Ehetyz

A very interesting video about how to optimise exposure on the BMPCC4K from one of the best channels about filmmaking and cameras on YT (IMHO), hope you guys will find it useful! ?
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8hHFt3ChZ8

I've seen good on-set camerawork totally ruined by terrible color grading, and mediocre work absolutely salvaged by a good, high effort grade. I've seen both happen to my footage and to the footage of other people. 
Nowadays I grade most of my work myself after a series of cases where the final graded footage looked way worse than what I had on my simple single LUT monitoring (due to being handed over to editors not experienced in grading). I would still like to do way better myself - after years with Resolve there are tons of things I'm still learning.
Good color grading is absolutely essential in this day and age, at least on cinematic footage shot on LOG or RAW.

Yeah I'm gonna chalk this up as some serious rose-tinted glasses towards those old BMD:s. I'm not saying they're bad but I know I won't touch one with a ten foot pole today - and I used a BMCC almost exclusively for two years. Anything BMCC did the new BMD:s can do - and a lot more. In fact the original color science on the BMCC was kind of a pain in the ass in hindsight.
Also consider the fact that you're comparing a camera that's been out for what, five years, with thousands of hours of footage available online, to a brand-new one people are slowly adopting and coming to terms with.
Anyways, I'm having fun with my P4K and have already used it on ten or so commercial shoots. On gimbal, as a B-cam for stealing quick shots, and even as a broadcast cam on a christmas cooking show live stream  - was able to match it perfectly to the URSA with my own custom LUT and it ran flawlessly through the show.

we need tha guns for tha tyrannical government tho
if shit ever hits the fan with the US gov and yall find out whos really in control of things, youre going to be thanking god almighty that theres an army of 100 million gun owners in america

Yeah I'm gonna chalk this up as some serious rose-tinted glasses towards those old BMD:s. I'm not saying they're bad but I know I won't touch one with a ten foot pole today - and I used a BMCC almost exclusively for two years. Anything BMCC did the new BMD:s can do - and a lot more. In fact the original color science on the BMCC was kind of a pain in the ass in hindsight.
Also consider the fact that you're comparing a camera that's been out for what, five years, with thousands of hours of footage available online, to a brand-new one people are slowly adopting and coming to terms with.
Anyways, I'm having fun with my P4K and have already used it on ten or so commercial shoots. On gimbal, as a B-cam for stealing quick shots, and even as a broadcast cam on a christmas cooking show live stream  - was able to match it perfectly to the URSA with my own custom LUT and it ran flawlessly through the show.

Yeah I'm gonna chalk this up as some serious rose-tinted glasses towards those old BMD:s. I'm not saying they're bad but I know I won't touch one with a ten foot pole today - and I used a BMCC almost exclusively for two years. Anything BMCC did the new BMD:s can do - and a lot more. In fact the original color science on the BMCC was kind of a pain in the ass in hindsight.
Also consider the fact that you're comparing a camera that's been out for what, five years, with thousands of hours of footage available online, to a brand-new one people are slowly adopting and coming to terms with.
Anyways, I'm having fun with my P4K and have already used it on ten or so commercial shoots. On gimbal, as a B-cam for stealing quick shots, and even as a broadcast cam on a christmas cooking show live stream  - was able to match it perfectly to the URSA with my own custom LUT and it ran flawlessly through the show.

Yeah I'm gonna chalk this up as some serious rose-tinted glasses towards those old BMD:s. I'm not saying they're bad but I know I won't touch one with a ten foot pole today - and I used a BMCC almost exclusively for two years. Anything BMCC did the new BMD:s can do - and a lot more. In fact the original color science on the BMCC was kind of a pain in the ass in hindsight.
Also consider the fact that you're comparing a camera that's been out for what, five years, with thousands of hours of footage available online, to a brand-new one people are slowly adopting and coming to terms with.
Anyways, I'm having fun with my P4K and have already used it on ten or so commercial shoots. On gimbal, as a B-cam for stealing quick shots, and even as a broadcast cam on a christmas cooking show live stream  - was able to match it perfectly to the URSA with my own custom LUT and it ran flawlessly through the show.

Regarding the person who produced the video about returning his P4K in favor of his Micro - from a straight shooting experience, he needs to have his head examined
We've got a lot of cameras, mostly BM, and a couple of Micros, whose images I love. In fact I wrote at one tome that if BM would take the Micro cinema sensor and put into a real camera body I would buy them for three times their cost.
The Micro is the most disfunctional camera you can shoot. A simple menu change takes forever in any environment. Tiny unrecognizable buttons on tiny stripped down senor box - but what a sensor and color science. And it's that way by design. It's supposed to be a drone or special use crash cam for TV/cinema production - not an actual shooters cam.
The P4K is the exact reverse of that - perhaps the easiest small camera to use on set or in the field - a brilliant camera as far as shooting goes.
And the idea that upressing the Micro footage in Resolve is better than shooting 4K/UHD on the P4K is a real head scratcher. Just spend some time learning how to optimize the image at aquisition and then how to work with the amazingly maleable image to get the look you want.
It took very little time shooting and working in post to get the image to look like the original Pocket or Micro etc.
You can't make any of the previous BM cameras (except the UMP) look like the P4K but you can easily do the reverse if you want to learn how.

Not sure about the RAW controls on the Lite version, I've been using the paid/Studio version since 2014 or so.
 
This one was made back when I used premade LUT:s pretty heavily, I think in this one I used a Visioncolor Osiris LUT, either KDX or Vision 4. In addition to the LUT I added a manual soft clip on overexposures and separated the skintones and gave them a warmer look than the rest of the image. I think there was a denoise on the first node as well, at a strength of 2.0. That's my go-to denoise level, on 4K/4.6K RAW footage it removes distracting noise but retains the detail.
Aforementioned method provided a hard-edge, modern look to the footage, but currently I gravitate (in narratives) more towards the early to mid 90's filmlike look with softer details and tones, smooth rolloff, less contrast and more pronounced grain... And lots of haze. Probably because it reminds me of the movies I grew up with - and now it's actually attainable with low budget.

Thank you!
Everything was shot in 800ISO, RAW 3:1. As far as exposure goes, the darker exterior scenes were underexposed, while using the flare pushed the whole dynamic range to use. The interiors were exposed "correctly" (I've later picked up a habit of exposing one stop to the right on the UM4.6K). I pulled down the shadows a bit in post.
Funny thing about matching BMD cameras, the newest Resolve has an option to conform them into BM Color science 4, which has huge benefits. Not only does it make matching them a breeze (I've been grading a feature we shot with two cameras rolling throughout, URSA and BMCC2.5K), but it also alleviates some problems the previous color sciences have (Poor color distribution on BMCC, magenta tint on skintones on URSA). Saved me countless hours on mixing and matching the two cameras. 

I do not see red or arri implementing good autofocus. So not sure why blackmagic should. Its a cinema camera, and ibis or autofocus are not on my havetoo shortlist. 
 
The pocket 4k is on place 1 for sure on my list. 

Man this not only looks incredible, it is a decent little story and really done so well. What ISO were you shooting at? And how bright was the footage before your correction/grade? Also was this ProRes or Raw and I assume it was 4K?
Man I am such a fan of your work. If I can get a quarter of the quality you’ve been getting, I will be a happy filmmaker. 
I may pick up another Micro eventually after seeing what you do with BM cameras and how John Brawley edits the Micro footage with UMP footage on the show he DPs. They’re so cheap right now, they’re almost a no brainer. 

So I finally put my first Ursa Mini short film up on Youtube. It's a horror short called "Last Line of Defense" and was shot in spring 2017 to serve as a stress-test for the then-new Ursa Mini 4,6K. It's not a test video though, it's a full - if short- short horror film with serious effort put in the filmmaking essentials - from wardrobe to the effects.
 
The main mission here was to put the UM into as extreme lighting situations as possible, so I drew up a story about a border station in some unknown future, where a group of men guard the station against an unknown threat, in the darkness, with only emergency flares to serve as lights. So we were able to experiment extreme contrast scenarios and low light.
We shot the short film over a weekend, spending one night in the "border" set in the woods, and another one in the "bunker" set we built in the basement of our studio. The biggest cost in the whole short film were the emergency flares, of which I bought 10, mainly to get enough coverage for the finale - one flare gave us less than a minute of shooting time.
This was my first touch with the Ursa Mini, and it's what sold me on the camera. The grade is quite simple by my current standards, but the images we were able to capture in those quite extreme lighting conditions turned out shockingly well. Most of shooting was done handheld with unstabilized lenses (Sigma 18-35 1.8, Samyang 24 1.4 and Pentax Super-Takumar 50 1.4) The forest set was lit with a set of Aputure Amaran led panels and a 4000K 1600 lumen light bulb that were all cast through a large diffuser, and the interior set used mostly  a mix of small tungsten practicals and available sunlight.
Once again, the worst bottleneck for the image quality ends up being the Youtube compression.
 
Hope you enjoy the short, and feedback is very much appreciated
 
 

So I finally put my first Ursa Mini short film up on Youtube. It's a horror short called "Last Line of Defense" and was shot in spring 2017 to serve as a stress-test for the then-new Ursa Mini 4,6K. It's not a test video though, it's a full - if short- short horror film with serious effort put in the filmmaking essentials - from wardrobe to the effects.
 
The main mission here was to put the UM into as extreme lighting situations as possible, so I drew up a story about a border station in some unknown future, where a group of men guard the station against an unknown threat, in the darkness, with only emergency flares to serve as lights. So we were able to experiment extreme contrast scenarios and low light.
We shot the short film over a weekend, spending one night in the "border" set in the woods, and another one in the "bunker" set we built in the basement of our studio. The biggest cost in the whole short film were the emergency flares, of which I bought 10, mainly to get enough coverage for the finale - one flare gave us less than a minute of shooting time.
This was my first touch with the Ursa Mini, and it's what sold me on the camera. The grade is quite simple by my current standards, but the images we were able to capture in those quite extreme lighting conditions turned out shockingly well. Most of shooting was done handheld with unstabilized lenses (Sigma 18-35 1.8, Samyang 24 1.4 and Pentax Super-Takumar 50 1.4) The forest set was lit with a set of Aputure Amaran led panels and a 4000K 1600 lumen light bulb that were all cast through a large diffuser, and the interior set used mostly  a mix of small tungsten practicals and available sunlight.
Once again, the worst bottleneck for the image quality ends up being the Youtube compression.
 
Hope you enjoy the short, and feedback is very much appreciated
 
 

4.6K has worse low light (usable range maxes out at 800ISO) and is heavier (translates to requiring heavier rigs and tripods) but OTOH it also has hugely better ergonomics (you can actually shoot handheld/shouldered like an ENG camera), better sensor in many ways (bigger, higher res for oversampling, more DR, better color) more codec choices, better connections for broadcast shooting etc. You can actually use the onboard sound recording as well - if you have quality mics. Been working with one for two years now and while I love the Pocket 4K, Ursa is still the big brother, and Pocket the B-cam.

Just got my G2X / Nucleus Nano combo! Beautiful packaging, will test it out with P4K asap!

Pairing the Pocket 4K with some good vintage glass is pretty blissful. There's been a lot of talk about how it looks more digital and modern than the previous BMD cameras - and yeah sure, I guess it's not as organic and grainy as the 2,5K. But throw on some c-mount glass or a speedbooster and old Pentax stuff and the camera sings. Haven't used it with this kind of setup on a production yet, (it's playing second fiddle to the Ursa Mini and been on a gimbal on about half a dozen shoots now) but I'm just having a lot of fun taking it on a walk and just taking some throwaway nature shots. It's something I used to do back when I used the 5DMK2 regularly, and I'm happy it has revitalized that habit again.

This was taken with the speedbooster and a Pentax 35/2.3 M42 lens on a cool winter afternoon. One of my favourites due to the very distinctive, oil painting-kinda way it renders out of focus areas and the transition between them and in-focus areas.

I picked up the one that was most readily available from local dealers, which was the Zhongyi lens turbo 2. It's an EF speedbooster and I just have simple M42-EF adapters on my M42 lenses (those adapters cost like 5-10 euros a piece). I think the lens turbo does a boost of 0,74x or something like that, essentially turning it into a Super35 crop. I found it to be optically good enough to mount a Samyang 24/1.4 or a Sigma 18-35 1.8 without noticable aberrations or degradation.
I haven't seen any need for an IR filter at least so far - though so far I haven't used it in really extreme circumstances (ND+heavy sunlight) - it's the period of polar night after all. In any case, I think these new blackmagics are way better about IR pollution than the 2,5K.
I use a Zhiyun Crane 2 currently. It's... okay. The first setup was a doozy, but it carries the P4K well. Requires a baseplate though due to how wide the camera is. It's the first gimbal I've owned and takes some getting used to. Definitely different beast than an oldschool steadicam, but way more pleasant to use than a full-size Ronin. Not 100% happy with my gimbal skills yet but I'll get there eventually.

There's a couple of projects I've done with that lens and P4K/Ursa but they're not available online yet. Here's one where I used almost exclusively lenses with distinctive bokeh, however it was shot on the BMCC2.5K and 5DMK2 (ML RAW). In this one I used the aforementioned lens, Super-Takumar 50/1.4 and a Petzval 85/2.3 to max out the old film noir kind of feel.
 

There's a couple of projects I've done with that lens and P4K/Ursa but they're not available online yet. Here's one where I used almost exclusively lenses with distinctive bokeh, however it was shot on the BMCC2.5K and 5DMK2 (ML RAW). In this one I used the aforementioned lens, Super-Takumar 50/1.4 and a Petzval 85/2.3 to max out the old film noir kind of feel.
 

There's a couple of projects I've done with that lens and P4K/Ursa but they're not available online yet. Here's one where I used almost exclusively lenses with distinctive bokeh, however it was shot on the BMCC2.5K and 5DMK2 (ML RAW). In this one I used the aforementioned lens, Super-Takumar 50/1.4 and a Petzval 85/2.3 to max out the old film noir kind of feel.
 

I picked up the one that was most readily available from local dealers, which was the Zhongyi lens turbo 2. It's an EF speedbooster and I just have simple M42-EF adapters on my M42 lenses (those adapters cost like 5-10 euros a piece). I think the lens turbo does a boost of 0,74x or something like that, essentially turning it into a Super35 crop. I found it to be optically good enough to mount a Samyang 24/1.4 or a Sigma 18-35 1.8 without noticable aberrations or degradation.
I haven't seen any need for an IR filter at least so far - though so far I haven't used it in really extreme circumstances (ND+heavy sunlight) - it's the period of polar night after all. In any case, I think these new blackmagics are way better about IR pollution than the 2,5K.
I use a Zhiyun Crane 2 currently. It's... okay. The first setup was a doozy, but it carries the P4K well. Requires a baseplate though due to how wide the camera is. It's the first gimbal I've owned and takes some getting used to. Definitely different beast than an oldschool steadicam, but way more pleasant to use than a full-size Ronin. Not 100% happy with my gimbal skills yet but I'll get there eventually.

Pairing the Pocket 4K with some good vintage glass is pretty blissful. There's been a lot of talk about how it looks more digital and modern than the previous BMD cameras - and yeah sure, I guess it's not as organic and grainy as the 2,5K. But throw on some c-mount glass or a speedbooster and old Pentax stuff and the camera sings. Haven't used it with this kind of setup on a production yet, (it's playing second fiddle to the Ursa Mini and been on a gimbal on about half a dozen shoots now) but I'm just having a lot of fun taking it on a walk and just taking some throwaway nature shots. It's something I used to do back when I used the 5DMK2 regularly, and I'm happy it has revitalized that habit again.

This was taken with the speedbooster and a Pentax 35/2.3 M42 lens on a cool winter afternoon. One of my favourites due to the very distinctive, oil painting-kinda way it renders out of focus areas and the transition between them and in-focus areas.

Pairing the Pocket 4K with some good vintage glass is pretty blissful. There's been a lot of talk about how it looks more digital and modern than the previous BMD cameras - and yeah sure, I guess it's not as organic and grainy as the 2,5K. But throw on some c-mount glass or a speedbooster and old Pentax stuff and the camera sings. Haven't used it with this kind of setup on a production yet, (it's playing second fiddle to the Ursa Mini and been on a gimbal on about half a dozen shoots now) but I'm just having a lot of fun taking it on a walk and just taking some throwaway nature shots. It's something I used to do back when I used the 5DMK2 regularly, and I'm happy it has revitalized that habit again.

This was taken with the speedbooster and a Pentax 35/2.3 M42 lens on a cool winter afternoon. One of my favourites due to the very distinctive, oil painting-kinda way it renders out of focus areas and the transition between them and in-focus areas.

Pairing the Pocket 4K with some good vintage glass is pretty blissful. There's been a lot of talk about how it looks more digital and modern than the previous BMD cameras - and yeah sure, I guess it's not as organic and grainy as the 2,5K. But throw on some c-mount glass or a speedbooster and old Pentax stuff and the camera sings. Haven't used it with this kind of setup on a production yet, (it's playing second fiddle to the Ursa Mini and been on a gimbal on about half a dozen shoots now) but I'm just having a lot of fun taking it on a walk and just taking some throwaway nature shots. It's something I used to do back when I used the 5DMK2 regularly, and I'm happy it has revitalized that habit again.

This was taken with the speedbooster and a Pentax 35/2.3 M42 lens on a cool winter afternoon. One of my favourites due to the very distinctive, oil painting-kinda way it renders out of focus areas and the transition between them and in-focus areas.