Black Magic Designs Camera- Status Anyone

[Noa Put]

Thx Dave for the link, I just wonder if you would export from davinci first and import into you NLE and let's say the NLE only supports 8 bit, if you would export that again for use in Davinci to colorcorrect you should loose quite some color info going from 12bit to 8bit? I would expect doing CC in Davinci resolve first and then export and do further editing.

[Dave Hardy]

Noa, this is a digital cinema camera, so it helps to think in terms of motion picture film technology. The fine cut you export from your editing system, i.e. the cutting copy fine cut is like a film work print. The cutting copy is used for reference only. The conform process is like the neg. cutting stage in film production. The original (the raw files) are conformed, that is matched frame for frame to to the cutting copy (your fine cut exported movie) via the cut list (the XML or EDL file) the color graded & exported at the highest resolution.
This is the eqivalent to the film lab's answer print, from which you would make release prints. In other words the raw file from the camera is what you are working with in Davinci not the file from your editing system.

All the best,
Dave

[Frank Glencairn]

Or you throw it into Cineform Studio, convert it to Cineform raw and start editing in realtime like you would do with ProRes, without any further roundtrips.

[Dave Hardy]

Yes, 99% of the people who buy this camera will probably never use the digital cinema possibilities of the Blackmagic Digital Cinema Camera & will simply use it as a video production camera using Pro Rez or Cineform. But it should cause us to feel all warm & fuzzy knowing that we are subsudizing the indy digital filmmakers who use this for the purpose for which it was created, by helping to keep the cost of the camera low by way of the volume of orders.

All the best,
Dave

[Chris Barcellos]

I want to have choice of capabilities at this price point. From what I have seen of the ProRes captured files I downloaded, there is plenty of grading capability built in at that level--- at first look, at least, there appears to be a lot more detail on both ends to work with than with my normal AVCHD (Sony or Canon) to Cineform process.

We shall see.

[Dave Hardy]

IBC shound be interesting in a week or so. The announcement this week at the show in Berlin of 120 fps 4K for the Canon C500 camera, display pannels from Sharp of double the resolution of Apple Retina Displays, Sony & Samsung have announced their their home 4K tv sets to be sold to consumers this fall and Sony have announced their first 4K home theater projecter. This comming year should present a multitude of choise. As of the present the Blackmagic Cinema Camera is a welcome entry to the digital cinema market & I'm sure there will be some interesting developments by NAB in april. We're in an age of rapid change.

All the best,
Dave

[Noa Put]

Originally Posted by Dave Hardy

Yes, 99% of the people who buy this camera will probably never use the digital cinema possibilities of the Blackmagic Digital Cinema Camera & will simply use it as a video production camera using Pro Rez or Cineform.

Well, then I"m probably that other 1% :) The only reason I would buy this camera is to shoot in Raw and that's because graded raw looked much better to me in Franks video on his blog. I"m actually still not so sure it's a camera for me, I do mainly weddings and events and for that the BMC is useless for my purpose, but I do some controlled shoots now and then for corporate clients and then I do see the advantages of a BMC camera instead of the xh-a1 I currently use for corporate shoots. Shooting and editing raw is a whole new world to me but I must say it does intrigue me.

[Chris Barcellos]

To keep all updated, this was posted today in the Black Magic forum:


"Blackmagic Cinema Camera

PostThu Sep 06, 2012 1:24 pm

Blackmagic Design has been overwhelmed by the fantastic response from the very first few customers that have received their cameras. Naturally the question on everyone’s lips is when is more stock shipping? As you can understand the Cinema Camera is a highly advanced piece of equipment and therefore requires only the highest level of quality components. At this time certain components are coming into our factory slower than expected and as a result the manufacturing of units has slowed. We ask that you please be patient with us as we are doing our best to get more stock flowing within the next few weeks. In the meantime we are pleased to announce that our engineering team has not been resting and we have more features and updates coming to the next free firmware update.

Thank you for your patience. We will be communicating more detailed updates on shipping when that information is available.

Terry Frechette"

[Allan Black]

Philip Bloom rides in, you need 45mins for this but as usual it's worth it ...

Video review of the Blackmagic Cinema Camera on Vimeo

IMO the production meetings at Blackmagic must last many hours :)

Cheers.

[Chris Barcellos]

Watched Bloom's Video a couple of days ago. Only made me more restless about getting the camera.

[Noa Put]

It's always good to have reviews like this, not for it's advertisement for accessories, but because it gives a good idea what and who the camera is for and all that needs to be considered to have it production ready, I did find it interesting at first, but probably got blinded by it's low pricepoint, but now I"m sure it's not the camera for me. To have a decent workable solution in controlled shoots I guess you need to add at least the cameracost again in accessories.

[Chris Barcellos]

Somehow I missed this a couple of days back. It looks like the reason for delay is defective glass cover for the imager chip, that resulted in dirty images. Here is text of post at Black Magic Forum from Black Magic official:

"Wed Sep 26, 2012 4:18 am

Hi,

I wanted to give everyone an update on where we are with Blackmagic CinemaCamera shipments.

As you know, we have been dealing with a supplier delay which has stalled our ability to build cameras. I thought it might be a good idea to explain in more detail what is going on, and do a technical "brain dump" on the problem so everyone understands the nature of the delay and what we have been doing about it.

Over a month ago now, we completed the testing of the Blackmagic Cinema Camera and started production. Very quickly we started to see cameras failing our production testing as they suffered from blemishes on the sensor. These are high end cameras so need to be built to a very high specification.

We started testing to discover the cause of the problem and discovered that the problems were from our second shipment of sensors. The first shipment of sensors were fine. All the cameras you currently see people using had been built from this first batch of sensors and that is why we did not see any issues until we started to build cameras in volume.

While investigating the problem our engineers found the blemishes were in the glass that covers the sensor, and not the sensor itself. This is good because the glass might just be dirty so we saw this as a quick fix, but wondered how a supplier could deliver us sensors that had blemishes, as they are supposed to pre test them.

It is worth noting here what this glass does. Each sensor has a glass cover to keep contamination off the surface of the sensor itself, which is essentially a large semiconductor. If the surface ever got dirty, it would be impossible to clean, however the glass is easy to clean. All sensors have this glass cover. It is a high quality glass with optical coatings, similar to lens glass.

Anyway getting back to the issue, when talking with the supplier, it turned out they had a bug in their test software that tested sensors after the glass had been applied. That's why they shipped us bad sensors and did not notice. They fixed that problem and could then see the problems we saw and stopped production as about 95% of sensors were suffering this problem with the glass.

The next step for the supplier was for them to work out the cause of the blemishes on the glass. They developed tests for the glass before being bonded to the sensor, and discovered it contained the blemishes on the glass before being used in the suppliers factory. After more testing over the last few weeks, the supplier has discovered the blemishes are caused by a contamination from the packing materials used by the glass supplier to ship the glass to the sensor supplier.

So that's where we are at now. The supplier is due to get more glass later this week and then hopes to start up production again using new clean glass that will result in good quality sensors that we can use to start building cameras again.

We build our cameras in our own factory on a production line built for the camera so we can start shipping cameras again the day we receive good sensors.

I deeply apologize for the delay in shipping and it has been very frustrating for us as well to be sitting on a completed and tested product for a month that we cannot sell. Especially when people need them urgently.

As you can also see from the breakdown of the problem above, there has been multiple stages of testing to discover the cause of the problem so it has been hard to lock down dates or what was going on until now, so its been hard to update everyone on the exact details.

I hope this update helps people understand the delay. We should know more details about shipping times once the new glass arrives at our supplier.

We also have a new software update v1.1 for the camera due in a few days. The original v1 software did not have DNxHD support so thats now been added, as well as support for lens stabilizers and a bunch of other small features.


Regards,

Grant Petty
Blackmagic Design"

[Chris Barcellos]

I still have confidence and desparately would like to have it in my hands. There is no doubt that Black Magic is learning about the camera production business and probably not announcing something until it is ready to shipi, but there is no hit on the basic product, in my mind.

[Chris Norman]

There are some well shot BMD camera reviews and clips that can be downloaded at Vimeo. Way better than anything I've seen from any DSLR. I own Sony EX1 & Canon 5D mark3. IMHO neither come close to BMD camera in terms of image quality.

A Week With The BMC (1080P) on Vimeo

Comparing the Cinema Camera & 5D Mk III on Vimeo

[Frank Glencairn]

I'm testing the BMC since quite a while now.
Since we have the 1.1 firmware, most of the quirks are eliminated now and I feel confident to shoot my first documentary on it, starting next week.

The picture quality she delivers is excellent. Once you shot with 13 stops of raw, it's almost impossible to go back to something else.

Just saying..

Frank