Andrew Reid

It is early days yet people.

Hmm run & gun is not the BMCC's forte. I'd chose the FS700 for that. It is more flexible, more versatile, does more things, adapts to more lenses, even has AF for run & gun if you need it. Now my advise to narrative filmmakers / music video producers / and many others is different, and it comes down mostly to the image and price as there are quite large differences between the two in those regards. The main issue about the FS100 and FS700 is their highlights, quite digital looking and I think the BMCC has a better image in day light, more cinematic, finer noise grain. But the FS100 (and I love mine) has great low light, so does the FS700 to a slightly lesser extent. Good dynamic range, but 8bit colour and AVCHD. 240fps is beautiful, I like it for slow-mo. They compliment each other, if you can afford the expensive gear - $8000 for an FS700 it isn't too much to stretch to another $3000 for the BMCC. If you can only get one, get the BMCC and spend the remaining money you were going to spend on the FS700 on lenses. Lenses are important.

A £300 NVidia CUDA card like the GTX 670 [url="http://www.ebuyer.com/367979-palit-geforce-gtx-670-2gb-gddr5-displayport-hdmi-dual-dvi-pci-e-graphics-ne5x67001042-1042f"]http://www.ebuyer.co...x67001042-1042f[/url] And DaVinci Resolve, which comes with the camera. 8GB RAM minimum, i5 or i7 CPU eSATA / USB 3 for external drive storage At least 3GB RAID internally External 6GB to start with either in multiple USB drives or a NAS.

[img]http://www.eoshd.com/images/anamorphic-prores-vs-raw.jpg[/img] The end :D

You can transcode from Raw to 2.5K ProRes 444, saving half the space. But you will need some sort of USB 3.0 / eSata or Firewire 800 SSD reader. You can't transcode the ProRes on the same SSD as the raw, you won't fit it all under 480GB. Buy a 3GB internal HDD and an eSata 3.5" HDD / 2.5" SDD IcyBox reader / dock with two slots, Firewire connectivity on the back for your Mac. Don't use USB 2.0.

They put sake in the Panasonic team's Kirin!! GH3 is going to be amazing.

Have you tried grading CineForm yet JG? Doing some research into that compressed raw codec.

I'll see if I can fix it in AE. But odd that GH2 H.264 straight off the card looks different in Quicktime compared to Premiere & VLC Player. What is going on there? Seems like more of a OSX issue than AE to me. Windows box may not have same issue as I am seeing.

Now ProRes 444 will always have the edge on 8bit H.264 but something is not right with Quicktime. At the point of transcoding the Blackmagic Cinema Camera raw (Cinema DNG) in AE CS5.5 to H.264 and importing that file to Premiere CS5.5, H.264 looks superb. Grab that same file and play it in VLC - looks as good. Play it in Quicktime and it turns a pale yellow, and the reds de-saturate. Also notice her sparkly green/blue eyes in the ProRes version - but really washed out on the QT H.264 screen grab. Again, VLC Player doesn't have same issue with H.264 nor does Premiere. Now Mountain Lion can finally play AVCHD I also notice this with my GH2 H.264 based AVCHD as well. Quicktime lifts the blacks and washes out the colour. So Apple... Questions to answer I think. This is major problem because H.264 is the most common codec in the world for us filmmakers to deliver material to the viewer. Click to enlarge - [img]http://www.eoshd.com/uploads/prores-h264-red.jpg[/img]

It is early days yet. People are still working it out for themselves and thinking out loud. If you have seen my twitter feed you will realise Bloom is not alone in that.

There are certain lenses that look better on S35 and some that look better on a 2x crop sensor. Nice to have a choice, I'd certainly prefer to use a 18mm T1.6 on S35 rather than Blackmagic. But then I'd rather use an 85mm F1.4 on the Blackmagic or GH2 as a super fast telephoto than on full frame where it is a standard boring portrait lens with uncontrollable DOF :) All the comparisons to full frame and claims of 'small chip' are bunk. S35 is large, Blackmagic is medium, consumer camcorder is small.

[quote name='pietz' timestamp='1346517519' post='17102']thinking that a couple of guys with new ideas would make it better than professionals, without actually knowing how and why they do it that way, makes you ignorant. [/quote] I'm entitled to think that. There's always good ideas around, both inside the industry and outside. I'm not ignorant of the smoother, faster, convenient workflow of ProRes, it is great to have. But personally I will not be chopping 20% of my resolution down for the sake of avoiding a bit of transcoding. I'd rather transcode from raw to ProRes and delete the raw files than record directly to ProRes, boxing myself into that decision and unable to reverse it later for even a single shot.

[quote name='tabac' timestamp='1346517569' post='17103']I sat in on the Skyfall rushes last year (ArriRAW), looked amazing. Is it essential? No, most would fail to spot the difference without a bench test. I am only talking Alexa here, I fully intent to shoot both RAW and DNxHD on my BMC, that is the beauty of this cam, it can do both.[/quote] ProRes on the Alexa is superb but don't forget with the BMCC you can transcode to CineRaw and still have a raw workflow at 1/5th of the storage requirements. Or even H.264 at 8bit but a high bitrate and you maintain the benefit of 2.5K then, even if when you throw the raw files away you lose some ability to grade. And the camera costs to buy what an Alexa raw unit costs for 2 days rental. Ha.

[quote name='tabac' timestamp='1346521306' post='17105'] "important projects are done in ARRIRAW ..." thats just wacky. No low budget feature I know of has been shooting ArriRAW, I asked for it. Got shown the numbers, then thanked god the Prores 4:4:4:4 on the Alexa looks damn near as good. (Low budget being 500K to 4Mil) [/quote] You can't afford to shoot raw with a 4 million dollar budget? Amateurs are editing raw in their bedrooms on laptops for the price of the camera. Is creativity completely dead in the high budget movie world now? Is it all about the numbers and the money? Maybe try spending less on marketing and more on workflow? £1000 per day for the Codex is a lot of money but it pales into significance relative to everything else in a $4m budget surely?

[quote name='Chris Santucci' timestamp='1346521323' post='17106'] The crop factor makes it unusable in my world, raw or not. [/quote] Why?

[quote name='Glenn Thomas' timestamp='1346505570' post='17092'] Yes, it is fast, and works well for 8 bit footage too as the files are converted to 10 or 12 bit. If you grade using First Light and don't use any NLE effects, pans or crops, videos will render faster than real time.[/quote] I'm trying out a Windows beta version of CineForm Studio Premium which supports CinemaDNG from the Blackmagic thanks to David Newman. Did you convert CinemaDNG to CineForm in that too Glenn, or in another program using the CineForm codec for Premiere?

[quote name='Xiong' timestamp='1346485280' post='17077'] One of the weirdest(and maybe lazy) things I hear people say is "we don't need RAW." I'd have to agree, we don't 'need' it, its just very VERY nice to have. Its not that they are taking your Prores format away from you, they are adding RAW along side to it! Lets say we don't have alot of gear, only a few lights, simple boom mic to H4N. Its fine when we're in a controlled set/environment, but if we try to move to say a parking garage? Or an office building with bad yellow florescent light? Wouldn't we want to shoot in RAW? Where we have the option to try and fix these issues? [/quote] Indeed, a large production would spend a lot more than they spend on post, to fix issues with a location and lights. We, the ones who are smart and think differently, will be able to do a lot of that in raw now. Every time we get more power allocated to us at $3000, the politics fire up... Is it any wonder hey?

[quote name='pietz' timestamp='1346485079' post='17076'] i work for a commercial production studio and we just shot a job with a budget of 2.5 million $. with this kind of budget you would expect the freedom to shoot on every possible camera out there and youre right. we shot on the arri alexa in 1080p prores for so many reasons. i find people here who say "people who dont see the benefits of raw, dont know what they are talking about" and the funny thing is that i get the feeling that many of YOU dont know what they re talking about. for example mattbatt, if you honestly believe that in a few years prores will be seen on the web, you have NO idea what youre talking about and clearly dont know a thing about prores. honstely. ProRes was created to be graded in professional purposes. you absolutely cannot compare this to a high bitrate H264, it will never be the same! you cannot put the argument out there saying raw gives you 12bit and prores only 10bit if you dont know what it means in real life. there is absoluty no way in hell and physics that you can tell the difference between 10bit and 12bit material. its so far from being possible. 10bit means more then 1 billion different colors that can be created. even if you decide that you want 75% grey to be white, thats more than enough. also andrew 13 stops is not a plus for raw, it doesnt have anything to do with that. the alexa has 14 stops and records in prores, whats the point youre trying to make? as one of the people in the 2012 camera shootout said, "its much more about workflow these days" you can import the alexa files directly into AVID and also use them for grading. thats about as easy as it gets. not only the space on HDDs but the transfer speeds and computing power you need to seemlessly edit uncompressed is extremly pricy. if you havent compared Uncompressed footage to ProRes you should not be talking here. do your homework and come back with evidence, because it blows my mind every time i realise that prores seems to have no boundaries and its about a tenth the size. [/quote] What a condescending tone. ProRes on the Alexa is not the same as ProRes on the Blackmagic. I don't yet know how ProRes performs on this camera, I very much doubt it will give you 13 stops of usable dynamic range or as much as raw. It certainly doesn't give you as clean resolution or as much or if or a way to reduce aliasing by downsampling in post to 1080p and equally it doesn't up-res as well to 4K. So let me get this straight, with your $2.5k budget you spend a boat load of cash on a monitor, 20 people to construct a tent so you can see it, a truck with a generator so you can power it and then two more trucks so you can move it around. Takes you an hour to move 100m with that crap. And you have this Alexa beast that shoots ArriRaw... AND... You choose NOT to shoot raw to gain a little hard drive space. Insane! I'm not anti-ProRes. I'm just in love with the look of CinemaDNG on the Blackmagic and that extra resolution provided by 2.5K and the way the raw material can be pulled around so much in post. Image quality all the way for me. I feel that if the film and TV industry really wanted convenience and to save money, ProRes is the last thing I'd look at frankly. If only you guys listened to all that new blood with the better ideas THEN you would save time and effort, instead of dismissing them as not knowing what they're talking about.

[quote name='Glenn Thomas' timestamp='1346489211' post='17080'] I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Cineform Raw here? This would give you the best of both. A true raw workflow, but with much smaller file sizes. I've been using Cineform for years, and the image quality has always been top notch. [/quote] I'm looking into CineForm. Performance wise it does sound promising too, the transcoding is mega fast - does in 5 seconds what AE takes 2 minutes to do.

I remember Philip enjoyed 4K raw on the Epic. I don't see why he should be giving up on the Blackmagic raw workflow after only a few days. Certainly not as storage or processor intensive as 4K raw that is for sure! Maybe his cat is in charge of the workflow, and he hasn't been feeding it enough Whiskers :)

The issue is easy to understand, and I fully appreciate it. I won't be using raw for everything, only when I think it is needed. I won't be archiving away 100TB of DNG files either. That would be insanity. HDD space is cheap but not THAT cheap! I can see the argument for ProRes, but actually I think maybe a workflow that results in 2.5K H.264 would suit people even better than ProRes. ProRes files are still relatively huge compared to DSLR codecs.

[quote name='bwhitz' timestamp='1346467790' post='17063'] +1 This is almost everyone on DVXuser and DVinfo. The discussions over there are reaching the inanity level. Some are even going as far to claiming that RAW is gimmick, the BMCC is a "toy"... and real pros "get it right" in camera. Or "if you know what you're doing... 8-bits and 4:2:0 is more than enough". It's funny because when DSLRs were all the rage... it was almost a crime to shoot on anything less than a 4:2:2 codec. I guess now that there are "pro" large-sensor cameras that students and amateurs can't afford they're justifying the use of sub-par codecs again. [/quote] I remember this well with the DSLRs, all the discussion was about the poor codec, lack of grading flexibility, no 4-2-2, blah blah blah. Now we have raw, and we still can't win. They are saying you should get it right in camera! When we really did need to get it right in-camera with picture profiles etc. on DSLRs, nobody mentioned getting it right in camera, they were all mentioning 'you can't fix it in post so these aren't professional cameras'. Damned if we do, damned if we don't, with some people. The negativity is astounding. Well it is a good job we had DSLRs and our optimised picture profile settings so we are used to getting it right in camera by now. Don't let any so called pro patronise you when it comes to getting it right on the shoot. I am sure we will all be endeavouring to get it right 'in-camera' raw or no raw. Raw certainly is no excuse for sloppy operating.

[quote name='madaspy' timestamp='1346463425' post='17058'] I shot 267 GB with my 7D which comes to be about 13.5 hours of content. In Prorez 422 1.22 TB Raw 6.9bTB [/quote] I've also been looking at the drive space issues. I can get 6TB of HDD space for around 300 EUR. I won't be shooting 13 hrs of docu footage. I tend to cut in-camera. I don't do long takes or live events, or interviews, etc. For a music video or a typical EOSHD 'on location' vignette I'd probably even only do 1-2 hours worth of footage, I almost do edit with the shutter button! Treat the Blackmagic Cinema Camera like a film camera. Best quality for the price, use it when you need to, and not all the time. John Ford cut in-camera. He did this to stop the bastard producers re-editing his film!! For many a docu interview, a DSLR is just fine for run & gun. The BMCC is an artistic filmmaking tool designed to ease aspiring filmmakers into the world of post, the world of raw and the world of DaVinci Resolve. Smart move by Blackmagic and incredibly generous too. That price will gain them a lot of ground in the market too, and the image will gain them a lot of ground even in the pro market vs Red and Arri! Remember that the raw files can be deleted and they can be converted into ProRes. If you shoot ProRes in-camera like I said in the article, you are making that decision a lot earlier and I kind of find that a bit unnecessary given how quick it is to transcode later over a single night, depending on how much footage you have. You certainly won't be needing 6TB of SSD drives which would be very expensive. Unless you're shooting 13 hours per shoot without ever dumping to HDD. Again use the SSDs like 30 minute long film reels. 240GB = $180. Not expensive. These are not Red SSDs. I believe it is important not to say a blanket 'no' to raw, or a blanket 'no' to ProRes. It really does depend on the shoot, or even the scene. Just use it when you need to and it will work out fine.

[quote name='pss' timestamp='1346461061' post='17054'] i am a still shooter and so i find the discussion funny....raw is a no brainer....yes, it has drawbacks but the advantages more then make up for it....afaik the only people shooting jpegs are journalists whi have to beam the image back as the event is still going on...everybody else shoots raw....for good reason... for still shooters this is also a much easier transition into grading....we are all used to using adobe or other raw developers to make the adjustments.....now we can stay within lightroom or aperture (or even phase one?) to get what we are used to from our stills...not to mention being able to use every single PS plug in.... [/quote] Yes I agree totally, all this blubbing about raw workflows being unworkable is coming from people who haven't got their workflow figured out yet. It will take time, and they will come round to it. I'm quite happy flattening the raw file (full recovery of highlights and recover all the shadows) then doing some grading in Premiere on the H.264 or ProRes I transcode from the raw files in After Effects. It is SO easy to do. And I am learning DaVinci Resolve. It is a new camera, I will give it the time and effort it deserves. And a crop sensor really suits my shooting style, I am so used to it and it worked great for me with the GH2. Everyone is CONSTANTLY going on about how difficult a wide angle is at 2.3x crop. What about how much more easy it is to get a very fast aperture telephoto shot? People never mention that, yet it is really cool.

As I said before global shutter is under development at various companies. But the industrial and scientific sensors which are already on the market with global shutter have trade offs in that mode, regarding less image quality. (Less dynamic range, more noise) So it will still be a while before the development projects (say at Panasonic and Sony) reach a certain performance level to make it worthwhile. I don't think there are many people who want to solve jello by fucking image quality. If what I believe about the BMCC's sensor is correct, that too has a global shutter mode. Have a guess why it isn't used :)