Blackmagic cinema camera update#
Blackmagic cinema camera skin#
Blackmagic cinema camera iso#
Blackmagic cinema camera windows#

The new Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera is now shipping and there is a software update for it posted, which has a lot of new features.

Now that we have gone through the tests, let’s dig into the latest updates from Blackmagic because there are very exciting upgrades and new cameras in the pipeline.

Blackmagic cinema camera iso#

This is why I felt that it was a 1600 ISO street. I will bring up areas that are too dark or need some color contrast. I have a bucket truck from the local power company go along and turn the lights off. With the new digital cameras, I place the camera down on the street and start moving the ISO up on the camera until the background comes to life. I had to light because I knew the film stock’s ISO would not see what my eye was seeing. What do I mean by this? The way I used to go about lighting night exteriors was to put big lights on condors high above the ground to create back light, add many units in the background, up light buildings in the background, etc. To me, that street looked like a 1600 ISO street. Notice the building on the left side, how the white wall’s fill level increases as the ISO is brought up. That low ISO is not bringing the available light to life. You can see the available light looks contrasty in the BG at 400 ISO. I thought the camera looked very good at night. Now we take those ISO ratings again and see how a night exterior environment works.

All of this can be brought back in post, but I was just curious to test how the camera reacted when you changed its ISOs. When we went to 1600 ISO, you can see how the image got thin and lost its color. At 400 ISO, the color started to come in, but at 800 ISO, it seemed to have the most range, the most color, and the most pleasing image. With that contrast, it did not give you color saturation. What I noticed immediately was that at 200, it was not bad but you had more contrast, for sure. We left the color grading the same and just went up with ISO ratings. The BMCC doesn’t have as many ISOs as most cameras, but I wanted to take you through all the ones that they do have and you can immediately see where the sweet spot is. “Trying All of the ISOs to Find the Sweet Spot”

Blackmagic cinema camera skin#

I also loved the way the skin looked in this little test. With a DSLR, you would have had to punch up the light on your model. I could hold the hot sidewalk, the sky and the hot school building in the background. I did this test to show you that the natural light falling on our model was perfect with the latitude of the camera.

Blackmagic cinema camera windows#

You have to bring your level up on the interior or bring your level down outside by using big sheets of ND on the windows or gel. So many times, you cannot balance the inside with the outside easily. One of the selling points of this camera is its 12BIT color space and its 13 stops of latitude. The background was four stops down and I overexposed her 1/3 of a stop so that she had creamy skin tones.Īvailable Light Test: Ungraded (L) Graded (R) I was also impressed with the detail in the BG. I was pleasantly surprised with how they looked. I wanted to see how it would handle this type of shooting, how dark the interior would feel, as well as how the skin tones would resolve. No extra lighting was used, other than turning on the house fluorescents in the background. We set up this test just using available light that was coming through a garage door to key our model. This camera delivers some very nice skin tones. Once you have agreed on this, you know exactly the way to proceed with the lighting plans. The reason for these tests is so that you can establish a visual language with your director. The level that you like might be way too bright for the director or much too dark. Your level of light on the down side, fill side of his or her face is important to help with both storytelling and delivering the emotions that the director wants to convey. Finding that fill ratio that brings about a HAPPY emotion, or a TENSE emotion, or one that is a FEARFUL emotion is critical. Quickly you can see what level that you might like, but is that level right for your scene or your story? “The WHY with Fill Ratio”Ĭreating the emotion, the mood and the tone of a scene that will ultimately transpose onto the actors’ faces is very important. We have our model and we will go down in fill ratio levels a 1/2 of a stop at a time. This is one of my favorite tests because it shows you and the director how the camera will handle underexposure on the fill side of your actor or actress’ face.