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2K BlackMagic Pocket Cinema Camera, active m43, $995
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  • Hhmmm a tiny, little mic, just in case, is it there? If not, I think I will miss it. Hard time to sync audio if you recorded external and perhaps had a broken cable to the camera?

  • @trevmar A few people on here have measured them and I've seen reports of 90MB/s but not 95.

  • preorder in for it.. :) I have a feeling it´s the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

  • @niGGo. It all depends on whether you believe the UHS-1 specification or the "95MBps" in their advertising. These are what I buy: http://goo.gl/uqkhU and they measure at 46MBps/read and 29MBps/write with my fastest Expresscard adapter (and CrystalDisk Mark).

    Has anybody here actually measured those "Extreme" cards and validated their speed claims?

  • Uhhh, what? ^

  • rant edited :)

  • what i'm wondering is why there's 3 used gh3's at bh.....and absolutely no gh2's to be found anywhere . that tell's me something

  • The GH2 also has been rising in price, body only could fetch for $700...

  • @DailyFilmFix. I saw the Amazon price bump, but B&H was still at $1298 this morning.

  • Did any of you notice that the GH3 has jumped in price in the last couple days? On Amazon it is now $1499 (I noticed it on my wishlist). That's a one or two hundred dollar jump. Could the announcement of this camera have anything to do with it? Probably not.

    Seems counter-intuitive, but maybe the delay will have some effect on those who need a camera now and know that they can't get the BMPC until July. According to B&H, the actual date for the arrival of the BMPC is July 25th. Maybe between now and then some productions will go with the GH3 instead of waiting. During that window, Panasonic may be able to fetch a little higher price. Maybe I'm completely off-base.

    But consider what some folks are saying on this thread. Some, like me, are thinking that upgrading their GH1 or GH2 is now not necessary and the answer will be the BMPC. I'm sitting here taking a break from editing a doc feature shot on two GH1s and the HMC150, and honestly, having a little more DR (and that 4:2;2 color space) would really help with grading. But having gotten comfortable with handling exposure, focus, and white balance not to mention film profile on the GH camera, I just can't imagine how crazy the BMPC would make me. I'd never let anyone see my footage and become a vampire color grading in DaVinci til the break of dawn. And don't temp me with them gamma curves...

  • It'll be great if BM firmware supports ProRes settings on gamma and high/mid/low curve. That might be huge time saving if one know what he's doing.

  • @Sangye more than one advantage! Much more range and flexibilty in post & grading. Exact white balance in post production as all bmd cams have no manual wb, just preset steps.

  • @Sangye under some scenes you may get a higher quality output due to it being a lossless (not compression artifacts) format. Also depending on how good you are on setting up the camera before you hit record, you may get better color due to white balance tweaks that can be done on RAW. You also might be able to pull out a bit more from highights/shadows from RAW.

    Oh, and it's possible that ProRes would apply other processes that you might not desire (such as sharpening/contrast/NR), but I'm not sure what BBMD does with their image pipeline

    For most uses ProRes seems like the way to go though, as it removes a big chunk of the post work, just setup your camera right on the field.

  • One question I have is whether there would be any advantage in shooting CinemaDNG and transcoding it to ProRes 422HQ, over shooting ProRes 422HQ in camera. I'm assuming there wouldn't be.

  • @Sangye I think they said at some NAB video that those are basically the only cards they've used themselves.

  • Hmm... The ProRes is 27.5MB/s then. I guess I'll go with that if I buy this. Plenty for me. That should fit around 40 mins on an 64Gb? Or then I screwed up the calculations. Again, plenty for me!

  • We don't know with certainty that it shoots a full 1080p of RGB resolution, due to debayering. Although those MBps numbers @_gl came up with do look roughly accurate, no one should be comparing them to the Mbps figures that GH2 hacks are rated at, without acknowledging that 1 MBps = 8 Mbps. So if this camera is doing 50MBps compressed RAW, that is 400Mbps expressed in GH2 terms.

    If this camera supports UHS-1, and there is no reason I can think of why it shouldn't, then there should be no problem writing to SanDisk's 90MBps write-speed Extreme Pro cards, even in CinemaDNG mode.

  • @niGGo, the numbers make sense if he was thinking uncompressed. But yeah we'll have to wait for details.

  • I guess most of us want just more DR, and we've seen with the GH2 that 50Mbps can get a long way.

  • Considering the rep's statement that around 30 minutes of RAW footage fit on an 128 GB sized SD card, your math could be right, although it doesn't fit 100%.

    It would be plain awesome if there was some sort of cache to reduce the datarate per second so we could use cheap 45MB/s cards. Otherwise I guess it really comes down to faster 95MB/s cards.

  • BMC v1 2.5k RAW is (apparently) 5MB/frame. It shoots 1.6x more pixels than the Pocket's 1080p, so:

    Pocket uncompressed RAW: ~3.1 MB
    Pocket compressed RAW (~1.5:1): ~2.1 MB

    @ 24fps = 50 MB/s (compressed)
    @ 30fps = 62.5 MB/s (compressed)

  • I don't mind 50mbps - more than sufficient for most of my needs. Just registered and posted on their forum to let them know that there IS demand for lower-quality-less-size codec option.

  • I seriously wish they put in a videomode with about 100mbps.

  • @trevmar: I don't think so. At least if we're talking about the 95 MB/s version. Take a look.

  • @niGGo I paid no more than $40 for any of the UHS-1 64GB Sandisk SDXC which I have bought (about a dozen). They go on special for that price from time to time. Normal price around $50 on Amazon.com