Blackmagic Design 4K Production Camera price shock

I went along to BVE 2014 at the Excel in London today and made a B-line (bee-line?) for the Blackmagic Design Stand to explain why I was a trifle miffed (British mid-level anger) about the non-arrival of my 4K Super 35 Production Cinema Camera, ten months after I ordered it.

And there it was. Not my camera of course, but a living, breathing, full production version sitting on a Manfrotto tripod aimed at a miniature fairground. I took in the scene and then my eye caught the most amazing figure in front of the camera; no, not a gorgeous model but the price of the camera.

Hang on. This was over £3,000 including the government's 20% cut just a week ago, and it's now £19 cheaper than a brand new Canon 5D MKIII body! So what has happened, or to my suspicious mind, what is missing? 

Well the first thing that's missing is compressed RAW recording which is promised to arrive later (as it did in the 2.5K) and Avid DNxHD which won't because Avid still don't have a codec that works with 4K. And... well nothing else. DaVinci Resolve colour grading software is still included, the sensor hasn't been changed, there is still a 6G-SDI output and the picture looks great. In fact the industrious James Miller has already compared the quality of the BMPCC with the Canon EOS 1D C here and it really cuts the mustard as we say in Blighty.

I have felt that this camera was going to miss out on the impact it made at NAB and with the Digital Bolex (kind of) available and the Panasonic GH4 launching that may have been the case before Grant Petty dipped into the BM Design piggy bank and made Christmas come late for all of us, by making this camera the bargain of the decade.

I ordered mine on 26th April 2013 about 2 nano-seconds after it was announced and I am still 30th on the list of orders at CVP, but I am hopeful that I might get it before the UK sinks again or the US freezes over. I might even be able to film Great Britain in the sun. Now how to spend that £1000...

4K at BVE in London and future proofing

It's been a week since BVE was held at it's new location at Excel in East London and I really enjoyed my two days there, partly for the old colleagues I kept bumping in to, partly because of the new kit I could actually see and touch and partly because of the 4K Cinema presentations. The 3D & 4K Cinema seminars were held in a room about 5 minutes away from the main exhibition so I felt like an orienteerer (or whatever someone who participates in orienteering is called) getting my badge scanned each time I moved between the two locations.

Philip Bloom's excellent presentation "The DSLR journey: from the 5D mkII to the 4K 1DC" was so popular that over 150 people were turned away each day, including me on Tuesday. Philip has not been too positive in the past about 4K's future but one of the reasons I follow him on twitter (@PhilipBloom) is because he is prepared to have his mind changed. He had shot a pop video with Olly Knights on the Canon EOS-1D C the previous week, quickly edited it in Adobe Premiere and Dissolve and produced a 4K ProRes 422 file which the venue guys converted to a DCP to show on the 4K projector at BVE.

The first time he had seen the video in 4K was at rehearsals the previous day, because he, like 99.9% of us working in 4K, doesn't have a 4K monitor (Sony had one on their stand). The only way he could check his pictures at 4K resolution was blowing them up into quarters on his retina screen. I have to say the pictures looked very good and Philip didn't have a massive rig like Canon used on "The Ticket", he just added a TV Logic field monitor:

Canon EOS-1D C on the Ticket (from Canon website)

Philip Bloom (with bag) shooting the Olly Knight video with EOS-1D C
(from Philip Bloom's blog)

The video had been shot very quickly and on the hoof, in Philip's words - guerilla filming - which is pretty incredible at 4K, and he managed to turn it around in about 5 days, which makes a nonsense of anyone claiming that shooting 4K at the moment is impractical.

Of course when you are on an island in the Pacific you might need a bit of backup and Sky's Galapagos series was certainly ambitious. 3D on a volcano - tick, and 4K? Why not. The first episode was shown in 4K 3D (or is it 3D 4K) at BVE and we were suitably furnished with dark glasses, which was a little disappointing. But the effect was not. Once you have seen a marine iguana snort out salt in 3D4K there is little that can impress you. I was in row 6 but wanted to be in row minus 3 to really see the crispness of the image but it was still pretty good from 12 metres away.

In an interview with tech radar this week John Cassy, the head of 3D at Sky TV reaffirmed the company's commitment to 3D and claimed that 4K would not be the innovation that replaces 3D but the technology that enhances the format, "There are very clear benefits that 4K gives 3D. The resolution is better and also it could help in glasses-free 3D because it enables that whole resolution and picture quality." He also claims to have seen a glasses free version of 3D but like a News of the World journalist failed to reveal the source.

Canon's 4K camera the C500 is dropping in price but is still at almost £19,000 so it is a hire only beast for now,but the EOS-1D C £10k less than that but still some way off my Christmas list. To me the cameras that will change the broadcast world though are the Sony PMW-F5 and F55 with the AXS-F5 4K recorder (about £16k and £24k respectively) which get round the rolling shutter problem and are "proper cameras" provided you have perfectly flat shoulders. 

There was a lot of talk about how much storage all this 4K material is going to take up but now I wouldn't consider buying less than 3 terabyte external drives (4 TB are out there), 6 times larger than I was buying 2 years ago. With the amount of storage looking like it will shortly double on a hard drive platter I am looking forward to shooting RAW 4K at a price point close to shooting HD now in about 2 years. 

To conclude I will quote John Cassy of Sky again who sums up my opinion on 4K, "We have a watching brief on Ultra HD and 4K. Actually what we have been doing, the Attenborough shows have all been filmed in 4K - and in some cases 5K - so they have been captured and future-proofed in a sense, as far as we can." 

Future proofing avoids obsolescence, if you get it right.