cantsin

  If I might chime in: For running & gunning outdoors (with an ND filter!), one of the stabilized (with on-lens O.I.S. switch!) Panasonic MFT zooms such as the 14-140mm, 12-35mm or the old 14-45mm is fine. For low light and/or planned shots, the MFT Speedbooster in combination with (preferably manual) Nikon or Samyang primes is just great. A speedbooster-ed Nikon 28mm/2.0 Ai-s I use produced beautiful, rich, organic images and color rendition, and still is a normal focal length (56mm full frame equivalent) on the Pocket. I can't say the same positive things about adapted 16mm/c-mount primes many of which are soft, have blurry corners and render not-so-great colors. 

  I stand corrected; the information I had on weight and size came from B&H's site (http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/902115-REG/Panasonic_DMW_BLF19_Battery_Pack_For.html) but seems to be wrong. If we believe the data on Amazon.com, than it weighs 3.2 ounces = 90.7 grams. Regarding the actual size, information online is highly contradictory, and Panasonic's own site doesn't give any data. Maybe you could shed some light on this mystery in your final review of the camera?

  The DMW-BLF19 battery of the GH3 has a size of 5.1 x 5.1 x 7.6 cm = 197 cm^3, and a weight of one pound/450 grams. The EN-EL20 battery of the Nikon J1/Blackmagic Pocket  has a size of 5.0 x 3.0 x 1.4 cm = 21 cm^3, and a weight of only 36 grams.   Nine times the weight and nine times the size would be quite a price for twice the battery capacity!   (I strongly suspect that the Blackmagic design team settled on the EN-EL20 because its capacity-vs.-size efficiency, and because it's a battery that is easily available. One can find the EN-EL20 or compatible batteries in practically any consumer electronic store, including airport shops, which can be an advantage on the road. The DMW-BLF19 is more exotic since the GH3 is rather sold by camera shops than your average mass market consumer electronics retailer.)

It's clearly the case of a small manufacturer of specialist gear who accidentally created a mass market product, and has trouble scaling to that market.   As a (happy) owner of a Pocket, I foresee disappointment among the many classical video amateurs/home video shooters who seem to be buying it (if you look at most of the Pocket footage currently uploaded to Vimeo and YouTube, for example). It's a quite demanding camera in comparison to, for example, a GH2/3. Exposure is difficult, focusing is difficult, white balance is difficult, sound is difficult, obtaining a good image in post can be difficult.   Exposure is difficult because you need to exactly hit 800 ISO to obtain the rich 13 stop image. Unlike consumer and ENG cameras, the camera doesn't apply electric gain/signal amplification to the sensor for higher ISOs. The 200/400/1600 ISO modes only over- or underexpose the 800 ISO mode. If you combine this with a 180 degree shutter as a second (in the optimal case: fixed) parameter, you're left with lens aperture and ND filters as the only devices to control exposure in daylight, respectively with aperture and additional artificial light as your only devices in low light situations. (Last weekend, I shot a mini doc in a music/arts venue where even f2, 1600 ISO and a 360 degree shutter produced underexposed footage.) In addition, you need to expose to the right for optimal results (i.e. expose not for a balanced image, but expose as high as possible before highlights clip), which means that your footage will look overexposed out of the camera and require color correction in post.    Focusing is difficult because focus peaking can't be trusted (not only on this camera, but on all cameras that I've used so far) for really critical focus, and only works anyway when there are hard edges in the picture. The focus aid/loupe is tricky to use, not only because of the camera's quirky respective user interface (double click on the "OK" button, which frequently makes you land in the meta data input mask, and no whatsoever visual indication in the viewfinder whether you are in focus loupe mode or not), but also because of the native 1080p sensor and the drastic limit it imposes on the magnification factor of the loupe. This makes it more difficult to judge critical focus on the camera display. For complex focusing (rack focus with shallow depth of field), it's either hit-and-miss, or you need to use an external monitor.   White balance is difficult because it can't be locked to a reference motif (such as a grey card) but only adjusted in preset Kelvin values. The camera display is not contrasty enough and its colors are too washed out to give a reliable indication of correct white balance. Furthermore, there is no green/magenta tint adjustment, which is a severe limitation when recording ProRes under available light, including energy saving bulbs and fluorescent tubes with their green tint.    Sound isn't very usable even when recorded with an external video mic (known issue).   Stabilization can be difficult because you will only get wobbly and shaky images when shooting handheld with a non-rigged camera. Things get much better if you put the camera in a cage like Viewfactor's massive contraption (which more than doubles the body's weight from 355 to 740g), but gone is the light weight and stealth look if you do this. Otherwise, there are exactly two working stabilized lens options for the camera, the Panasonic 14-140mm and the Panasonic 12-35mm. Both are (too) expensive for their real optical quality, and their image doesn't look very cinematic.   Color correction can be difficult because, out of the camera and in most cases, footage needs correction: lowering exposure, conforming Cinema log to rec709. But the available LUTs are weird; both Blackmagic's and Captain Hook's LUTs produce turquoise-greenish highlights and skies. And not all NLEs do support LUTs in the first place. Resolve will be overkill and a complexity shock for most amateur/DIY/home video shooters; it's like throwing users into ProTools for basic sound editing of video tracks.   Wouldn't be surprised if lots of people will give up on the camera in frustration and go back to their GH2/GH3s or Canons DSLRs. (Which, on the bright side of things, could mean that the Pocket might soon become cheap on the second hand market.) From an opposite viewpoint, this camera is - metaphorically speaking - the (first) digital Bolex. An affordable, high quality yet quirky tool producing outstanding images.

  Beg to disagree. You might, eventually, prefer organic sharpness and true detail from a decent lens to an artificially sharpened consumer camera-like video image.   I'd say that the Blackmagic Pocket camera is like a studio monitor speaker with clean linear frequency response - on which good recordings sound really good, but crappy recordings sound crappy (as opposed to consumer stereo sets that boost certain frequencies to make everything superficially sound good or at least fat).   But I had to learn this the hard way. Wouldn't have expected that I would be so disappointed by the results of the c-mount lenses and see such great differences to high quality MFT glass.

  You are right that my post was misplaced in this thread, my apologies.   - Second hand prices for a naked 50D body over here are generally around 400 Euro (and I'm not sure whether you noticed that my offer includes a 64 GB high speed Komputerbay card, 16+8 GB Sandisk Extreme cards, 5 batteries, a battery grip, Camera Armour body protection, Firewire800 CF card reader, 4 lens adapters, plus a free Canon EOS zoom lens).

Yeah, as you said, crop mode and wide angle are mutually exclusive. And using a 500% crop of the lens for a 1080p image really pushes the limits of lens resolution. Even a Tokina 11-16mm would end up as a portrait lens, and doesn't have the resolution to perform well at 1:1 pixel level. So, for me, this mode is not really practical.    You're right that the 50D can do a lot - for less than half the price of a BMC Pocket, you get a nice photo camera aside from the raw video. But since I own other cameras and only needed the 50D for video, it doesn't make much sense for me to keep it, personally. (For those of you reading German, here's my sale offer on the Slashcam forum which I think is really a bargain.)

Well, just as you wrote and observed: The Canon DSLRs (with the exception of the 5D Mark III) alias badly, the Blackmagic Pocket more subtly.

None of the Nikon 1 cameras can record 1080p raw video - all they can do is shoot high speed raw photo sequences in their native photo resolution (which amount to sequences of images that one can use as a few seconds of video).

The black spot issue is fixed by the new firmware, and the white orb issue is fixed in all cameras that are now shipping. But if you own a Pocket from the first production batch and are affected by the white orb issue, you need to send the camera to Blackmagic's customer support for hardware recalibration. This can't be fixed with firmware.   I can 100% confirm this as I am the owner of an orb-affected first-batch Pocket camera, and have installed the new firmware. Still need to send in my camera for recalibration, and don't like the idea at all because the (current ProRes, not even raw) video image coming out of it beats everything that I've used before, including the raw video from a Canon 50D with Magic Lantern - click here for a comparison.   Kudos to EOSHD for getting this message out to a larger public despite its criticism of Blackmagic. In various web forums such as the Blackmagic User Forum, personal-view etc. the troll wars and hearsay around this camera have really got out of hand.

Just a personal conclusion: I've had the Blackmagic Pocket for two weeks and tested a large number of c-mount lenses from my collection on it, both classical 16mm cine lenses and cctv lenses.    In all cases, I have found the c-mounts to be significantly inferior to native MFT lenses (such as the SLR Magic 12mm, the Voigtländer 25mm, but also the Panasonic 14mm and 20mm primes), even when testing top tier lenses such as the Schneider 25mm/1.4 or the Canon 13mm/1.5. Sharpness/detail is significantly lower, the image gets unsharp in the corners. The only advantage I see in those lenses is their compact size. In some cases, they can be used as speciality lenses (the Ernitec 6.5mm/1.8 as a fix focus fisheye, or a VT 8mm as a psychedelic wide angle with heavy vignetting and color casts); the 16mm/2.0 Tevidon is a decent performer with constant sharpness across the frame, but surely not as a good as an Olympus 17mm/1.8 or Samyang/Rokinon 16mm/2.0.   Unlike on the GH2, vintage glass doesn't look good on the Blackmagic Pocket. Since the BM Pocket gives an uncooked, non-artificially sharpened image with true organic color depth, it looks best with a good lens. A bad lens just looks bad. 

For me, the problem with 50D raw video image really are the downscaling artefacts/false detail. Today, I tested it against the Blackmagic Pocket and came to the conclusion that I'll probably sell my 50D:   Canon 50D   Blackmagic Pocket   (Note that I did my best to match the colors of both images; the BM Pocket material was recorded as Prores HQ in cinema log, the 50D material in Magic Lantern raw video - all color correction in Photoshop.)   Oh yes, and the cleanest/sharpest image came from the Nikon V3 (raw high speed continuous photographs, downscaled to 1920x1280):  

  After Effects should automatically benefit from the improved Cinema DNG support since it's built right into the lower-level Mercury playback engine on which both Premiere and AE are based (and, with the update, Speedgrade, too).   I just wonder how much CPU & GPU power you'll really need for having full-blown Cinema DNG in your timeline. "Real-time playback", as promised by Adobe, is relative and might only be true for one or two tracks of ungraded footage, even on a comparably powerful system... (In that respect, wavelet-based raw codecs such as RED Raw and Cineform Raw offer huge advantages because they can be played back at lower quality/decoding depth without separate proxy files.)

Well, latest news is that Adobe promises us salvation for native Cinema DNG editing with the forthcoming Mercury Engine/Premiere/AE update. But it doesn't look like the proxy workflow will be improved at all. (While, with REDcode's and Cineform's wavelot codecs, you get automatic low-bitrate proxies just by decoding/playing back the original camera files at a lower quality setting. So we'll still wrestle with the issues that hmcindie describes, or need really potent PC hardware for real-time editing of native DNG.)

  In fact, I do know what you are talking about. But: Cinema DNG does not provide the proxy workflow that you describe, at least not without resorting to a debayered format like ProRes or DNxHD. Either you accept pain-in-the-neck round trips, or you work around the issue by converting into an alternative format/workflow like Cineform Raw. Yes, Red's workflow is nice, and so is Cineform, but both of them are based on a completely different (=wavelet) codec technology than Cinema DNG. Cinema DNG is just sequences of undebayered (TIFF-like) bitmaps, either uncompressed or compressed with a simple algorithm like LZW or JPEG. Wavelet codecs, on the other hand, provide built-in proxies (so to speak) without the need of recompression into a debayered format.   One of the reasons why Blackmagic's cameras are cheap, besides using off-the-shelf industrial camera sensors, is that DNG is free of patents and license costs. Red's codec is proprietary, and a Cineform Raw user license costs about one third of the Pocket camera.   In other words: raw â‰ raw.   (And no need to react rudely.)

  Have you ever practically worked with raw/DNG video, for example from a hacked Canon EOS, a Nikon V1, or one of the bigger Blackmagic cameras? It's a major pain in the neck, with multiple conversions, major roundtrips (often via XML import/export) required between a raw development/grading program (such as After Effects or Resolve) and your NLE (such as Premiere or Final Cut).   No NLE can sensibly edit raw DNG footage at this time, Premiere even dropped this feature altogether. RED and Cineform have good workflows based on lossily compressed raw (in the case of RED, with expensive hardware acceleration). I don't think that anyone who's already tried to edit raw DNG video wants it as their daily life bread & butter workflow, at least not with the soft- and hardware we currently have.   Or let's say, it's a pain in the neck for people shooting as one-man-bands, the ones who're likely to be on this forum. In team production, you'd likely generate ProRes or DNxHD rushes from the raw camera files, edit them without color correction/grading, and once the edit is done, send the original DNG files along with an EDL or XML file to a colorist who'll grade the edit in Resolve.    As soon as it will arrive in the Pocket, I personally would reserve raw DNG recording for beauty shots or shooting in mixed light situations where choosing the right preset white balance is tricky.

The larger BMC cameras write 5 MB per frame for 2.5k uncompressed raw. The equivalent for the 2k Pocket would be 4MB/s, but since it will write compressed raw, the net bit rate will be 2-3 MB/frame, resulting in 60-90MB/s for 30fps recording and 48-72 for 24fps.

  You have to rethink this paradigm with the Blackmagic Pocket, as I am doing (with my own large collection of c-mounts) at the moment. Vintage cine lenses were good on cameras like the GH2 with their highly processed video image. The GH2's firmware/built-in video encoders denoise, oversharpen and oversaturate the image, resoluting in sterile video when you use system lenses or very sharp/well-corrected adapted photo lenses.    On the Pocket, this is no longer true. You get an unprocessed video image with zero artificial sharpness, no in-camera denoising and flat colors. A cinematic image with gentle gradation, soft roll-off etc. can simply be achieved via proper color grading, because the nearly-unprocessed 10-bit log material has so much more dynamic headroom.   This also means, you don't want "filter" your image during recording (using a vintage c-mount lens with a warm, organic look, flares, vignetting etc. pretty much boils down to that) because that will limit your possibilities in post. A sharp, modern, even contrasty lens is not a problem, but an advantage on the Pocket.    These were the conclusions I drew after comparative shots with a Canon 13mm/1.5 c-mount lens vs. the modern SLR Magic 12mm/1.6, and a Schneider Xenon 25mm/1.4 vs. a modern Voigtlander 25mm/0.95.

I neither see battery, nor storage consumption as such a big issue. A 64GB Sony 95MB/s card can be bought for less than 60 Euro and holds 50 minutes of the Pocket's ProRes HQ footage. Likewise, the EN-EL20 batteries can be bought for 10 Euro a piece on Ebay, with 27% higher capacity (1020 mAh) than the 800 mAh battery included in the camera package (and used by Ph. Bloom for his camera test).   The real issues are others: No really good stabilized lenses are available for the camera because the optically stabilized Lumix zooms have strong barrel distortion (which gets corrected in-firmware by cameras like the GH2 and GH3, but can't get corrected on Pocket material without degrading resolution); The white orb issue kills the camera for shooting in many real life conditions: night street scenes, concerts, clubs/pubs for example, anything with a high contrast ratio. Let's hope that it will get fixed. The real issue, however, is the camera's user interface. White balance, shutter and ISO adjustment are buried in the camera's menu and not quickly available on dials or hotkeys. Adjusting any of those parameters requires at least 7 clicks on the miniature menu/arrow keys. You see that the user interface - which is the same as on the larger Blackmagic cameras - is optimized for touchscreens and raw recording, not for the arrow keys and ProRes recording of the Pocket. White balance only has 6 preset values, no possibly of individual adjustment through locking a subject (such as a grey card), and offers no green/magenta tint compensation. Again, you see that camera's interface was designed for raw shooting, where this doesn't matter, but not for ProRes. Also, focusing and exposure are much trickier than on cameras like the GH2 or Canon DSLRs with Magic Lantern. Focus magnification gives you a much smaller zoom into the image because of the sensor's lower native resolution; focus peaking isn't really precise by design for critical focusing, or low light conditions. Exposure is difficult because there are no Histograms, and Zebras only for highlight clipping. You have no idea or indication of underexposure. The audio recording limitations of the camera have been sufficiently covered elsewhere.

I got my camera shipped two days ago, perhaps because I had pre-ordered on the day that the camera was announced, and picked a friendly dealer. Yes, white orbs are an issue which I encountered right away shooting a street with cars at night. Didn't have issues though when I filmed during daytime with an ND filter like Thomas.    Since many former GH2 users are interested in this camera, I shot a short comparison (trying to match the Pocket image to the GH2 in post):   https://vimeo.com/73538448   My write-up of the strengths and practical weaknesses of the camera, as posted on the Vimeo page:   Conclusions   1) Although the German video site Slashcam found the non-artificial sharpness in the Pocket to be very high, it seems to me that the GH2 still resolves better image detail. (Not entirely surprising with an image downsampled from a 16 MP sensor as opposed to a debayered 2 MP image.) However, the GH2 video image would have been inferior resolution-wise if both cameras had been tested at 800 ISO.   2) In terms of dynamic range, gradation and shadow detail, the Pocket is in a different league than the GH2. This is already visible in the video image that has been graded to look like the GH2's. The possibilities to grade the image to match other looks/cameras are very limited for the GH2 and comparatively endless with the 10bit native ProRes material from the Pocket.   Caveats   ...for owners of the GH2 and similar (amateur) cameras: operating the Pocket is much more demanding in every regard: exposure, focusing, white balance.   1) With its high native ISO, camera absolutely requires the use of ND filters. They also are the best recipe against the camera's white orb/blooming problem.   2) The focusing aid zoom (for manual focusing) is less precise by design because it only zooms into a 2MP instead of a 16MP sensor; and while the camera offer focus peaking, I principally don't find zebras reliable enough for critical focusing.   3) Exposure aids are limited to zebras and, for electronic MFT lenses, an auto-aperture button. Thus, the camera encourages exposing to the right, which is not a good strategy if your scene has a high range of brightness (say: a street at night with cars driving by) and you need to let some highlights blow out. Highlight roll-off is harsh, and provokes white blobs if you overexpose by more than 2-3 stops. Conversely, there is no histogram or zebra to indicate underexposed parts of the image.   4) White balance is adjustable in a few preset Kelvin values, which is fine for photographers/cinematographers used to Kelvin temperatures for different film stocks. There is no possibility to set white balance by locking the camera to a neutral grey object, and no possibility to compensate for green/violet tint (a limitation when recording ProRes).   5) If you want a good image, don't use Panasonic's and Olympus electronic Micro Four Thirds lenses, at least no zooms and no focal lengths below 45mm, because their optics distort and require in-camera software correction. That also rules out all available stabilized MFT lenses. If you want to shoot handheld or with a simple handheld stabilizer, your focal length should be 14mm or less, and 17mm maximum. I found the SLR Magic 12mm/f1.6 to be a good all-round lens for the camera.   Older 16mm cine lenses, such as the Canon TV16 13mm/f1.5 or the Kern Yvar 14mm/f2.8, work as well, but don't resolve as good as a modern lens - and they are among the very few wider angle 16mm cine lenses that cover the S16 sensor of the Pocket.  

  Use step-up rings, or gaffer tape, or a combination of the two.

  Yes, but note that if you film in dusk, the difference between car headlights and the rest of the scene is about 4 stops, and at night, it might be something less 8 stops. If you expose to the right, the rest of your scene will be completely underexposed. Also, forget filming concerts, for example, with their big exposure difference between stage lights and ambient light.   Blackmagic advertises the camera as "everything you need to bring cinematic film look shooting to the most difficult and remote locations, perfect for documentaries, independent films, photo journalism, music festivals, ENG, protest marches and even war zones." This is certainly not true for the camera as it works now.

  Yes, have a lot of 16mm film camera lenses, and many of them work great.   But: blooming is an issue. You can't avoid it if you film scenes with highlights that are overexposed by more than 2 stops.

On the positive side of things, the image of the Pocket is really beautiful (when you don't run into the artifacts). I just made a comparative shot between the Pocket and the GH2, using the 12mm SLR Magic and the 25mm Voigtlander on both cameras, and the difference between the footage is like night and day - you really can't stand the (comparatively) oversaturated, artificially sharpened amateur video image of the GH2 any more in comparison to the genuine detail and non-plastic colors from the Pocket.   With the BMC cameras and Canon/Magic Lantern raw, it seems as if 8bit-h264 DSLR video now has become an episode (2009-2012) just like HDV camcorders were the episode before them.

  That's actually the good news, since Brawley had a pre-production model with an earlier version of the firmware. Since it's highly unlikely that the sensor was changed later (most likely, the camera was designed around the sensor), it might indeed be an issue with the current firmware and the way it translates the 12 bit sensor data into 10 bit Prores.   But we can only speculate at the moment. Blackmagic's head of hardware development has replied on Blackmagic's user forum that his team is currently investigating the issue and will release information soon.