Captain Hook, a Cinematographer out of New Zealand, got the opportunity to take a beta version of the Blackmagic Production Camera 4K for a music video outing. Here is a rough cut of some of their footage.
I’ve had the pleasure and privilege to be testing out the BMD 4K the last little while.
I went out and grabbed footage like with the previous two cameras just to see how it did ‘out in the wild’, but i also arranged with my good friends Tanya and Lance from The Storyboard to bring the camera onto a music video they were working on with me as 2nd Unit DP. Kent Belcher was the main DP for this shoot and a Red MX was to serve as ‘A Cam’ with me operating the 4K as ‘B Cam’. After the first couple of shots of the shoot, Kent and Tarn (Director) were loving the 4K and it basically became ‘A Cam’.
The shots i’ve included in this video are random clips i picked myself and don’t reflect the edit or final video (still in progress as i write this). What was interesting to me is that this was a night shoot and i had the camera set at ASA400 (had already tested at night with 800 which is at the end of this video) and the red was at 1200 yet Kent and I were both surprised the Blackmagic looked brighter on the monitors!
The rest (and bulk) of the footage as i said is just me grabbing footage when i had the chance (busy time of year for everyone!), but i’m still impressed with this camera. I didn’t think global shutter would be a big deal for me, but i LOVE the motion from this camera, and the colour is what i would expect from BMD (i REALLY like it).
Honestly i kind of went into this thinking i probably wouldn’t like this camera as much as the other two, but right now i like it more! The images are really nice, really really nice. This time the BMDFilm coming from the camera has a lot more contrast and saturation than the previous two, so you don’t have to do anywhere near as much to grade it (but yes i already have a LUT i’ve made/been using with it to speed things up even more). I went for quite a contrasty/saturated grade with most of this to see if i could push it ‘there’ (combined with my LUT i made it for it). I think it holds up really well.
I can see people LOVING the images from this camera, i know i do. Thanks again to Blackmagic and the hardworking team there for everything they’re doing and for allowing me to be a part of the process, it’s truly appreciated.
All footage was shot Prores 4K. I don’t normally say this, but even compressing this video for upload was a disappointment compared to the Prores from Resolve. You need to play with files from this camera yourself, vimeo truly is the great equalizer and i can’t wait for the H265 replacement to H264. An UHD version/link will be coming soon.
Lenses used: Sigma 18-35/1.8 – Canon 35/1.4L – Canon 50/1.2L – Canon 85/1.2L (YES IT WORKS!!!) – Canon 100/2.8L – Canon 70-200/2.8L IS
Vimeo
The shots i’ve included in this video are random clips i picked myself and don’t reflect the edit or final video (still in progress as i write this). What was interesting to me is that this was a night shoot and i had the camera set at ASA400 (had already tested at night with 800 which is at the end of this video) and the red was at 1200 yet Kent and I were both surprised the Blackmagic looked brighter on the monitors!