Keep an eye on the video above today. Blackmagic will live stream “Camera Update” and “Post Production” news later.
Read moreBlackmagic to announce new camera related news at 12 noon PDT (8pm London)
Something for Blackmagic to look into here on the EOSHD Forum thread for the Pocket 4K. Anecdotal evidence say the camera is suffering from macro-blocking and banding in blue skies which you don’t expect to see with a 10bit codec let alone a RAW codec. Since the BRAW codec update, various users have been claiming it’s a backward step for the film-look of lossless Cinema DNG raw.
Read moreBlackmagic Pocket 4K – why I am staying with the Cinema DNG firmware
NAB 2019 begins this weekend and exhibits open to the public on Monday 8th. One of the big talking points this year I think will be DaVinci Resolve 16 and hopefully we will see a big swing away from Adobe Premiere for editing as a result. Adobe will also unveil updates at NAB but I am uninterested, as I really do think their reliability isn’t fit for pro work any more, or any kind of work for that matter.
On the camera side it looks a bit quiet so far. Canon confused us all with the EOS R external RAW recording tweet, but it’s entirely possible their reps don’t know the difference between external HDMI recording and RAW any way.
Read moreNAB 2019 predictions and major talking points – BMPCC 4K Pro anyone?!
Blackmagic RAW has arrived on the Pocket 4K camera, meanwhile Cinema DNG has been remove due to patent claims, and basically being an obsolete format with poor performance and compatibility. I don’t really mourn Cinema DNG, but it’s a shame they had to remove it for legal reasons.
What’s very interesting on the hardware side is how Blackmagic are able to deliver such a dramatic firmware update. A lot of consumer cameras have hardware based on ASIC chipsets. The Blackmagic Pocket 4K has a FFPGA (Fast Field Programmable Gate Array) which is a type of chip that can be completely reprogrammed at the hardware level by software commands. This is how Blackmagic are able to deliver such fundamental features as an entire new raw codec, which would have necessitated a hardware change on a normal camera.
Blackmagic are providing a BRAW Player as well for MacOS which allows quick preview and playback of clips from the Finder. BRAW clips are a single file unlike Cinema DNG, which is a folder of still DNG frames in sequence.
For the first time ever I’ve come face to face with the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K and the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K has come face to face with me. It’s time to face facts without doing an about-face.
