John Brawley tweeted that image of the soon to ship Blackmagic Pocket Cinema MFT camera. The firmware is now ready and added the autofocus support for MFT and FT lenses. And Battery life gets displayed in percent. The camera will ship from July 25 at BHphoto (Click here). Blackmagic Design has scheduled 2 events, in Los Angeles on July 25th, and New York City on Aug. 8th; go to their website for times, locations, and online registration: http://invite.blackmagicdesign.com/event2013/
P.S.: Blackmagic Pocket Cinema preorders in USA at Adorama (Click here), BHphoto (Click here) and in Germany at Technikdirekt, in France at pbs-video. In Sweden at macoteket, scandinavianphoto, protel.jetshop, webhallen.
Thanks Peter!
25 Responses
Love it.. Looks like its on schedule for shipping on the 25th
“battery life display in percent”
Still can’t figure out why most cameras do not have a decent battery charge indicator. At first I thought it was only the Oly’s 3-state indicator: “full”, “almost empty” and “very empty.” But as my friends have confirmed, many CaNikons suffer from the same problem.
> Still can’t figure out why most cameras do not have a decent battery charge indicator.
Because it’s not that easy to do. A battery won’t tell you how much charge is left. All you can do is to constantly measure its voltage and try to approximate how much charge is left based on the voltage. To do this accurately enought for displaying charge in percent, the battery must have a very constant voltage curve. Most batteries however don’t react that way; instead, their voltage drops abruptly when it’s nearly flat.
While it’s very true that the lithium-ion batteries used in modern cameras have an EXTREMELY flat voltage curve that makes it nearly impossible to use a simple voltage measurement as an accurate indicator of state of charge, there’s also a vast amount of electronics present in the same device that could easily be used to generate a relatively accurate percent state of charge reading.
After all, smartphones and laptops all use the same type of batteries, and until the batteries get quite old they do a very good job of calculating the remaining amount of power in their batteries. It’s not like there’s less space available in an iPod Touch than a camera–have you seen how thin those things are?–yet mine is quite accurate with that little % reading at the top.
Forgot to mention that it would probably necessitate increasing the amount of computing on the battery pack itself (I assume they already have built-in over- and under-charge protection), which would increase the price of spares somewhat (and make 3rd party batteries harder to build), but if anything I’d expect the camera manufacturers to LIKE that. And I expect most people would be glad to pay the extra few bucks for a nice % on the display.
Older Apple batteries, for example, had a button that would actually show you the state of charge (in 20% increments) when the battery wasn’t even in a computer.
What does “autofocus support” mean? Full autofocus capabilities?
That would be a big change in what I’ve read before. Nice.
Yeah, I thought it was supposed to be manual focus only. If it turns out to have full AF support, that would be a massive improvement, and enough to move the thing into “carry around vacation camera” territory, instead of just for pro shooting.
Click on “John Brawley tweeted” to find out it has a single auto-focus point. In the photo that accompanies this post shows the single auto-focus point (white square).
Wonder if the Unit Manager and Location Manager mind having their phone numbers broadcast….
Nice, but I wonder how the focussing works. If it is as smooth as Gh3 focussing, it is really nice!
yes if af is decent and usable this will make the bmpc suitable for a lot more things, including on drones…
AF support is nice. But more important to me is if there is lens correction built in. MFT lenses rely heavily on the camera or raw processing to correct barrel distortion. With a crop factor of 2.88, I’m struggled to find a decent wide angle MFT lens as an equivalent standard lens for it.
Stop thinking Full Frame Still Camera! Hollywood DigiCine cameras are S25 (DX). So the crop factor is 2.1 between the S16 sized sensor in the BMPCC and the S35 sensor in an Arri Alexa. So a f/4 7-14mm Panasonic zoom = 14.7-29.4mm in S35. BTW Hollywood seldom shoots wider than 18mm, so you’re OK here. They also quite often use 50mm, so a 25mm M43 lens has the same FOV. Here’s thw Abelcine FOV comparator http://www.abelcine.com/fov/
There are barrel distortion removal plug-ins for FCPX and other video editing software.
The 2.9x crop factor IS relevent, as there’s (currently) a physical limit on how short/wide a lens is available. What m4/3 lens (beyond a novelty lenscap-lens option) would one use on this camera to get a traditional 14mm wide view? (Obviously not the 7-14mm, as that’s going to be interpreted even wider than on a GH3).
You may also want to check-out John Brawley’s test using the Panasonic f/2.8 12-35mm https://vimeo.com/64944847 Looks like it would be a good all-around lens on a BMPCC.
If DXO can build support for the cam & lens combinations…the RAW capture is a series of DNG files, no reason why lens distortion can’t be corrected in post using DXO Optics.
Thanks guys. It seems that I can’t avoid lens correction being part of the workflow in PP when using MFT wide lenses.
Thanks guys. It seems that I can’t avoid lens correction being part of the workflow in PP when using MFT wide lenses.
Never mind AF, lets get some nice C mount lenses on this beast!
What is the crop factor on this one again?
Approximately 2.88 relative to 135 (full frame) format.
Note that AF is expected to be much slower than on m43 bodies, as they use very high framerate sensor modes for focusing (60/120fps etc) to grt their AF speed, and the Pocket likely can’t, or isn’t (yet) programmed to. But at least it’s there now, they’ll probably improve it over time.
No word if compressed raw recording is now included in the first production firmware or if it will be provided as an update next year?
In this video shot at Broadcast Asia expo a few weeks ago, BMD’s Richard Lim says the BMPCC pocket cam will start shipping by the end of this month with lossless compressed RAW recording (and with ProRes HQ recording at up to 220 megabits/sec.):
http://vimeo.com/68895788
We’ll know soon enough if this proves to be true or not. Even if the RAW recording feature isn’t ready on first ship, I’m sure it’ll be a free firmware update available after shipping starts.
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