A little tease

Well.  It’s been a while between drinks on the Blackmagic Cinema Camera footage front.

I’m literally getting emails and tweets everyday clamouring for more footage !  I think I’m actually very close to being able to show some more clips. There are some things coming up which I can hopefully talk about soon.

In the meantime, I wanted to share with you some stills.  These are framegrabs out of Resolve for a little test I did this weekend with writer/director Ben Phelps.  You’re looking at ungraded and then graded stills.  My Resolve skills are still amateurish at best,  and these grades are single node grades with no noise reduction or sharpening.

The footage was shot using ProRes 422 (HQ) with the “film” curve.  This is still something that’s being feverishly developed, so it will still change by the time the camera ships, but you can see these lovely flat ProRes files are grading up beautifully.

Lighting here is very very simple. I was by myself really with no electric support.  (I did have the excellent service of Ella Gibbons who pulled focus for me.  )

I had just the ambient bounced daylight that was coming though the big windows.  The sun was hitting the building across the street.  I had a few pracs on which didn’t do much in the scheme of things.  I also had a single Kino Diva set as a mixed grill and a 1×1 Lite panel.  I was basically using these as edges and for shaping.

There’s a lot of mixed colour temperatures in here.  Daylight (changing as the light went down) plus the Kino, the daylight litepanel AND a mix of pracs in both tungsten and fluro.  Plus some regular domestic fluro.  A great test for us !

The camera was shooting at ISO 800 @ 5600K and using Zeiss CP2’s in EF mount (supplied by my friends at Lemac rentals).  Most of the CU’s were shot at T2.8.  The wider shot towards the windows was T8 (from memory).

EDIT.  The wide shot below here was the 18mm.  The two close ups were the 85mm and the final shot was a 50mm.

About johnbrawley

Director Of Photography striving to create compelling images
This entry was posted in Black Magic Cinema Camera, Equipment and tagged , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

56 Responses to A little tease

  1. Eric says:

    Waiting for you to upload original ProRes files…
    (not YouTube / Vimeo compressed footage)
    Cheers 🙂

  2. Raad says:

    Wow … thank you John … waiting for the footage …

  3. Shiva Reddy reddy says:

    it looks promising,
    but my concern is what are the widest possible lenses to use on this?

  4. N.M. says:

    Looks gorgeous.

  5. alanbstardmp says:

    sadly I was told today it is unlikely BMC will take Canon L glass. Looks like I’m out!

  6. Hey John,

    Lovely stuff! Out of curiosity, do you recall what the exterior was spot reading at? Were you exposing for the interior or to keep the highlights?

    Can’t wait for more 🙂

    • johnbrawley says:

      IN the wide shot I simply exposed using the Zebra function of the camera. I put the shite parts of the building on the right hand side out of the building at 100%. That part of the building was being lit by the sun BTW (the sun is behind the camera)

      I find take any readings of exposure level. There is no extra lighting in the wide other than the pracs. I actually had a Kino on for a while, but it looked to *lit* to my eye.

      jb

  7. Quobetah says:

    That doof looks pretty hot even at f2.8!!

  8. Jeremy Woods says:

    Well. The depth of field question seems to be answered here and it looks just fine to me. Most actual movies I see done by professionals don’t look like they were shot on a full frame with a 0.95 wide open anyway so I don’t see what all the concern is. You say it’s essentially the size of a Gh2 sensor? I have a GH2 and have no issues with its dof. Thanks for these pics John! Now i can pre order the damn thing.

  9. John, thank you so much for your work and answering all the questions that the entire internet is throwing at you.

    I have one question. Are you shooting from the final release model of the camera or is it still being tweaked? Is the tweak happening through firmware or hardware?

    Very excited for new footage.

  10. mattbatt77 says:

    Thanks John, this looks wonderful! I really like how it handles the two lamps in the wide room shot. That shot looks simply like FILM! Baby Alexa is on pre-order for me 🙂

    PS: My 16-35 F2.8 L seems like it will be fine for wide shots! I’m happy!

  11. John, you are my dealer. I am your addict – and I want more! Thanks for the updates. 8 days to wait!

  12. Hi, link to large photos is empty 😦 page not found

  13. jank says:

    Hi John, thanks for the sneak peek, and for your helpfulness in general. Much appreciated.

    A minor heads-up, I think you got something backwards in your post, might confuse some:

    “These are framegrabs out of Resolve for a little test I did this weekend with writer/director Ben Phelps. You’re looking at ungraded and then graded stills. “

  14. alvin says:

    Hi John, maybe a old question…but do you know if the camera will have other mounts available or its EF only ? thanks for your deep commitment to this project 😀

  15. D$ says:

    Thanks for sharing and responding John. The thirst for this market is unbelievable right now. I’m curious as hell along with the rest of them.

    Wish my Nikon F-Mount Primes (F-Mount) would fit perfectly on these.
    Looks like more adapters for me. *le sigh*

  16. Adam says:

    Can not wait. Is it still comin out this month?

  17. vidanaselva says:

    Looks great. When will you be releasing new footage?

  18. Michael says:

    Hey John question about ssd for camera. Do you know if it matters whether it’s a 7mm ssd or 9.5mm ssd? When looking at ssd saw two different sizes and wasn’t sure if it mattered.

  19. Pingback: John Brawley Shows off More Graded Material from the Blackmagic Cinema Camera - NoFilmSchool

  20. Pingback: Interesting grabs from the Blackmagic Cinema Camera » cinema5D news

  21. Andy Chappell says:

    Hi John
    The camera looks easy to use on a tripod, but how easy is it to use handheld?
    I find shooting with most DSLR rigs a bit of a pain to use, cause you always need a hand free to focus, zoom or change exposure (that is when you’re shooting solo, and don’t have a focus puller), I prefer not using any rig, or sometimes a monopod. So, I’m curious how well someone can operate the BMC handheld (focusing, zooming, adjusting exposure, etc) Since every camera is different and has it’s own peculiarities, I was just wondering if this is more a studio/tripod centric camera? Have you tried using it handheld, with or without a rig yourself?
    Don’t get me wrong, I’m really excited by this camera, I think the images are looking fantastic and tempted to trade in my 5DmarkIII for one!
    Cheers
    Andy

  22. snoopyrawdogg says:

    Looks good wish it was moving though but love it keep up the good work do you have a youtube channel?

  23. Rich says:

    What kind of issues, if any, have you run into with this camera while working with it? Are you allowed to discuss any software/firmware//hardware issues?

  24. clairstyler says:

    Hi John! and thanks for all the info, you are doing a wonderful thing here, devoting time! A question, does it have on-screen audio meters during recording? And is it going to be on the shipping model/firmware?

  25. mike says:

    mike!

    we use next year 2 cams with extreme 3d-kinekt sync for small action movie.
    the black magic i call ” BLACK MAMBA” – i like it it is what i would build… MIKE

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  27. Hi John, the images, when clicked, lead to a blank page. Could you please look into it. Thanks.

  28. Daniel says:

    Hi John,
    I have an idea for firmware implementations, that at least I (but I think others to) would really appreciate.
    I have calculated, the if the sensor would read out only 1080×1920 by cropping the sensor, it would be exactly a super16 sensor size. If they would do this, using super16 lenses would become possible. Resizing afterwards oviously also is possible, but when shooting cinemaDNG files would become unnecesarily heavy.
    You probably are in contact with the Blackmagic guys, so if you like the idea to you could suggest them this idea?
    Ovviously the mount is not really suited for super16 lenses as most of them are PLmount, but I’m going to remove the eos mount anyway, and will try to replace it with an IMS mount.

    thanks
    Daniel

    • Daniel Natzke says:

      Daniel,

      From what I gather about the camera, there is no cropping of pixels on the camera. As I heard from a BlackMagic Rep, the 2.5K image is scaled down into 1080p which helps provide better anti-aliasing for the image.

      So it should still be m4/3 size image area.

  29. Daniel Natzke says:

    Hello John,

    I was wondering how the camera is holding in terms of Rolling Shutter?
    I couldn’t see any in the footage, which has me greatly pleased. However, it did seem to be mostly on a tripod or such.

    I love everything about this camera, but the Rolling Shutter is what is holding me back from it. I hope the Black Magic can reduce the Rolling Shutter output to something like the FS100 or AF100, that would sell me.

    Thank you for your posts, and keeping us all updated, we greatly appreciate it!
    -Cheers!

  30. Hi John,

    Question about the CMOS sensor. In handheld – how did the vertical sway affect the image? Does BMD have software in camera that helps remove some of it – similar to the red?

    Thank you,

    Nathan Apffel

    • johnbrawley says:

      Well you can tell how much it affects the image for yourself. Take a look at the footage.

      There is no software that improves this in the camera.

      I haven’t heard that RED does this either.

      There are POST PRODUCTION plug ins that claim to FIX rolling shutter issues, but I think that’s pretty hit and miss. Resolve at the moment, doens’t have any correction for this.

      jb

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  32. newdvguy says:

    Casey_1.2.2 looks noisy to me in shadows/darker areas & on her legs. In original files (RAW/Prores) or due to compression?

    Also, if part of original, does Resolve fix the noise?

  33. virtualevans says:

    John
    I have this artifac with my MFT Bmcc at 800 ASA as well
    [video src="http://www.diglikes.com/bmcc/rolling4.mp4" /]

    please see the rolling lines in dark area.. What do you think is this?

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