Andrew Reid

The only thing I am sure about is the ergonomics that should be much more improved.

It's not all bad on the ergonomics front. When I used the Ikonoskop on the same shoot as the BMCC last winter, the BMCC was an absolute doddle to get rolling. It's a very simple camera to use and you can set it up in seconds on the touch screen.

It just needs some simple changes - 

The weight needs lowering and distributing more evenly front-to-back. It is quite a narrow body but taller and wider than a DSLR.

The screen has quite poor colour and contrast though good detail. I'd like to see a more recent panel on the 4K model, OLED would be ideal and it needs to be articulated, otherwise people will just be adding a spidery arm and a chunky Marshall and that kind of defies the point of having so much of the camera itself taken up by a large screen.

mFT mount they have already done - smart move.

ND filter built in would be next step.

Pocket Camera not used so no idea if it feels 'right'. ReWo brought a mock up to me a few months ago of the camera they made from official dimensions from foam in the factory and it feels good in the hand but the record button is awkwardly placed on the top.

Quick test. Massively blown window by 3ev.

Brought down 2.5 stops in post.

If you enjoy having your highlights look like the mush on the right, keep shooting 8bit / C100 / standard DSLR video!

I will do a grading post on EOSHD soon which will show the difference between 14bit raw and 8bit codecs very clearly. Best thing to do is to stop talking about it and SHOW it.

They have the Pocket camera as expected 31st July - http://www.creativevideo.co.uk/index.php?t=product/blackmagic_pocket_cinema_camera_mft

It is only a small but significant part of your C100 fanboyism I can no longer accept on this community - the completely nonsensical statements about products you have little or no experience with.

"The sensor sucks. Even worse than the BMCC."

Simply not true.

This forum is quoted all over the place as 'EOSHD' and I am not happy to have bulls*** spread around by users with an anti-Blackmagic vendetta. Opinion and speculation are 100% fine. Just make sure it isn't bulls***. Simple!

I was able to convince the Black Magic rep
Guarding the BMPCC on display in Burbank today to allow me to
pop on my beloved Kern Switar 10mm f1.6. I can confirm some
pronounced vignetting in the corners. The Panasonic 7-14mm f4 zoom
that they had on the camera for demo looked great.

Nice job!

Yes 7-14mm is an incredible lens. Hope they update it and widen the aperture to 2.8.

Peederj, seriously, give it a rest.

Final warning.

need advice on next lense to buy

i own these wide angles

zenitar 16mm f2.8

a broken (drop)  saymang 24mm f1.4

canon 28mm f1.8

samyang 35mm f1.4

 

 

what i am looking for is a lense to keep everything in focus whitout having to go all the way up with the f-stop

 

thanks

 

for sharing

If you want to keep everything in focus you can't do it with a fast aperture on full frame. You'd be better off with a small sensor.

Consider Zeiss Jena 20mm F2.8 in M42 mount though. At F5.6 that is a great run & gun lens and optically superb for the price. Bought mine for 200 euros and if it were a modern lens it would be 1000+

Samyang 14mm F2.8 is a weird lens - distortion is massive on it. It's OK for grabbing the odd shot and works best in confined spaces, crowds or for arty close-ups - but whenever you have angular or straight objects in the shot it looks rubbish.

"first quantities" meaning maybe one or two to europe then, maybe 3 by this time next year.

I think part of the problem is that Blackmagic keep attempting to put out the fire by adding gasoline.

First they say September would be 'a best case scenario' - then the official statement they raise expectations by saying August. Bit risky no?

Expectations are already too high and there's a good chance that in the final development stages or production stages that a camera might encounter issues that take further work to solve.

It would be better if they just said 'second half 2013' and give themselves some breathing space.

Under promise and over deliver rather than the other way round.

What I was told today (from one of the dealers) is this:

 

Pocket camera is shipping is low quantities (i.e. less than 100 units, I was actually told about 10 at a time). The manufacturing is apparently happening in Singapore. 

If this is true, what on earth are they playing at?

Surely they must have the ability to scale their production to demand.

At a rate of 100 units per month there's a good chance it will take a year to go through the pre-orders and that is a VERY conservative estimate of 1000 pre-orders. I expect they had a lot more than that given the consumer pricing and attractiveness of the spec AND the temptation of people to keep the Pocket pre-order open whilst they cancel others, or even move their pre-order from a more expensive model to the Pocket.

You can't ship such low quantities in this market, even in a niche part of it. Just doesn't work.

Blackmagic need to give us proper answers on their production capacities and whether they can ramp up, otherwise all we're going to be lead to do is speculate that it might take a year for some people to their cameras and that isn't useful or constructive for Blackmagic.

If you don't like the RX100 mark II you can always get an RX100 mark I with a wooden handle for $2k.

http://www.hasselblad-stellar.com

 

It's the redefinition of ridiculous...

It's a text book illustration of excessive profit chasing will result in the death of your brand.

I used to associate Hasselblad with medium format image quality and $45,000 cameras.

Now I associate them with rebadging old Sony cameras which you can pick up for $400 on eBay.

The design and finish of the Lunar isn't even nice. The RX100 mod is even more lazy, practically the only change is the grip.

Hasselblad are toast. DSLRs like the 36MP D800 are now good enough to replace medium format and digital backs. The company was bought out by a venture capitalist firm recently who were asked to look at ways of leveraging the brand for more profit and the disastrous Sony rebadges are a direct result of that.

Under current management practices (which aren't sustainable) and non-engineering lead product launches, let's see how long they last for. Want to take bets? 2 years?

12 stops of DR on the sensor.

How much of it works its way into 8bit? Let's do the maths.

Dear people of the DSLR community, including photographers. Herein lies an enlightening example of the problem with many pro video people as epitomised by Peejderj here. They are craftsman, even talented some of them, great understanding of the practicalities of shooting but they all have tunnel vision.

They put the practical realities of shooting AHEAD of everything else, including inspiration, intuition and spontaneity - those ingredients are critical to art-house filmmaking, narrative shorts and music videos.

The procedure is most important to them, and meeting a spec, delivering something quantifiable, by a set time.

And they are often incredibly arrogant. Only the shoots they have made a career doing are shoots, the rest is just pissing about, struggling away with workarounds, etc. Hey Peejderj... Upstream Color, GH2, enough said.

Downsampling hardly hurts raw on the 5D Mark III. The image is very well sampled indeed and even performs on a chart. Did you see the joint Slashcam / EOSHD tests vs C100?

MJPEG is a terribly inefficient 8bit codec and very old, 1D C really suffers from it. Doesn't grade. Huge file sizes. ProRes is far superior.

"Most even non-event shoots just aren't like that Andrew"

Thanks for the real world lecture. Next time I am in my real world shooting at an abandoned Berlin sanatorium with actresses and a great script I will remember to cancel the whole thing because it doesn't fit your narrow minded view of a shoot FFS.

in fact this test was based on RAW

The issue is that noise reduction is clearly applied to the images posted.

Therefore the test is invalid.

There's not much difference anyway even then. The lows are clearly crushed on the RX100 M2 to make it look better in reviews. I'm unimpressed.

Also if a $999 camera can make a profit and bundle 10bit HDMI and ProRes into the deal, why can't Canon do this at the $6000 mark? It's ridiculous.

10bit HDMI could be a real saviour of DSLRs. Panasonic should put on on the GH5 and feed uncompressed 10bit 4-2-2 LOG down it. They wouldn't need raw if they did that.

You forget that raw, aside from being an ultra creative workflow, is not all about 'raw' rather it is about bypassing the god awful H.264 mode of the 5D3.

Struggle. Haha. Half measures. Tee hee.

Pressing a record button on a DSLR isn't a struggle.

Getting 14bit film negatives off the card isn't a half measure.

Full frame sensor - no half measure there either!

I don't decry your personal reasons to shoot on what you shoot and neither should you mine, but looking at it objectively you have to admit you lost :)

The image is just flat out better!

From official forum -

BMPCC: Still waiting on the green light (I assume from some form of manufacturing QC) for mass shipping. No numbers yet (I don't think they even want to know them) but a few more demos have begun shipping to retailers. It should be a couple or three business days before those start shipping out. You're not getting RAW on the first wave. That's coming later on a firmware update. 
BMCC4K: Still has about 3 to 4 weeks worth of development before those are ready to be approved for shipping. Not sure what the technical issues are, but those are taking a bit more time.

Key bit - Still waiting on green light to start mass production of Pocket.

13 stops fits nicely into 12bit, converts nicely to 10bit.

Remind me, what is DR of C100 and the bit depth?

Also, there's no peaking.

And still frame recording:

Should have a stills mode though, linked to shutter release. Still reading...

From the manual:

I believe this is the first 10bit HDMI output I've ever seen on a consumer camera.

I'm not surprised that Brawley prefers the 13-stops the BMCC offers. Especially if the BMPC isn't even quite hitting 12-stops right now.

 

I never understood why people were pre-ordering the BMPC before they saw footage. Especially with new sensor tech like the global shutter. 

 

At the end of the day, cinematographers want gorgeous images. BMCC provides in spades. BMCC is being used in professional productions as a B-cam to Alexa. If you need global shutter because you love to whip pan, the BMPC might be a good choice. 

 

Andrew -- thanks for the update post on Blackmagic. You might toss in the new PDF manual from Blackmagic. On a disappointing day, it was fun to read a little bit more about the camera systems.

Cheers! The manual - http://www.blackmagicdesign.com/media/5813056/Blackmagic_Camera_Manual_July_2013.pdf

Just got back from the L.A. Blackmagic event today. I suspect Blackmagic is about to get ranted on by quite a few online sites for pushing back the release date that they so confidently affirmed wouldn't be an issue back at NAB.

 

The Blackmagic Pocket is also a slow trickle. According to some dealers yes the Pocket cameras will start shipping over the next week or so....straight to the Blackmagic offices and not to dealers! That's right, the Pocket cameras will actually first stop at Blackmagic where they will receive a firmware update, and only then will they start to be shipped to the dealers. I'm told to expect a very few trickle, so for some people who preordered the Pocket cameras, it could still be a couple of months away.

 

The Blackmagic Production camera was also a disappointment, not just for the delayed shipping, but also for the fact that they still seem not quite ready in the software/firmware departments.

 

Lastly, Resolve 10 is supposedly still on track for "3rd quarter" which could be any day, or still a couple of months away.

 

All in all not a particularly exciting or revealing day with Blackmagic....but they did have free cookies!

Thanks for the first hand info.

Well, my suspicions of the last few weeks it seems were justified. There were a lot of hints.

I don't know how many orders of the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera they need to ship to satisfy all customers in August. I can see it being that unless they ship 1000, it might be the same situation as the BMCC in 2012/13, and that is unacceptable. If they trickle out 30 a month, it just won't cut it. At $999 that is a product that needs the higher quantities to succeed.

Maybe now, people can better understand my disappointment and anger over what is going on at Blackmagic. All the signs pointed to this recently, and it is something they cannot really afford.

That the Pocket Camera goes from the factory to the Blackmagic offices strikes me as having a manufacturing setup in China as opposed to in-house, though I have no idea what exactly the set up is - I expect this will cause further delays before it reaches customers because if Blackmagic are putting the new firmware on production models for the first time and hit a snag, or it needs testing extensively then we're going to be in for a further wait.