10Apr Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera hands on and first impressions
A lot of people are excited about Blackmagic’s 4k camera announcement which finally delivers a 4k camera for under $4000. This is something manufactures have failed to do over the past several years and Blackmagic will make a lot of money filling this segment of the market. You might consider 4k camera to be a revolution, however I think the real winner here is the ultra compact Blackmagic Pocket Cinema camera.
At the pre-order price of $995, it shoots ProRes 422 1080p footage in a camera body that makes the Sony NEX 7 look fat. The ProRes codec isn’t as data intensive as RAW DNG but still offers more than enough headroom to grade your footage in post. The Pocket Cinema camera shoots on SDXC cards which means there is no need to muck around with SSD drives.
The lens mount is micro 4/3 which means you can adapt it to just about anything you need. The Pocket Cinema camera also has plenty of inputs and outputs including HDMI out, headphone out, and 3.5mm stereo inputs. No word yet on the HDMI output, it might be possible to record RAW DNG externally, but I haven’t gotten confirmation on that.
Controls and button layout seem straightforward and build quality on the Pocket Cinema camera is top notch. The 3.5 inch LCD screen also looked good and I found it pretty easy to pull focus, especially with the focus peaking turned on. It’s also nice to see that everything is done with physical controls instead of a touch screen, it makes navigating the menus much easier.
The Pocket Cinema camera camera has the same battery compartment design seen in Sony cameras. This provides a very nice comfortable grip, however most people will be attaching this tiny little camera to some kind of rig.
I haven’t decided if I’ll be pre-ordering the Pocket Cinema camera but it’s certainly a tempting proposition for the size and price. I’m not sure if any electronic 4/3 to EOS adapters will work with this guy right out of the box, but I hope to get ahold of someone who can give me a little more information on that. It would be nice to use this camera with a simple metabones adapter. I’ll post some more information once I’ve had a chance to talk to a rep.
April 10th, 2013 at 4:15 pm
The pocket cinema camera will have (by launch) 12bit “lossless” compressed DNG recording capability. Storage wise it’s something like 30 minutes on a 128gb SDXC card.
Sources:
http://vimeo.com/63675961
http://bmcuser.com/showthread.php?3484-Discussing-the-new-Compressed-DNG-RAW-Files
April 10th, 2013 at 6:34 pm
I’m pretty sure the production version WILL have 1.5:1 compressed RAW DNG recording. A Blackmagic rep clarified this during an interview on newsshooter.com
April 10th, 2013 at 7:45 pm
We can’t switch to m43 we have DLSR in our URL 🙂 Does look nice though.
April 11th, 2013 at 5:15 am
DeeJay,
If you want to iris down that EF glass you could use this:
http://store.redrockmicro.com/livelensmft
I didn’t see anything about supporting IS.
Metabones Speed booster might be a better bet, when the MFT version arrives.
Deejay can you check a few things?
-Are there audio meters on the display? A manual method to control the audio (no AGC either?)
-Does it have an anti aliasing filter?
-Runtime on the battery?
Many Thanks!
April 13th, 2013 at 3:08 am
I would buy this if a Nikon lens mount is available.
September 9th, 2013 at 7:58 am
I know this is a video camera but could the footage be used to HQ stills from like its big brother? I know the BMCC has a different shutter but Im just wondering.
PS love the youtube channel & your site!
September 9th, 2013 at 8:49 am
As with any HD camera, you can pull still from the video stream. Not really the best way to go, but it’s useful enough for photos that are only intended for the web.