When watching films at the cinema, or in HD on your TV at home, there is a notable difference between your quality of the footage on the screen, and anything you can capture yourself, utilizing an everyday HD video camera. That is mainly due to the truth that professional filmmakers typically use cameras worth more than £100,000, and a complete host of additional professional kit, such as lighting rigs, lenses, filters etc.
Taking dcp under consideration, its highly unlikely that the common hobbyist, cash-strapped student or up-and-coming filmmaker would be able to afford this sort of equipment. However, there is an alternative solution.
At just over £2000, the Blackmagic Cinema Camera is really a fraction of the cost of most ‘cinema quality’ cameras, and is defined to be always a real game changer when it comes to putting professional-standard video capture in the hands of the ‘domestic/pro-sumer’. The Blackmagic is with the capacity of recording 2.5k Raw footage, which is more than enough for the common home user. At almost twice how big is HD, most people’s home computers will battle to actually display video on that scale.
The Blackmagic helps considerably with post production workflow: The editing and colour grading process occurs after shooting, gives a much wider range of colour to work with compared to the average camera. Depending what codec the video was recorded in, it might be digitized straight into editing software, such as Final Cut Pro without the need for transcoding.
Included with the camera is a new version of Davinci Resolve 9 Colour Correction software. Offering you have the hardware to take care of the file sizes in the home, this software will help you to colour grade your footage to achieve whatever look you need, i.e. you may want to create a cloudy day look sunny.
You can find 13 Stops of Dynamic range featured in this Camera, which quite simply, means the picture is awesome. For those in the know, the opportunity to harness light going into the lens of the camera so allows them to achieve a very specific ‘look’ or ‘feel’.
To check the camera’s dynamic range, it has compatibility with EF (Electric-Focus) lens mounts – the typical lens found on Canon DSLR and SLR cameras, and ZE lens mount, that exist on all Carl Zeiss DSLR/SLR lenses.
For actually recording on the camera itself, it includes a SSD (Solid State Drive) recorder, that is compatible with a host of card brands including OCZ Vertex 3, Crucial C300, Crucial M4, Kingston V100 (64GB, 120GB, 240GB), Kingston HyperX 240GB.
For easy navigation, the camera features a neat 5″ touchscreen, that allows one to label and mark your clips easily, while on the fly. The ability to edit direct from the up to speed HDD (hard disc drive) is incredibly ideal for those doing quick change edits.
To be able to transfer data quickly, the Blackmagic includes a Thunderbolt port – an input on the camera allowing a super-fast connection to a computer or input at the opposite end. Specifically, the Thunderbolt port transfers data at an astonishing 10Gb/sec, via two channels – that’s 20Gb/sec! To provide you with a comparison a standard 2.0 USB port will transfer data at 480Mb/sec.
In general the Blackmagic Cinema Camera is a complete game changer: it has the potential to completely revolutionise the way in which film and television is produced, and opens up the planet of cinematic quality footage to small production outfits. The seamless workflow of the camera throughout all stages of the production process gets the potential to lessen post-production turnaround, shooting schedules, and inevitably budgets.
