BlackMagic 2.5K Cinema Camera with 12bit RAW for $3000
eoshd.com
eoshd.com
As a proportion of overall budget, Labour is a much higher cost than equipment in film products. The cameras could be given away for free and it would STILL be difficult / expensive to produce a good movie, because what you really need more than anything is high caliber people (writers/actors/DoP/etc...)!
So while finding talented people is still the bottleneck, I think as a long term trend, the move to digital and effect of Moore's law is going to help with that as well (as long as the person looking is also talented).
There were a hell of a lot less programmers when you had to buy time on a mainframe. Or scribes back in the Roman Empire.
Think of all of the amazing works of art or literature that were never created because the tools (literally, paper) were beyond the means of average citizens.
Half the recordings i see in the neighborhood are huge budget series. The other half is a small production where everyone is working for film credit and lousy catering lunch.
Isn't there a minimum scale for wages required for any film? Or is it only if the film somehow becomes a "union" job?
And that reciprocates so many jobs that everyone i know pays (or are making ends-meet to pay) the union (most are something like 5k for actors, 20k for photo, per year).
But, small indie movies, just shoot for a couple days and nobody has any pay. They usually gets people with little experience via email chain and facebook noise.
No negative feeling towards the product, I just have an intense dislike of the current use of the word 'disruption'.
PS. Seth Godin had made a note recently on how to cause description in the market http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/04/on-making-a-...
In other words, RAW could be a buzzword, Blackmagic are new to sensors, this might be a big hoax, but having a perfect track record with Blackmagic products so far, I'd consider switching, which is sort of what you're looking for when you say 'disruptive'.
This cameras is going to sell tens of thousands of units, which in the cinema world, is a huge amount. I think RED has sold just north of 10,000 cameras in the last 6 years. This could easily double or triple that.
I own a 5K 16-bit RAW cinema camera (the Red Epic) and I'll be picking one up as a B or C cam. I expect many other people will as well, if only because it includes the full version of DaVinci Resolve 9 (normally $1K) and UltraScope (normally $700). It's almost like getting the camera for free, since I'd buy the other stuff anyway.
It will tremendously improve the image quality of low budget movies, and probably enable people to make movies that wouldn't otherwise have been made, especially in the poorer parts of the world.
This doesn't mean this isn't impressive, but cameras are something I'd like to put under a microscope (er, vectorscope?), before putting any of my precious creations at stake.
I'm really curious how/whether that will translate into video production.
If you've seen any low-light footage with with manageable noise on it (forget manageable, just make it pretty) shot with Magic Lantern, I'd love to know about it.
This movie is from Trammell Hudson, the guy who created Magic Lantern. He doesn't mention that Magic Lantern had anything to do with the low light performance, so I assume the performance is plain 5DII - however, features from Magic Lantern can help you get the focus, exposure etc much better than stock firmware. (I am sure, however, he used ML when taking this video)
I've used their Intensity Pro and Intensity Shuttle for capturing 1080p/60 HDMI (gaming consoles) and those are the cats meow for under $250. Nothing else comes close for the price.
I can only assume this will be similar. Nice job guys.
What are the differences of using something like the MkII vs something like this (for folks that don't know anything about movies)?
The big reason for using a 5D in house is both it's size compared to a movie camera - you can get in to closer shots. But mainly it has a larger sensor - most movie cameras (film and digital) have a sensor half the size of a 35mm frame so movie lenses are effectively 1.5x as 'long' as you are used to on a SLR camera.
By using a full frame 35mm camera (Canon 5D) the lenses become wider angle than on a movie camera and you get a much smaller depth of field (for the same aperture) which lets you create shots that isolate a persons face in close up.
It's a little surprising that this camera didn't have the APS-C/super35 sensor size used in most movie cameras - that would mean that a lot of standard lenses would work as expected.
Also, doesn't think make movie production more accessible?
Isn't this similar to < $1K DSLRs? Sure, the cost of a camera might be nothing to National Geographic, but for everyone else [interested in photography] they've had a pretty big impact.
http://www.blackmagic-design.com/
Go Melbourne! It has quite a scene of small high tech video companies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sensor_sizes_overlaid_ins...
A larger sensor allows for better low light images with less noise. It also allows for significantly more control over depth of field (and it is this control that distinguishes "cinema" from "video" in people's minds to a great degree.)
You can buy HD (2k) shooting cameras with full frames from Canon for about this price. You can buy APS-C 2k cameras from Sony for 1/3 the price (leaving more money for nice lenses). The NEX-7 seems to be a pretty ideal choice, in fact.
Sure, these cameras don't shoot RAW, but then, you don't really need RAW. RED made RAW popular with their no compromises approach and that's very nice, if you have the money, but notice that RED didn't compromise on their sensors, and actually has (or is promising, you never know with RED) very large sensors. 24mbps HD is more than sufficient for indie filmmakers in most cases. Granted, I think a 48mbps compressed stream would be about ideal. I wish Sony and Canon would make that an option.
I think in this camera, so much went into the ability to record in RAW that to make their price point they had to compromise on the sensor, and that's the wrong compromise. You pull raw off of the sensor in every camera, but carrying it all the way to the storage medium forces you to spend a lot of money on each stage, including shipping the camera with an SSD, and naturally, Thunderbolt then makes sense, but it too adds to the price.
At sundance I've seen movies shot on DV (an SD format) that worked as movies. We've all seen HD movies in the cinemas- for instance Revenge of The Sith was delivered as a 1920x817 frame- HD cut down to make a wider aspect ratio.[1]
And of course when you're working with RAW it affects the rest of your production pipeline- you need more storage space to keep your footage, backups get bigger, you need more bandwidth to your storage and you need a heavier CPU to work with it, etc. The final deliverable isn't going to be RAW, its likely to be HD (at least in many cases) and so I'd rather spend that budget on optical quality, and in a camera that means sensor.
I do hope these guys find great success, as the japanese really could use some good competition.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CineAlta
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Edit to add: I wrote the above response based on the EOSHD article, but checking the BlackMagic website, I better understand why they made the choices they did. I still think that if they'd gone with an APS-C sensor, or full frame, this would be much more exciting. But now I'd weight their choice of improved capture via raw as about equal to the impact of sensor size in image quality.
The biggest issue is DOF. Which will require fast lenses at shorter focal length that don't readily exist yet.