Sample Footage From The Black Magic Cinema Camera NSFW

A few days ago my buddy Bryan Bowden called me and said that he was in possession of the currently unreleased Black Magic Cinema Camera. This camera could be the next big thing in videography because it’s incredibly cheap ($3000) for what you get (2.5K RAW footage). I personally only got a moment to see the camera but I asked Bryan to write up something for our readers about his very short experience with the camera and release some RAW clips straight from the camera.

Bryan wrote up a small article about his experience with the camera. Keep in mind that this is in no way a full review, especially since this isn’t a production model.

Bryan writes:
So I was lucky enough to test 1 of 3 BLACK MAGIC CINEMA CAMERAS in the U.S recently for a day. My goal was to shoot some interesting scenes in RAW format which BMCC does in 2.5K. I decided to use natural light in most of the scenes and lighting for the hallway scene towards the end of the edit. The camera has the option to short “FILM” once in RAW mode so this is what you are seeing. I’ll start by saying that the camera is very easy to use upon first glance, the touch screen is a very easy to navigate around and seems to be very sturdy and straight forward. The lens I used was a Canon 35mm prime. The camera weighs close to 4 lbs and seems to be very sturdy and well built although the ergonomics are a little perplexing to me.
When shooting RAW, the files are converted to DNG files at 5mb each. This I found very interesting because you can literally open each file in Camera Raw and tweak the images with virtually full control. I was surprised to see that when opening each file in Camera RAW, the contrast and saturation was tweaked way beyond what you see in the viewer while shooting, I’m not sure why this is but with the RAW file you can download here and the ones available on my site, I hope someone can fill me in on this. The reason I shot an attractive model in a bed wearing only lingerie was to make it a little more interesting and fun for you to work with. Now for the pros and cons of my experience with the Black Magic Cinema Camera:

PROS:

1. This camera is very easy to use if you are an experienced DSLR user, the touch screen is set up for easy access to all settings.

2. It’s powerful, the shooting resolutions are 12-bit RAW files recorded at 2432 x 1366

3. The frame rates are 23.98p, 24p, 25p, 29.97p, 30p (I shot 24p)

4. The battery life is supposed to be 90 minutes, when shooting RAW, I was able to shoot closer to 30 min. 5 MB/frame in RAW 2.5K fits about 30 minutes of 24p video on a 256 GB solid state disk. Compressed HD formats fit more than 5 times the amount of RAW video. It has a lithium ion polymer rechargeable battery and you can shoot
tethered with a 12V AC adapter.

5. The disk is a 256 GB SSD disk that fits into the side of the camera…and it’s pretty big.

CONS:

1. The camera does have a slight rolling shutter issue.

2. FCP has a very hard time importing these files. I was told that Premiere Pro 6 would be easier but with the help of editor Matt Robinson, we had to download Davinci 9 Lite
to import the footage. It took several hours to complete the conversion to MPEG. Once that was done, it was easy to import into FCP7 and X. The computer we used for this process could very well be the problem here so I’m listing the specs for you:

IMAC:

21.5″
3.06 g2 I3 Processor
4GB
DVR3
1333mhz
OS 10.6.8

3. As you can see from the footage seen here, there are some green lines and noise throughout the footage, we’re not sure if these are video artifacts or distortion caused by the lack of power used for the conversion. Again, in the camera viewer, this was not visible, only after the conversion. I would like to see what someone’s grading looks like using a much
more powerful system.

4. If you look at the files in the finder, the images had a magenta tint to them, but once in Divinci Resolve, the footage had a green tint. Not sure why this is, again…the footage looked awesome in the camera viewer (usually does but this was a drastic change). These issues might not be there is a different editing set up was used, I want to know what you people can come up with.

5. Shooting in daylight was very difficult while in RAW. There is no histogram or waveform monitor in the camera. Through the camera viewer, it was very blown out but once imported into Resolve, the footage looked fine. This proves to be very difficult to get the right ISO and exposure settings while shooting. All of the footage shot in the test video was at ISO 400 and it still looks grainy, I think that this could have something to do with the “film” setting in RAW mode.

I have several RAW 2.5K scenes available for download at my site for those of you who want to work with the footage and see what you can do before purchasing the camera.

Thanks for taking the time and I hope my experience shed some light pn the mystery of the BMCC.

You can download some RAW sample clips from the camera here.

Here is the “fixed” conversion.