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"The ability to capture raw, work in great detail on the coloring and look of each clip, and generate an absolutely beautiful motion picture at the end is exactly what this camera is all about."
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There's been a lot of buzz about the Blackmagic Design Cinema Camera (BMCC) since news of its introduction broke at NAB in 2012. On paper, the specs are impressive: Canon EF or MFT mount versions for use with common lenses; 13 stops of dynamic range; 2,432x1,366 (2.5K) resolution; uncompressed raw footage; and the $995 version of DaVinci Resolve color correction software included—all for $1,995. This sounds like a videographer's dream. And for a church, where budgets are tight and you need to make every dollar count, it seems perfect. It took a while until the company could get us a review unit. But we were very excited when we finally got one. So, let's take a look and see if the camera lives up to the hype.
The hardware
Right from the start, the camera looks unconventional. It's squat, boxy design, raw metal finish and complete lack of conventions knobs and buttons is intriguing. The only thing on the front of the camera is the lens mount, and there are two models—one for Canon EF lenses, and one for MXF lenses. It should be noted that this camera has quite the crop factor— about a factor 2.3 (whereas for comparison, an APC-S sensor DSLR camera has a crop factor of 1.6). Down the left side of the body are external connectors for a LANC remote control; headphone output; audio inputs (1/4-inch TRS instead of the more typical XLR jacks); SDI out; Thunderbolt; and power. The right side of the camera sports the slot for installing SATA SSD drives for media capture; and the back of the camera has the five-inch LCD touchscreen with physical buttons for iris adjustment; focus assist; skip backward; rewind; play; skip forward; menu; and power. And that's it. Pretty sparse real estate.
Camera and record settings are controlled via the menu and touch-screen LCD screen. Under the camera tab you can set ISO, white balance and shutter angle. Options for these settings are more limited than typical video cameras—ISO (equivalent to camera gain) can be set to 200, 400, 800 or 1,600. White balance steps between 3,200K, 4,500K, 5,000K, 5,600K, 6,500K and 7,500K. There are no options for setting white balance based on a white-balance card. Shutter angle (the film way of specifying shutter speed) steps between 45 degrees, 90 degrees, 108 degrees, 144 degrees, 172.8 degrees, 180 degrees, 216 degrees, 270 degrees, 324 degrees, and 360 degrees.
The audio settings tab lets you adjust the microphone recording volume; select between mic and line input levels for the external audio inputs; set levels for channel one and two external inputs; and adjust the speaker volume.
The record tab lets you select the recording format (Raw, ProRes and DNxHD); select the recording dynamic range (video or film); frame rate (23.98, 24, 25, 29.97, and 30 fps); and settings for time-lapse recording.
There's also a display tab for adjusting the display dynamic range setting, brightness, zebra bar display, and SDI output overlays.
And—that's it for controls and options.
What is Shutter Angle?
Shutter angle is a traditional film camera's way of specifying shutter speed. The shutter in such a camera was a physical disc that rotated between the lens and the film, and the disc could be opened so that it covered ¾ of the circle (270 degrees), half the circle (180 degrees), etc…. The disc would rotate once for each frame of film. So, if you're shooting at 24 frames per second (fps), and the shutter angle is set to 180 degrees, the film is exposed for half of the time that frame is in place, or 1/48th of a second. If the shutter angle is set to 90 degrees, or in other words ¼ of the disc is open, then your shutter speed is 1/96.
Performance
I'm going to jump to the end of the story for a moment. I focused mostly on the raw workflow, because that's where you'll get the most benefit from the dynamic range and color space of the camera. The image quality of this camera is quite beautiful. Colors are vibrant without looking cartoonish; shots of items that present a gradual gradient of color have no banding artifacts on them. Being a CMOS sensor camera, the shots will suffer from the same rolling shutter issues that all CMOS sensor cameras deal with, but I found that it's only strongly noticeable when I look at specific frames, and less noticeable when the footage is playing back since normal motion blur helps disguise it. Noise in the image is non-existent in an appropriately lit scene, but trying to use this camera in poorly lit situations where you're trying to get a normal video level will bring out plenty of noise at the highest ISO setting, and moderate noise in the ISO 800 setting. However, as we'll get into, that's not really what this camera was meant for.
For high dynamic range and beautiful color, this camera really stands out, and leaves other similarly priced video cameras in the dust.
Outfitting and other considerations
While the BMCC seems like a downright steal at $1,995, we need to put the camera into the perspective of what it's designed to do, and what you'll need to make it fully usable.
While there have been several cameras from various manufacturers released under the category of “cinema camera,” those cameras can also be used fairly easily in places where you'd also use a standard video camera, with a little extra effort involved. This camera is truly designed for cinema work. It helps to think about the BMCC not so much as a video camera, but more as a sensor and configuration system in a box.
Why is that? Let's run back through some of the features of the camera, and I'll explain why.
While the BMCC has an LCD screen on the back that functions as a viewfinder, it's mounted flat to the back of the camera, and doesn't pivot. So you need to put your head directly behind the camera for every shot. Shooting low to the ground and angling up? Or up high and angling down? Bring a ladder, or something soft to lay on, because your head needs to be right behind the camera—and under a hood of some sort if you are outside, because it's not very bright. To really make this camera effective, you'll need a separate monitor for shooting. And not just any monitor. The only video output is HD-SDI, so you'll either need a converter to use a monitor with HDMI or component inputs, or a monitor with HD-SDI input, which adds significantly to the price of a monitor. But, this would be pretty normal in shooting for cinema, where it would be common for more than just the videographer to want to see what the camera is seeing.
On the audio side, the camera provides no visual audio meters at all—you can't see what your audio levels are. So you're taking a chance with capturing audio on this camera. However, in cinema, you'd normally have a separate audio system (and person) recording and monitoring the audio, so the most you need from the audio from a cinema camera is for reference.
Handles are also optional for this camera, but a cinema camera person would be using the support system that works best for each shot, so why put handles on a camera that likely would never be used in cinema work?
And as mentioned briefly, this camera stores the footage on SSD drives, not low-cost Compact Flash or SD cards. And for good reason—shooting in raw mode, you're going to need a lot of space. Like, a gigabyte for every six to eight seconds of video. For 30 minutes of video, we're talking about 256 GB of storage.
As for media management capabilities of the camera, there are none. You cannot format the media; you cannot delete an unneeded clip. The only way to delete files or format the drive is to plug it into a computer. Of course, in traditional cinema, the cameraperson couldn't “delete” clips from his film.
In addition, the camera expects media formatted for Apple Macs. If you're a PC user, you're going to need something like MacDrive to let you access and format the media. And with the quantity of data you're going to be pulling off the drives, an eSATA, Thunderbolt or USB3 external adapter for SATA drives would be a very smart idea to copy the data quickly. (You can also copy media via the camera's Thunderbolt port.)
Also note that the camera doesn't come with a lens. Want to get the best images from this camera? On the EF version, you'll be investing in fairly expensive L series lenses, or incredibly expensive Cinema series lenses, just like the cinema people.
Workflow
If you're shooting raw to get the most out of this camera, you're also going to be changing your workflow, as well. Neither Final Cut Pro nor Adobe Premiere can work with the raw footage from this camera directly. The normal workflow requires you to bring the clips into DaVinci Resolve, Blackmagic Design's high-end color grading (i.e., correcting) software. Here's how this works:
First, shoot your footage. Then, bring the raw clips into DaVinci Resolve. Using Resolve, you optionally do an initial color-correction pass, and then you generate Quicktime proxy files for use in editing with applications like Apple Final Cut, Adobe Premiere or Avid Media Composer. You'd also better have a high-end graphics card with lots of CUDA cores—my six-core AMD Phenom II machine with a lower-end, 32-core card took an hour to render out proxies for six minutes of raw footage. My Lenovo W530 laptop, with an nVidia k2000 card with 384 cores rendered the same media in about 15 minutes. Rendering occurs only on the GPU, so it's the graphics card that matters most with regard to Resolve's performance. And if you want to be able to see your footage full-screen, Resolve won't use your typical secondary monitor. It will only use a video monitor connected to a Blackmagic HD-SDI card installed in your computer.
Next, you bring the proxies into an NLE for editing. After editing, you then write out an XML or EDL file that describes the timeline edits from the NLE.
Now, go back to the same Resolve project and import the XML file. This creates a timeline in Resolve with the same edits, but linking to the original raw media. You then do your final color grading in Resolve, and render out your finished project, getting every drop of color and dynamic range benefit from your raw footage.
But, don't use any transitions beyond cuts and dissolves, and don't use things like titles in Premiere, because Resolve won't work with those. Of course, in cinema, you don't typically put titles over your movie, and special effects would be generated outside of your NLE and turned into clips you import into your NLE (and Resolve, as well) for editing.
As you can see, the workflow for using raw footage is very time-intensive, and will slow you down significantly over a typical video camera workflow. However, Resolve is an incredibly powerful tool, and is frequently used in major motion pictures for color grading. You can do way more with it than you can with your normal three-way color corrector in your NLE, if you want that kind of polish on your project.
Summary
So, what's the bottom line for the typical church? For shooting promos, your Sunday morning service for web streaming or DVD production, etc.—this is probably not the camera for you. That's typical video camera work, and this isn't a video camera—it's a cinema camera. If you want to occasionally do cinema-level work, but also want the same camera to provide more editable media, then the BMCC does offer the option of recording to Quicktime formats, and use normal video dynamic range instead of film dynamic range, making it more diet-friendly.
But, if you are one of the growing number of churches that are dabbling in producing movies, or have other reasons to take your video production quality up to a new level, this may well be exactly what you've been waiting for. The ability to capture raw, work in great detail on the coloring and look of each clip, and generate an absolutely beautiful motion picture at the end is exactly what this camera is all about. You'll spend a lot more than the $1,995 purchase price to outfit it (and your editing suite) appropriately, and may possibly need a computer upgrade to handle the Resolve, but the results will be spectacular.
