DEFINITION December 2018

BLACKMAG I C 4K POCKET CAMERA | USER REVI EW

ABOVE Ember’s test film shot fire and fireworks. All the fire shots used a Helios 44 lens captured at 400 ISO. The fireworks were captured on the Olympus 12-40 2.8 and at the dual native ISO of 3200. See the test film at: bit.ly/DefSamhain

still looks quite natural. The new size also balances out the lens. The screen is much brighter, we had to turn it down when shooting for our bonfire night test film. The on-board microphones are much better as well but bring their own issues. With their position – either side of the lens – you have to be careful where you put your hands and fingers so the movement isn’t picked up by the mics. Obviously with a rig with a top handle you possibly wouldn’t have those problems. This handheld use points to the camera’s great potential as a documentary camera. All you need is a small camera bag with a few batteries and an SSD drive which you can connect up to the new USB-C drive (you can buy a 500GB Samsung T5 portable drive for around £120). You can also use the other drives as possible backups with the SDHC and CFast slots (you can’t use them simultaneously). You then choose your settings as in which CODEC you want at what compression ratio. There are plenty of options there so you can scale up or down depending what your production is. If you only want to shoot in HD, for instance, you can just take SD cards. SHOOTING Shooting .DNG Raw is very data heavy and for the old pocket camera you probably wouldn’t use it. Now with the SSD option you can quite easily cope with it. We graded our film in Resolve and used proxies to edit it in Premiere which we use for most of our editing. It all then flowed back in to Resolve to finish. That flexibility in a camera so small and cheap is great and unheard of.

he first ‘pocket camera’ from Blackmagic delighted its intended audience, the indie

filmmaker. It was very small and very cheap and with it you could learn all about the basics of filmmaking and also digital wrangling, with its ability to record DNG Raw. But the camera initially had problems like the ‘black sun’ anomaly and sensor bloom on different overexposure levels which a firmware update quickly solved. The audio wasn’t great and the SD card media was too basic to handle all the Raw the camera encouraged you to use. But it was the battery life which disappointed the most; you would have to arm yourself with many to attempt long location shoots. But shooting with that camera could yield fantastic results. The footage was outstandingly sharp even with cheaper MFT lenses on- board. Even movie productions saw a role for the camera as a crash cam or even a remote camera that could cut in to the final edit. It also gave productions an option for GoPro footage; you could mount the pocket in the same places and get a much better look. Fast forward five years and you have the same camera name but with the 4K nomenclature added. But this new camera is much more than a slight change of name. RUN & GUN The new Pocket Camera is much bigger than the original, but that’s a good thing. The new size makes it easier to use handheld which you could never do with the old one, it was too light and you had to mount it on something. The new size is bigger and it shoots off-speed so you can get away with some movement, it

“THE NEW POCKET CAMERA IS MUCH BIGGER, BUT THAT’S A GOOD THING”

DECEMBER 20 1 8 | DEF I N I T ION 55

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