@kholi I'm curious to hear a little more about your 4500 strategy. Are you talking just RAW? or ProRes too?

Let-s learn to live with BMPCC! It is hard to shoot, but if you do it right you will be pleased after grading... Definetely you need a ND and I prefer a variable one, for the ease of use... What do you think about Tieffen VND? My biggest problem now is that I did not find a way to export my movies 422 10 bit in a usable format, only DNXHD 175Mbs, or 8bit 422 down to 36Mbs directely Mxf or Quick time. OK, for future use of the material I will export 422 10bit, but what if I need to post on youtube/vimeo or Bluray? 420 8bit and I will get banding in skies... Is there a pack of codecs I have to instal for Adobe PProCC?

@kurt10 that does not make too much sense as different to a pocket photo camera there is no standard lens at the BMPCC. Which size should fit?

Alright, glad I'm not the only one that found 4500 optimal. Did not ask BMD about this and haven't told anyone really, well up until a week ago on the other forum.

On the topic of glass, I had at least one lens that produced this nasty color cast that I could not pull out of footage without destroying the rest of it, that's why I asked.

If you ever have a chance or the time to post a ProRes clip that you've experienced the issues with it would be cool. Just to see what's going on/grow the knowledge base.

I wish my Tiffen 1.2 was as strong as your Heliopan, as that thing simply does not do its job. If I had the money I would skip it all and grab TrueNDs and a Mattebox. =T

For the record, shooting RAW on the Pocket and ProRes has been the same experience. Color etc. are mostly the same, you just see the RAW shine when it comes to detail preservation, color depth (of course), and DR.

Nah, there's this entire thread on one of the other forums about exposure, and we kind of never got to the bottom of it. I could not balance the 2.5K to save my life unless it was a very controlled environment, but these things seem to help, gathered from experiences from other forum members:

• NDs play a major role in daylight. Especially if they don't have very strong IR cut. BUT... I've also seen random footage with ZERO IR filtering that looks good. It's really weird.

• Some of my glass was just bad... I stopped using certain lenses and that helped a lot.

• I stopped exposing to the right drastically, and almost never break out of the -1.0eV - +1.0eV bracket. Exposing to the right, for me, does not produce great color with RAW or PRoRes, and I would rather underexpose the camera. Basically, exposing it like any other camera but knowing you can hang out at the top of the curve if you must.

• This isn't a hard rule that I would suggest anyone follow, but you can try it: I shoot everything at 4500. I doubt either camera has a native color temp, I think that's kinda old sensor talk? But, if I'm shooting I just leave it at 4500, and have since had solid reds (not orange, absolutely red), normal skies -- even for LA where half the skyline's green every day, etc. I don't know if this is actually why, but I just shoot 4500.

• As far as post goes, mostly just balancing lift and offset in Resolve gets me where I need to go if I'm not using a LUT, but I did build a half-assed LUT that seems to work with both the 2.5K and Pocket as a starting point, and being that it's an input-LUT, you can still move data around before it hits 709 or whatever you're exporting. But, again, it's half-assed and not really anything I would pass around. Try the Alexa to Rec709 LUT, it looks better to me than the BMD 709.

WHat glass are you using? Nds etc?

I'm only really trying to help people figure it out, and in the end it won't be the solution for everyone. Exposing without tools, super frustrating, even more an issue on the 2.5K IMO, seems a lot easier with just the screen on the back of the Pocket.

@balazer

Are you up to answer any questions about your workflow/post-workflow and hardware (NDs)?

Edit here: I have had a lot of trouble in the past getting consistent results with the 2.5K, that's why I ask. I actually do not disagree that sometimes it's really inconsistent and I could not figure out why.

Having used this camera for almost two months now, here's my opinion:

BlackMagic's ProRes film log is half baked.

If you expose so that you can pull the image out of the upper part of the camera's range (giving you the equivalent of ISO 100 or 200, approximately) and the white balance setting in the camera is pretty close to the right value, you can get good images. If you don't expose that way, the images come with weird color casts that can't be easily corrected in Resolve or in any other software, especially oranges that turn pink, over-saturated sky blues, and muted greens. The color casts change depending on what range you're pulling from, so without the ability to expose consistently you can't simply figure out how to correct them and apply the same correction to other scenes. I see these weird colors all the time in things other people have shot, and they drive me crazy. So while the camera has a huge dynamic range and much of the lower part of the range doesn't have too much noise, the full range is not usable in a practical sense. BlackMagic's BMDFilm color space is simply not the right color space for making the manipulations that are necessary to enjoy the large range that this camera offers, and BlackMagic has provided no spec that we could use to map the BMDFilm space back to linear. This camera can deliver good results when you get things right in the camera, but the range of exposures that look good is much smaller than on a traditional camera, and the camera's screen gives you really lousy feedback about how you've exposed and set the white balance. With practice you'll get good for certain kinds of scenes (e.g., expose a bright blue sky a little below the zebras), but with unfamiliar scenes and artificial lighting you'll have inconsistent results. There are some high dynamic range scenes that I couldn't get with any other camera, and capturing a wide dynamic range offers tremendous flexibility and freedom to adjust in post and get the look I want. But in the end the trade-off isn't worth it for me. I'd rather have consistently pleasing and accurate color than huge dynamic range.

For all you guys who figured out how to make this camera work for your needs, good for you. It's not suitable for what I shoot. I'm under a lot of different conditions and shooting things as they happen with no opportunity for a re-take. I have my own aesthetic for color, and this camera isn't giving me what I want.

Here's hoping raw recording will give me more of what I want.

Seems that you want to get old film DR from a $999 from your posts. If you don't like it, judging from your constant critical comments here, return it. Simple. No need to keep telling us how you don't like it. Unless everything is just lost in translation here.

I'm not sure I've ever seen a digital sensor which avoided some form of fixed-pattern noise on extremely underexposed footage (especially at higher ISO settings) after I brought up the shadows. Given the choice of a better exposure and a bit more grain at ISO 1600 or shadows crushed beyond the point of recovery, I guess I'd opt for ISO 1600. That's just me, though - and if you believe that Summicrons are the only lenses worth using, I hope that works out for you, though others seem to manage to shoot stuff which looks pretty nice without them. Otherwise, please do enjoy shooting the ~1 hour or so of 16mm film on your scoopic which, with processing, will cost around the same as the BMPCC, a nice memory card, and a converter for your super 16 glass.

It is an issue of context - I was responding to Inean's hunt for hot pixels by shooting footage of blacks and harsh highlights - what mid tones were you expecting to see? The DR of the BMPCC is nowhere near film - I can easily get 10 stops in highlights while keeping four to five in the shadows on Kodak 500T - hence rolls of it in my freezer. Less highlight range means you have to key low to avoid clipping just like on every other digital. Sorry to say, there's no skew toward highlights apparent with the DR of the BMPCC. The video below clearly shows that it's either clipped highlights or lost shadows, you can't keep both like on film. Kodak vision would spank the lost orange clouds seen here with its S roll off and golden saturation.
Are we splitting shutters now? 24fps 172.8 degree ~= 1/50 it's what I set in the Sekonic. To those suggesting replacing a Summicron with a random $80 1.4 prime or nokton, please see an occulist - you may be suffering from chromatic aberration blindness. Those are issues I don't have to deal with once I screw on a Leica. The current noise at 800 ISO is enough of a chore to suppress, I have no desire to put up with any more at 1600. At that point might as well reload the scoopic 16mm and have the lab push the stock, it would come out with much cleaner blacks. It may be better than most DSLRs yet BMPCC is not film and wet dreams of a similar DR on highlights are just that. With my unit's hot pixels, bars and lines I'm already on the fence about a straight refund instead of warranty exchange. Only hopes keeping me with BM is the actively cooled sensor, lack of AA filter and finally seeing RAW... and I guess Niagara film lab's processing delays.

@MaulKentor Same here.

@Dionysus One suggestion to get more effective light on the BMPCC for free is to change the ISO from 800 to 1600. That'd be a place to start - while 1600 isn't as nice as 800 quality-wise, the vast majority of that footage looked underexposed to the point of uselessness and exposing up another stop probably wouldn't hurt. Also, faster glass than f/2 doesn't in any way need to cost $5000. You can get a decent quality manual focus 50mm f/1.4 lens for around $80 or an f/1.2 version of the same for like $150. Panasonic's 20mm f/1.7 lens costs around $400. Otherwise, you also have the magic of going around 2 stops faster with an SLR Magic or Voigtlander f/0.95 lens (ranging from $600ish to $1200ish).