Wow.
This camera is an absolute joy to use. It’s essentially a lens, sensor and solid state drive. No frills, nothing fancy, just a solid 1.6kg block of metal which records exactly what’s in front of it. Perfect.
After filming for a few hours on the afternoon we received it, I discovered that it is also totally unforgiving. If your lighting is crap, the image will be crap. But WEOW does it look good in direct sunlight. The exposure is so strange to judge coming from a few years of dSLR histograms and EV metering. The only aid is zebras, much like you find on broadcast cameras. You can set them to 80, 85, 90, 95 or 100%, and they do the job just fine, allowing you to choose what you’re happy to lose to clipping. So the first mistake I made was assuming that “13 stops of latitude” meant “IS CAPABLE OF ACTUAL MAGIC”. If you expose for the skylight windows of an otherwise unlit office, you will indeed capture the details of the shadows. However, if you intend to then grade for some sort of normal exposure for the interior, you will find that the image is very noisey and frankly unusable. Once you accept that lighting is not obsolete just because the camera has buckets of dynamic range, things become a lot more fun.
I expect to learn a lot about lighting with this camera. I believe it’s ruthlessly truthful representation of what’s in front of it will challenge me to light more gracefully. Perhaps using more contrast than I’m used to, higher ratios and less dependence on huge soft sources. Definitely more on that to come.
The truly wonderful thing about this camera is the absence of h.264. Even the proress is a GIANT step up. It’s just wonderful missing all the horrible DCT gubbins (that’s discrete cosine transform for those inclined to wiki it) which comes with that horrible acquisition format. All there is to see is a fine grain-like sensor pattern lightly dancing in the shadows.
Problems:
- The backfocus thing – this is a known issue which will be fixed free of charge according to the BMD forum. Apparently Canon were dicks, and didn’t tell Blackmagic Design how deep the flange on an EF mount should be. Blackmagic measured it up, but Canon make theirs slightly smaller than correctly calibrated and neglected to tell their competitors. So the distance from lens mount to sensor plane on the BMC is a millimeter or so out for EF lenses. Anything released from now on will apparently be calibrated for EF lenses. We must’ve got one of the last ones which is out.
- Finding a DC cable to connect a V-lock battery plate to the camera has proven very difficult. For now, I built one from Maplin parts, using mini-coax as the cable, for those interested.
- Meta data entry – I still don’t understand how the system works exactly. If you tap the screen you can enter details and change take / shot / scene numbers and can set them to auto increment independently. For some reason, the default scenario paragraph keeps showing up as the shot description, which is something to do with hunting I think? Anyway, I can’t figure out how to change that per shot, rather than globally. If I sit for a few minutes working on that alone I’m sure I’ll figure it out, but for now I just want to film!
It’s too much fun – I don’t really have time to upload footage – I have my favourite toy ever sitting in my office!
Did I say toy? I meant professional tool, obviously. We had to shoot a few shots for a proposal today, so perhaps we’ll post some of it here tomorrow. To be honest, the pressure to produce ridiculously beautiful images immediately with this camera is pretty high. I know a lot of people who’d kill to have one of these things, because I was one of them a few days ago. So I’d prefer to wait until we’ve got something really worth showing off so I don’t seem undeserving of this utterly wonderful piece of kit.
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