Australian video company Blackmagic Design announced its Blackmagic Cinema Camera (BMCC) earlier this year during the NAB Show in Las Vegas.
The 2.5K camera features a built-in SSD recorder and is designed to record footage in native formats including 12-bit CinemaDNG raw, Apple’s ProRes 422 (HQ) and Avid’s DNxHD at 220 Mb/s.
“Then it can offload its material over a Thunderbolt connection at up to 10 Gb/s for instant editing that is facilitated by including metadata directly from the camera,” reports creativePlanet. “Priced at $2,995, Blackmagic has bundled the camera with software packages including Resolve and UltraScope, which total more than the cost of the camera itself.”
As previously reported on ETCentric, the original camera was outfitted with an EF mount that accommodates Canon and Zeiss lenses, and the company later announced a Passive Micro Four Thirds (MFT) model for lenses with manual iris and focus capabilities. “Other lens formats, like PL or Nikon, can be used with third-party adapters,” explains the article.
Jacob Rosenberg, director and CTO at Bandito Brothers in Culver City, describes the camera as “awesome,” noting that Blackmagic truly understands the needs of video professionals.
“Blackmagic Design is aware of the color science that goes into using video formats like CinemaDNG raw files to get what we need out of them,” he says. “It gives you great latitude at 2.5K for an HD deliverable, giving us extra headroom for enhancements like stabilization.”
Marco Solorio, owner of OneRiver Media in the San Francisco Bay area, has shot several interesting tests, including one that offers a comparison between 12-bit raw footage and 8-bit alternatives.
Blackmagic has given the camera a 13-stop dynamic range, that serves bright and dark shooting environments. “Solorio finds that the camera has very solid low-light capabilities and says you can boost its sensitivity all the way up to 1600 ASA,” notes the article.
“This camera has a 15.81mm x 8.88mm sensor that is sized between Super 16mm film and Micro Four Thirds,” he says, “and some have expressed concerns over its potentially limited depth of field. But we’ve found that using a fast lens, like f/1.2, and stepping back so you can zoom in a bit can put backgrounds out of focus the way most modern shooters expect.”
Australian video company Blackmagic Design announced its Blackmagic Cinema Camera (BMCC) earlier this year during the NAB Show in Las Vegas.
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