The Blackmagic Production Camera 4K experience Part 2

In part 1 of this blog I documented the first experiences of using the Blackmagic Design Production Camera (BMPC) and how I chose the SanDisk Extreme II 240GB SSDs, a cheap battery solution and a low priced EVF monitor. So far this setup has cost £2310 for the camera, nothing for the battery system (OK about £16 if you bought it), £260 for 2 SSD cards and £400 for the Cineroid EVF-4CSS a total of £2986 (or €3577 or $4936). To this I have to add a tripod and of course suitable Canon lenses which can easily double the price.

But as a result I have a rig capable of shooting 4K pictures on a good codec (ProRes at the moment) with a global shutter (so no "jello") and I have a piece of software that would cost $995 if bought separately, more about this later. But the usability of the BMPC is always an issue and the form factor of the camera worried me because it is heavy and, I predict, easy to drop. I also needed something to attach the EVF and an external microphone. 

I had looked at a lot of cages but the cheap ones were, well cheap, and all of them were bulky and meant I couldn't fit all the kit in my brilliant Lowepro Stealth Reporter D550AW bag. My solution is from Redrock Micro with a top handle and the Ultraplate which added about £100 to the total. The Ultraplate offers just enough screw points to attach the handle, the EVF on a mini magic arm and a mic or recorder if needed.

So the whole rig looks like this.

Post Production

So I have shot the footage, got (most of) it in focus thanks to the EVF and now I need to edit it and Blackmagic Design have kindly included a copy of DaVinci Resolve 10 with a USB key in the BMPC box to help me. This is the first time I have tried to work with 4K footage and I have a pretty powerful PC to do so with i7 processor, 32 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 570 and Quadro FX580 graphics cards. Unfortunately this is far to weak to properly edit 4K footage and as I don't have a 4K monitor I can either view the footage in HD or just see the top half of the footage spread over two 1920 monitors. 

It's not brilliant but it is possible to work this way and produce great results. I work mainly with Avid Media Composer which is less than useless for 4K or Adobe After Effects which is more than good but Resolve is like neither of these and if you are going to use it properly will take fair bit of learning  - persevere it is well worth it. This is not a tutorial in Resolve so I just want to highlight some of the Eureka moments I have had so far. 

Where you store your footage for editing is really important, run the included Blackmagic Disk Speed Test on all your drives and put the material on the fastest one - you can archive to a slower drive later. A raid drive such as the G-Raid is likely to be the best, better than the fast SSD (that was a surprise). 

Unless you have a monster $1000+ GPU like the GTX690 or NVIDIA Titan you will not be able to play 4K on your timeline, you will get a screen of shash and a GPU out of memory message. Go to project settings and select 1920x1080 as your timeline resolution. 

THIS IS IMPORTANT. When you have finished editing and grading and you go to the "delivery" window and select UHD as your output you have to go back into project settings and set the timeline to UHD, if you don't your final output will be HD expanded to fit the UHD raster. Resolve is actually very good at this and it took a lot of looking to see the difference. Below is a still from a scene in Trafalgar Square and two crops with the timeline set to different resolutions. The middle picture shows the image at 400% with the timeline set to UHD and the bottom picture with it set to HD. The bottom picture shows a lot less detail.

If you look at the comparison table of Resolve lite and the full version there doesn't seem to be a lot of difference, but go about a third of the way down and you will see this section:

After the sharpening tool (like the 5D the images generally benefit from a bit of sharpening) the noise reduction tools make a huge difference particularly in areas like sky or flesh tones, be gentle with it and you will be rewarded. The BMPC is not good at shooting in low light (and I am not a fan of ProRes for this) and sometimes scenes like the one below in St Pancras Station mean lifting the dark areas considerably which can bring in really bad speckle. The noise reduction tool in Resolve is amazing at reducing this.

The format you output will always depend on where you will put it, but I have established a workflow from producing 4K time lapses where I output QuickTime Cineform versions which are indistinguishable from uncompressed files but much smaller and then use Adobe Media Encoder to produce QuickTime PhotoJPEG versions for stock companies or broadcasters since that is such a user friendly format and one that Resolve cannot output directly. 


These two blogs have been a quick summary of what I have learnt "hands-on" with this amazing camera and what I feel is the minimum requirement to shoot good footage. Hopefully it will give a bit of guidance to those still in the queue for the 4K Production Camera.

4K codecs - the good, the big and the ugly. Part 1

There can be little doubt that there is going to be a huge increase in the demand for 4K footage over the next few years and much of that early demand will have to satisfied by stock material. Currently broadcasters can turn to an enormous library of SD and HD material compiled over decades of shooting, but that won't cut the mustard when intercut with newly acquired 4K footage.

Which is good news for those of us who are planning on making our own library of high quality 4K stock shots. One question I would love to answer is which flavour of 4K will be the choice of stock libraries and I really hope that the big boys can come to some sort of agreement here, because uploading four different versions of a 4K clip is not a quick process.

Now H.265 has been announced and I think this will become the bookies favourite even though its younger cousin H.264 is not currently stock libraries first choice for progressive footage. But efficient as H.265 is, it's unlikely to be a good format to edit with for reasons I won't go into here. This means any stock footage will have to be transcoded to another format or codec before editing.

So I ran some tests on existing codecs using a 4K clip from a time lapse within Adobe After Effects to see if any of them would be good enough to host on the web and edit with natively. Here is a still from the sequence. 

The One Tower, St Georges Wharf, Vauxhall, London

The crane on the tall building behind Vauxhall Bridge was unfortunately hit by a helicopter in January 2013 in case it looks familiar - you can see a 1080p version of the time lapse here. I chose this clip because of the complexity of the image with lots of vertical and horizontal lines and a lot of detail in the sky and water.

Here are the codec candidates:

Avid DNxHD - works on Mac and PC and the codec is free.
BlackMagic codec - great quality but probably too big and not widely used.
Cineform - again works on Mac and PC but you need the Premium version of Cineform Studio to create files and this is $299.
Photo JPEG - An old codec, with good compatibility. Currently the choice of many stock companies but not the most efficient of compression choices.
TIFF - Using LZW compression should give a perfect image but with file sizes to match. Also tried a QT using TIFF.
Animation - Not used so much any more but moving between editing and graphics tools is used to be the king. Huge differences in file size depending on the compression ratio.
MPEG A & B - Had their day I think and largely used only for interlaced  
ProRes - A really great codec but will not play well (if at all) on PCs, which really is a ridiculous situation. If it did this would be numero uno. I'm working on a PC so couldn't produce any test results. Pah!

I created a 4K (4096x2304) 1 second clip in each format at two or three compression settings (75%, 90% & 100% where possible) to look at file size and quality. Here are the results:

File sizes of  1 second 4K clip in various codecs 

The TIFF sequence adds up to 288 MB for the 25 frames. 

Unsurprisingly the uncompressed or lossless compression codecs are significantly larger than the lossy compressed versions. The embedded TIFF QTs were significantly larger than the sequence of stills using the LZW lossless compression and the TIFF sequence would still be a good way to exchange between editing and graphic systems.

The lossy compression codecs start with Cineform (100% quality) at 126 MB for a 1 second clip. Bearing in mind that the maximum  length of a clip on iStock is 30 seconds and you could end up with a files of 3.78 GB! At 75% quality it would be a mere 1.8 GB

The tests showed that DNxHD 444 10 bit was almost the same size at 100%, 90% and 75%. Somewhat surprisingly it made little difference on MJPEG codecs whether 75% or 90% compression was chosen. But Cineform at 100% jumped up to 126 MB - almost double the 90% file size, which shows remarkably efficient compression if the quality stands up.

Photo JPEG and MPEG4 also showed a big difference between 75% and 90% and a 30 second clip at the higher compression (75% quality) would be just over 1 GB in size.

In Part 2 of this blog I look at the picture quality of the smaller files to see whether they have a future as a 4K stock format.

Useful software for videographers and photographers - Part 1

Over the years I have purchased or downloaded for free many small pieces of software to achieve specific results or solutions. Some are used a couple of times and then deleted, others, like Christmas dogs, stay with me forever. I thought I would run through some of them here as they may prove useful to you one day.

MPEG Streamclip by Squared 5 is one of the best known video converters and despite owning powerful conversion software by Avid, Apple and Adobe, this is the one I use the most. Firstly it produces files that are universally playable and recommended by stock sites. Secondly it can convert sections of a DVD to a QT file that can be imported to Avid. Thirdly it is quick to use and the presets are logical. Finally it is very small programme that has little impact on computer resources.

MPEG Streamclip options

Most editors know that attaching Apple formatted drives to a Windows PC just doesn't work unless you install Mediafour's Mac Drive which allows you to be totally agnostic about the drive format. But another of the company's software, Disk Aware has been the find of the year for me. Disk Aware analyses every folder and file on a drive and presents it as a list arranged in size order and also as a colour-coded wheel which shows you the relative size of the files and folders. Simply click on a segment and analyse the next layer down.

DiskAware - The Wheel

The programme only costs $10 per computer but it can analyse any drive: internal, external, flash and even network drives. It enables easy clearing up of drives and lets you work out why all your storage has disappeared. 

One tool I used for a while, dropped and have returned to is IrfanView, the strangely named freeware viewer for PCs. One of the more recent improvements is IrfanView Thumbnails which you get when you install the complete set of plugins and I place as a shortcut on the desktop. It opens up an explorer window with a light grey background to distinguish it from Windows Explorer. Open up a folder containing mixed media and almost immediately it is populated with thumbnails which can be set to many sizes, not just Window's three. 

IrfanView Thumbnails of text, video and .psd

Thumbnails are shown for videos (with filmstrip icon), stills (even Photoshop) and text. PDFs are not shown however. One of the most useful tools is the ability to save those thumbnails as separate images for putting into a spreadsheet for example. Hovering over a thumbnail reveals information about the file itself such as dimensions, although for video only the dimensions of the thumbnail itself are shown. Like most features of IrfanView they are a work in progress, but the ability to see thumbnails from both videos and Photoshop files make it worth having.

In Part 2 I look at a a couple of sound tools, a backup programme and a couple of tools for uploading and managing material at iStock and Smugmug.

The boring but extremely important part of video making

You've just finished the most brilliant bit of work you have ever produced. Shot on Red, edited in 4K, graded, dubbed and in the preview theatre it looks and sounds amazing. Now what?

Well the video needs to be distributed to lots of different recipients with just as many requirements. Is it going to be shown in the cinema in 4K? Played by broadcasters in 1080p, 1080i, 720p, standard definition? Will it be put on a BluRay disk or a DVD? And if it is going to be watched on a computer, how good is the screen resolution and does the computer have the ability to play it back? 

There have always been multiple options when it comes to saving a piece of video or TV, even in the old days of  U-matic you could choose Hi-band or Low-band. But now if I am asked for a QuickTime file I ask at least 5 questions which are inevitably followed by blank stares and shoulder shrugs. 

Every four years or so there is a new format in town, the last biggy being HD with a top size of 1920 pixels by 1080. The next big step is 4K with either 4096 x 2304 pixels or 4096 x 2160 pixels. We can make this now and there are a lot of formats we can save it to such as old favourites like Apple ProRes and MPEG4 as well as a few new ones like GoPro's Cineform. Shortly HEVC or High Efficiency Video Encoding will be officially released by the MPEG and VCEG joint group. This new codec will have the same quality as MPEG4 but half the size (or the same size and twice the quality). 

Bored yet? Of course you are, but what is the point of producing a superb video when the only place it looks right is in the edit suite? A final thought; archive to the least compressed (preferably uncompressed) format you can so you can always produce new compressed copies from this master.