De um Forum: lmackreath 2:13AM Morning all! Received my BMPCC here in the UK this week thanks to Jigsaw24. My first shock was how small the box was and the camera itself!....looking at the pics online doesnt give you an appreciation of how small the camera really is in your hand bare without any lens on. I plugged the camera in to update the firmware and was pleasantly surprised to find that it already has the latest firmware installed, meaning no black spots for me! First thoughts when playing with the cam was what a bugger the battery\sd compartment is to open and close...and its a really tight squeeze for both sd card and battery. I have purchased 8 off market batteries from Ebay and they all seem to work well albeit drain quicker than the supplied one. The buttons on the back of the cam arent great to press, especially the on/off switch which is kind of flush with the cameras face so you really have to squeeze your thumb in to get a solid purchase on it. You also have to hold it down for about a second to turn it off, rather thank a quick press for on/off. I have found myself accidentally leaving the cam on when I thought I had turned it off...not good with a cam with such poor battery life! I plugged in my Pansonic Leica 25mm 1.4 and started to have a play. The lens locked in solidly to the mount and I was away shooting. It became very obvious straight away that this lenses focal range is unusable on the BMPCC without being sat on a tripod or with the use of heavy stabilization in post. What was a 50mm FF equivalent on my GH2 now has become a 75mm FF equivalent on my BMPCC and I cannot get anything close to me in frame without have to step back a lot! I even tried to use the Leica on a mono pod yesterday to give me some stabilization while at the same time giving me some freedom to move around. Sadly in post I still found myself staring at micro jitters and using lock and load to remove them. I purposely bought myself the 14-45 Panny last month in anticipation for the BMPCC as I knew it was the cheapest lens with IS with decent wide angle. I clicked this lens in and found myself a lot happier with both the focal length I was getting and also the very stable IS. I know this is a cheap piece of glass and I plan to replace this soon but as it stands it probably will be my go to lens and I may have to leave my Leica to tripod work in low light. Both of the above lenses support auto focus and auto iris..both of which are useless to any serious filmer. The auto iris just completely underexposes your scene to make sure there is no clipping at all which is not helpful and as for the auto focus...forget about it...beyond useless! I use full manual focus using the peaking which general works ok, and I use zebras for exposure. As for blooming I am 100% that this cam does not display any such issues. I filmed a lot of headlights last night and street lights an nothing so it seems my cam is from the new batch of calibrated cameras out the factory. Now for the dead/hot pixel issue. I am definitely seeing SOMETHING when I have the lens cap on and ASA set on 1600.. but truth be told that is not a proper shooting scenario...so whatever I saw in terms of static or dancing pixels with the lens cap on was not noticeable in normal shooting conditions. I think if you are looking for any kind of dead pixel you will find it..but nothing that I can see that would make me send the camera back. In terms of shooting I stuck with 180 degree shutter, 25p frame rate which gives me smooth cadence and perfect motion blur. I also set the ASA to 800 and the ISO at 4500K for all scenes which seems to work fine. I set my zebras to 75% which has been recommended on a few forums. With this setting I expose my scene with fixed aperture and shutter speed and control the light coming in using a variable ND filter. I let as much light in as I can until I see zebras appearing and then dial it back a bit until they are gone again. Obviously I allow zebras for areas that I am happy to be clipped or blown out. I have been using the Sandisk 95mb/s 64gb card and have had no issues with dropped frames or anything. The batteries do drain fast but you are totally aware of this fact if you keep any eye on the LCD and even if it dies mid shoot it saves the shot you were filming at the time. As for post production I use a mac and FCP X. The files are a dream to import being native pro res files so there are no transcoding issues anymore. On first look the washed out files look blank and disappointing (obviously). I used Nick Shaws LUT to throw on a 709 log to the footage straight away so I have a good base to work with in terms of saturation and contrast. Most of the work in terms of grading can really be done simply through Nicks plugin if you so wished. It offers enough sliders to get your footage looking great in my opinion. I have gone on to use FCP Xs own colour correction to add a feel to the footage but this is down to personal choice. I have applied filmconvert to my footage that I used extensively with my GH2 but I find because the native footage coming out of the BMPCC already has a film like grain and look that I might be now only using filmconvert sparingly. I have exported my finished work as a h.264 file at around 20mbs for viewing on my LCD TV through a media player. I must say the footage on the big screen rendered looks a lot better than it does in the NLE. I was concerned/disheartened at first when looking at the footage in FCP X, even after grading as I thought my gh2 stuff looked better than this. Trust me, once you get it on the big screen you will see why you went to the expense of investing in this camera. All in all I would say after owning the cam for 2 days I would say I am a little wary of this mini beast. I think its a given that under the perfect circumstances, with the perfect shooting conditions with the right lenses and good grading this cam can produce amazing stuff. From the few shoots I have done over the past 36 hours though it is clear that it is very easy to have a lot of duff footage, out of focus, over exposed and ungradable, even if when shooting you thought you had nailed the lot. Practice makes perfect as they say. I think a lot of the bad footage on Vimeo is testament to my statement above, you cannot just pick this camera up, press record and run round and shoot with it. I would say 99% of the BMPCC footage on Vimeo is indicative of how easy it is to get things wrong when shooting with this cam. I was keen to upgrade my lens arsenal soon and invest in the highly regarded Sigma 18-35 plus speedbooster combo. I have no doubt this setup would produce excellent images...but again my worry would be that without IS this beast of a setup would be useless in the wrong conditions. I think due to the run and gun nature of my work I am now more tempted than ever to stay on the IS path and maybe punt for the Pansonic 12-35 2.8 instead. I can see that people have commented that the footage looks video like and I might agree...but there are trade offs with both lens choices and I think for me the IS is a must. I hope to do some proper shooting at the weekend and get this posted up, a couple of clips on my Vimeo page now but they are rubbish, plus some of my earlier GH2 stuff. https://vimeo/videoccasionsuk/videos
Posted on: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 11:05:12 +0000
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