When watching films at the cinema, or in HD on your TV at home, there’s a notable difference between your quality of the footage on the screen, and anything you can capture yourself, using an everyday HD video camera. This is mainly due to the fact that professional filmmakers typically use cameras worth in excess of £100,000, and a whole host of additional professional kit, such as for example lighting rigs, lenses, filters etc.
Taking this under consideration, its highly unlikely that the average hobbyist, cash-strapped student or up-and-coming filmmaker can afford this sort of equipment. However, there is an alternative solution.
At just over £2000, the Blackmagic Cinema Camera is a fraction of the cost of most ‘cinema quality’ cameras, and is defined to be a real game changer regarding 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 average home user. At almost twice the size of HD, most people’s home computers will struggle to actually display video on that scale.
The Blackmagic helps considerably with post production workflow: The editing and colour grading process takes place after shooting, which gives a much wider range of colour to work with than the average camera. Depending what codec the video was recorded in, it might be digitized directly into editing software, such as Final Cut Pro without any need for transcoding.
Included with the camera is a new version of Davinci Resolve 9 Colour Correction software. Providing you have the hardware to take care of the file sizes in the home, this software will allow you to colour grade your footage to accomplish whatever look you need, i.e. you may want to make a cloudy day look sunny.
digital cinema can find 13 Stops of Dynamic range featured in this Camera, which put simply, means the picture is awesome. For those in the know, the ability to harness light going into the lens of the camera so allows them to achieve a very specific ‘look’ or ‘feel’.
To complement the camera’s dynamic range, it has compatibility with EF (Electric-Focus) lens mounts – the standard lens entirely 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 comes with 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, which allows you to label and mark your clips easily, while on the fly. The ability to edit direct from the on board HDD (hard disc drive) is incredibly useful for those doing quick change edits.
So that you can transfer data quickly, the Blackmagic features a Thunderbolt port – an input on the camera allowing a super-fast connection to a computer or input at the contrary end. Specifically, the Thunderbolt port transfers data at an astonishing 10Gb/sec, via two channels – that’s 20Gb/sec! To give you 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 gets the potential to completely revolutionise the way in which film and television is produced, and opens up the world of cinematic quality footage to small production outfits. The seamless workflow of this camera throughout all stages of the production process has the potential to reduce post-production turnaround, shooting schedules, and inevitably budgets.