The newest addition to our video production and animation studio turned up yesterday to much excitement.
It’s a beautiful Pocket Cinema Camera from Black Magic. Also referred to as a BMPCC.
As we’ve found ourselves needing to shoot more and more video footage for corporate video productions it made sense to update our own equipment. The stunning footage it can produce will also compliment our own 3D animation and visual FX services.
The camera is rather special, allowing us to shoot stunning cinema quality footage at a more approachable price point and physical size.
We did have to weigh up spending more on a larger rig that would allow us to shoot 4k but in reality it’s not something we’ve needed to produce yet and the image quality this Full HD camera produces is exactly what we need. Then in the future when and if Black Magic release a Black Magic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K model (BMPCC 4k) version we can upgrade to that and hopefully the rest of the camera rig will be transferable.
The camera purchase included a superb Movcam cage meaning we can build up a full professional camera rig around the BMPCC. Plus a superb 20mm Panasonic Lumix lens.
We’ve added to this setup with a 14mm Panasonic Lumix Pancake lens and based on global recommendation a cheap 35mm CCTV lens from eBay which cost just £20 but shoots some lovely macro images considering the price. We’ve got our eyes on a lot of other stunning vintage lenses and modern zoom lenses with Optical image stabilisation. the plan is to build up a perfect set of lenses for filming both corporate and commercial video productions.
Needless to say we were a little excited when it arrived and jumped straight in (well out to a field) to try out a few lenses and camera settings.
For the first day we only had slow SD card to hand which meant the footage was a little jumpy but we were still able to make a little edit to show the quality of the cameras sensors and lenses.
On the 2nd day with the camera. We had a much faster 95mpbs SD card which meant we could tryout the ProResHQ and RAW settings on the camera, allowing us to shoot in much higher quality retaining a lot more information so we could grade the footage with much more control in post. It gave us the perfect excuse to head to the local beach… here’s the results.