Blackmagic 4K Production Camera - First Sample Videos from Grant Petty

[Will Turner]

Wow I didn't realise the new mac pro's were so tiny! That's amazing. And relatively cheap too, about half what I thought they were going to cost! Great point on hand luggage Andrew. To be honest I would have mistaken these for new mac mini's unless I knew otherwise; very impressive. 

 

To address the claims that AVCHD is a pain, it's not. I cut a short shot on a hacked GH2 to 176mbit on a 1.7ghz macbook air last year, it was a breeze. Didn't drop a frame. 

 

The only issue I have found with macs is the gamma issue with AVCHD. Most things are plug and play, cameras and printers and such, whereas with PC's you have to piss about installing drivers, software, et al. I have saved hours, probably days by now, by buying a mac. 

 

Anyway, back to the BMPC, the image looks good enough. It's another camera that I wouldn't mind using, along with all the other cameras available these days. 4k is cool, we finally get noise/grain that doesn't make everyone automatically think it's rubbish or a documentary. The dynamic range is the only flaw, seeing as the bottom stop is noisy as hell, we get what, 11 stops useable? Good enough, but nothing special. I'd prefer a BMCC with a speed booster. They should have partnered with metabones and released a camera with a built in speed booster. 

 

Global shutter is great, about time too. 

[mtheory]

Anyone know if Mac Pro can be upgraded to use NVIDIA cards?

[jcs]

NVIDIA upgrade: via an external Thunderbolt 2 PCIe chassis.

[levisdavis]

Interesting discovery... The Ultra HD footage from the BMPC plays perfectly fine on a Sandisk Extreme 95 Mb/s SDXC. Andrew had talked about form factor and how the Pocket is perhaps a better design... Who would have thought the BMPCC media would be powerful enough to record BMPC footage? *Footage does not skip frames when played on a Macbook Pro Retina with the built-in SDXC card reader. Found this out while at work. At the time, I had no alternative other than to pop in the SanDisk SDXC card to download / view the footage. What a surprise, huh?

[PeterF]

For those of you who have problems downloading 9GB zip file, I have extracted 13 video files from that big file and uploaded them separately to http://fil.io/FL5kj/Samples%20from%20Grant%20Petty

Premiere CS6 for some reasons opens them with lower resolution, but Premiere CC opens and plays it smoothly on my i7 notebook. I can even apply color correction filters, it still plays without frame dropping.

[JackHorror]