they describe leaving it on for 3 hours without it getting too hot but I suspect that didn't involve having the camera in record. The second point is that it for people who do want to go V mount then it actually has quite a low capacity (49Wh). The KYTD BP-90, for example is 190Wh and £160 on Amazon. For another £90 you can then use a rail mounted V mount kit like this one which adds all of those additional ports (and actually includes the correct dummy battery for the Pocket 4K !). The total cost will be more than the Core SWX Powerbase but it will be far more flexible in terms of how and where you mount it (horizontal or vertical) so you can keep it away from the exhaust, will let you swap out to different V mounts (or even run it using the £20 Sony F to V mount adapter plates) and will offer almost four times the capacity. That extra capacity can't be underestimated as it might not just be the camera you might be powering off the battery (powering an EVF/External recorder off the Dtap for example) so it means you'll also be able to run a system as a whole for far, far longer.

When I started working is irrelevant. I don’t think I’m alone here who indeed started experimenting with ultra shallow DoF thanks to the FF DSLR revolution and access to fast primes for video use. ..or super slo motion with affordable HFR camera options. Always been aware though that these are obviously just tools, techniques. Never expected anyone to admire anything either. Just thought it was interesting some people would marvel over bokeh while others just found the footage overly blurry. Beauty is in beholders eyes. One mans junk.. you know the story. Anyways my point was that shallow DoF, super slomo etc has become over used and a bit of a crutch. I’m honest enough to admit I’ve been a victim of it myself and tend to try and avoid them in favor of other techniques and working with cameras that don’t offer those specs/features has certainly helped resist that urge.. Which brings me to my other point: chasing camera specs / bashing cameras over specs is a little bit futile in the grand scheme of things. All the latest mirrorless cameras are capable of spectacular results in the right hands.

I think they match like amazingly well just using different types of curves. Pushed ISO on both by one stop to open shadows. Took me 5 minutes. The Pocket 4K has better DR shadows and way more detail The Pocket HD has better DR in highlights and a slight green tint, but everything is in focus.

Good luck with the noise with the old BMPCC, once graded.

Great. I think the rendering, etc. is good and I like both the quality and quantity of bokeh when shooting wide open, where the lens is already sharp enough for my taste. Auto focus for photography is working well and together with Eye-AF leads to being able to let someone else take a picture (there's not a single good picture of myself taken with the Voigtländer because manual focus basically overburdens most people who aren't used to it). On the downside, you might have to adjust the focal reducer to get sharp pictures at infinity (and then still not get them if you get a slightly out of spec one) and it's not ideal for manual focus because often the combination of lens to adapter to camera has some rotational play when turning the focus ring (you can limit this by mounting the focal reducer to your cage and/or using a lens support on rails). Continuous auto focus on the GH5 is basically unusable with the combination but I found it also too unreliable with native Panasonic lenses. I'm taking quite a bit more pictures than video so that was a good decision for myself in my opinion.

Will be close to ideal once the D-tap cord is widely available. A better option than the dummy battery, since you could charge a real battery as you run the camera.

Yeah, cause he definitely needed all that to shoot something so technically advanced as this, wow!

i spend the whole summer with xh1 and updated xt2 just now to check if i can live without ibis again ( xt3 specs is so juicy) i ended up thinkin about gettin rid of xh1 and just stay with what i already have) heres my test: xt2/konica40f1.8/noname speedbooster 100fps handheld all the way: still lack of eterna/d400 makin me really sad and i wonder if anyone can tell how much difference between editing 8bit 4K IPB and 10bit 4K ALL-I files im also wonder how much time should pass to fuji discover that 25/50/100 option on the shutter ring is extremely desirable in 50 Hz country

Well to be fair he figured out that its a native DCI 4k sensor, which is a valid observation as its different to all other stills cameras. But to say never shoot UHD is a bit of a stretch. If you know you want UHD and you shoot DCI you've just given yourself a job in post.

My review is finally online ! I hope it will help people and answer a few questions ! Let me know what you think of it ! It took me so much time and yet I just have shaky footage to show... I'll shoot something decent soon, a real project !

Lenses are not uniformly sharp across the entire focus range, often the closest focus suffers most. The differences are quite small most of the time, mind you.

Hello everyone! I received my BMPCC4K almost a week ago and unfortunately I haven’t had much time to play with it so far but I wanted to give you my first impression and observation in the hope these might be helpful! BUILD QUALITY / ERGONOMICS: The camera is pretty big (and wide especially) but it’s surprisingly light. I’m not a huge fan of the exterior plastic material as it feels a bit cheap and quite prone to scratches but at the end of the day this a professional tool so as long as it’s able to withstand normal use I’m not too bothered about it. I haven’t found any spots that are cause for concern, yes the battery cover it’s a bit flimsy like other people reported but it never came open on me (and even if it did the battery is safely hold in place with a spring loaded clip so it won’t fall over anyway). The lens mount seems pretty robust, I tried mounting some heavy lens and haven’t experienced any flex so it seems all good. The mounting points looks very sturdy as they’re surrounded my a metal plate so if you plan to mount something heavy without a cage it looks like is not gonna be a problem. The camera feels quite good in the hand the only reservation I have is that is fairly easy to obstruct the bottom exhaust while shooting handheld as it’s the natural resting point for the hand that operate the lens. The screen is pretty awesome I should say, it’s detailed, responsive has good colours and it’s surprisingly bright when needed. Is it usable under direct sunlight without a hood? In my experience barely but so is the vast majority of built-in screens out there, for that you need something very bright like a smallHD 1500nits or something similar. USABILITY/OPERATION: Like many other people said before this camera is an absolute joy to operate, the menu system is one of the best in the industry, it’s logically laid out and super intuitive. Overall the experience is much more akin to a RED or an Alexa rather than a hybrid camera and this is good given the this is a cinema camera after all ? I like how everything can be controlled so easily via the touchscreen but I like even more the fact that you don’t have to rely on it if you prefer not to or you’re in a shooting situation in which is not practical. All the main functions have dedicated buttons (and a dial in the front just under the record button) plus the three functions buttons are completely programmable either as toggles for specific functions or you can assign a precise value to a parameter that you wish to quickly recall (say you want to go to iso 3200 with a touch of a button you can do that) The Preset menu is another gem of the OS, you can save camera configurations with totally different settings and recall them in a moment, it’s a massive timesaver! The screen, other than being of great quality, offers an impressive range of tools for a built-in screen the highlight of which (for me) is definitely the inclusion of false colours which is such a great tool to expose and is something that is never present in hybrid cameras. Battery life is not amazing but again it’s quite normal for a cinema camera with an actively cooled sensor I think. I would say you can expect 35-40 minutes recording time quite consistently. Like other users reported already original Canon batteries seems to give the best and most consistent results and are the only one providing a percentage to the camera so I might swallow the hefty price and buy a couple extra of them. I haven’t had any problems with stuck batteries so far and I hope it stays this way! I’ve recorded mainly on SD cards and I’m glad to report that my Sony G ones can reliably record 4K RAW 60fps 4:1 with no issues (although they’re not in the official list provided by BM but I suppose they’re very similar to the new “Tough” series just released which are approved instead). I also used SanDisk Extreme Pro UHS-I and although they’re not fast enough for 60fps they can record 4K 25 RAW 4:1 with no issues. I’ve also made a test with a random SSD mounted in a usb-c caddy and it worked perfectly so I’m probably gonna purchase a couple of Samsung T5 as soon as I find a nice holder that I can use without a cage. IMAGE QUALITY: This is where the camera really shines (and it’s kind of important I reckon, right?) ? The images are detailed and rich, the colour science is very very good out of the box and coupled with the ease of use and the big screen is easy and fast to acquire great footage. The dynamic range is not greater than other cameras like the GH5s or the A7III but the numbers on papers often don’t tell the full story.. The camera produces files that have not been processed in any way (if you shoot raw of course) so it’s actually easier to squeeze every bit of information from them compared to a heavily compressed codec. As other users already noted I found the highlights rolloff to be a bit on the harsh side so I’d say it’s a good idea to protect the highlights with this camera as a priority. The dual native ISO values of 400 and 3200 are a very good choice in my opinion, particularly in daylight when you don’t have to use a ton of ND filtration to get the correct exposure. Noise levels are pretty good although I have to say there is more chroma noise that I would like (particularly compared to the kind of monochrome noise Sony has accustomed us to with their sensors) but again, with files this good it’s quite trivial to use your denoiser of choice and get rid of it without murdering the image. I also noticed in a couple of shots some moire/aliasing and unfortunately this is quite inevitable since this is not an oversampled sensor readout and there is no OLPF… This is it for now, hope I haven’t bored you to death and that you’ve found useful information and I promise to follow soon with more details and some hopefully nice images too! Have a great weekend everybody!

My impression is that people don't like backgrounds that are unnaturally blurry. Hold your finger up close to your face and focus on it. Now, while maintaining focus on your finger, become aware of the items in the location you are in and how much detail you are able to ascertain. It is normally quite a lot, although if you do this with test charts you will obviously find that the detail is obscured. Your eyes aren't as large aperture as you might think. However, in video, you are able to look at the out-of-focus areas directly with your eyes, and so any detail present can be distracting, so it's not a straight aperture conversion. Basically, the human eye has a relatively small aperture, the translation is a weak one, but the more you push it faster than the human eye the more unnatural it looks. I completely agree that it's a photographer thing, as photographers have learned to idolise shallow DoF because they are associated with portraiture and expensive lenses, and that it isn't the consumer as much as a photographer lusting after a completely unnatural sea of blur behind a subject in their images.

Also people saying “oh this is a must, and this is a must” and then people on here quoting and saying this like “that’s fucking crazy, I thought this would be an amazingly easy camera to use”, like what the hell people! We all have different ways of using the camera. I don’t shoot/use my equipment like everyone else of you. E.g it doesn’t apply to all of us. If they came out with a paintbrush for a painter and he was like “I don’t like the strokes of the squirrel hair” do you think every other artist in the world would have gone bonkers and screamed hell at this new brush?! It’s become a witch hunt in here. It’s sad because a lot of you are tech enthusiasts like myself and your clouding your minds for no reason. Be happy this technology exists, it’s a wonderful camera.

Yeah, I had the camera before most and I have written about my experience, which has been amazing. But NO ONE ever quotes me in here. And Andrew, yes, he just keeps talking about that battery door, I switch my batteries a lot cause I keep the camera on while testing so burn through them pretty quickly (yes it drains your batteries if you have third party, listen to AaronChicago or what his name is, OFFICIAL CANON is the way to go for maximum running time) so I open and close that battery door A LOT with ZERO problems. I’ve used the camera ALOT outdoors and yes the screen gives of glare but I can still use it without problem! I also shoot handheld, and haven’t felt a need to “rig” it up for more money, I bought a half cage with handle because I am used to shoot with ANY camera, that style. Getting a holder for T5 was just a plus as I had it hanging out (and let me tell you, with zero problems) before and it was just ugly. Everyone complaining and raising concerns are people that DOES NOT have the camera.

I do get there should be better quality control for many things on this camera, and it's far from 'perfect'. But a lot of these comments, not just from Andrew seem quite nit picky. For example, complaining you need expensive media is a result of having such a big codec. If you don't want the codec, there's other options with cheaper media. If you want RAW and ProRes out of the camera, expensive media is the price you have to pay. That said, as soon as BRAW hits, this whole issue is out the window. Same with the M43 lens distortion, if you're buying this for the an unprocessed image from the sensor, don't complain that it's not been processed. Granted, for ProRes recordings it could be nice, but then people would complain the ProRes looks so different form the RAW. I like that they're almost indistinguishable until you hit heavy grades. Andrew, you mention the battery door in almost every comment about this camera, but as far as I know, only 1 person here has had an issue with it, and it was solved by BMD or the reseller quickly. It just doesn't seem to be an issue, just one faulty unit. Then adding cages and monitors - that's 100% optional and is far from a requirement to make it work. Anyway, I don't wish to rant or persuade people one way or the other about this camera. I'm enjoying using it, I'm enjoying editing it, and I'm enjoying riging it up and stripping it down.

hello @laughingboy9000 welcome to the board

It is 2499 euros here (3000 bucks almost) and that XLR thingy someone mentioned starts from 320euros. The price in difference is vast, and honestly, I do not consider the GH5s a serious photo camera. I need at least 24mgpxls to be safe on photo jobs, I do not know any professionals shooting with such a small resolution (that applies to A7s too), or that wpuld be confident using one for paid jobs. I double on the menu system. It is really terrible on most cameras, and Sony still has limited touch screen interface. For some of us those 2 count. I have worked extensively with Sony cameras through the years and I hated the experience. Does anyone know what gimbals are compatible with the Pocket4K? Especially these 2 new Moza and Zhiyun are really interesting.

I see some nostalgia here for the old pocket. It was an interesting camera and a great deal for the time, but it had dozens of issues that this new camera doesn't. This one appeals to a bigger audience and a lot of young filmmakers (the 21st century kind of) will use these cameras like 16mm/8mm cameras of the past. This one pushes the democratisation of film making a lot more than, let's say, Canon mirrorless cameras that cost more.

Another low light test from the P4K