Last year, Blackmagic Design released their much-anticipated Pocket Cinema Camera 4K, a beast of a machine that offers a rather stunning amount of resolution and features all packed into one tiny unit. How does it stack up against a professional cinema camera that’s worth 10 times as much?
In this video, professional filmmaker Gene Nagata (better known as Potato Jet) pits the $1,300 Pocket against his RED, keen to test the quality of the footage, grain at low light, and all-around usability. Clearly, the RED and its larger sensor is going to offer more professional results, but the Blackmagic certainly seems to hold its own, even outperforming the RED when it comes to grain and shooting in low light.
While the RED has a much more flexible layout when it comes to adding all of the accessories required for professional shooting, the Blackmagic’s portability offers some huge advantages. While it seems to lose out pretty severely when it comes to creating a cinematic feel through a shallow depth of field, you’re much more likely to throw it around on a gimbal such as the DJI Ronin-S.
The video mentions that the RED seems to be much easier to grade over the Blackmagic, but some users have mentioned getting great results from throwing the Blackmagic’s footage into its own DaVinci Resolve 15 software. Let us know in the comments if you have experience getting the colors you want and how easy it is to achieve.
It would great to see how the BMPCC4K (as everyone is calling it) compares with cameras that are a little more in its price range if simply to see how its 12-bit raw internal recording performs compared to the 8-bit internal offered by something like the Sony a7 III.
Your comment about the Ronin-S is not accurate. At Cinegear, DJI was showing how powerful the Ronin-S is by showing a Red camera on it. So you can throw a Red camera onto a Ronin-S.
Slow news day today?
"you’re much more likely to throw it around on a gimbal"
Never said what you said I said. Please read the article. Slow comment day today?