One of the most critical things you are going to run into immediately when shooting with the BMCC is the ability to monitor what you are shooting. Even with the supplied sunshade it is almost impossible to properly monitor on the built-in touch screen in daylight. If you don’t have an external monitor, make sure that you have a black drape or coat that you can drape over yourself and the camera to shut out light. You will look like the old-fashioned box camera photographer but it is the only way to cut out the glare on the screen. Also with it being fixed to the back of the camera, means that you have to go through some awkward contortions to view the monitor if you are doing low or high angle shots. If you have a portable SDI monitor then you are set. However if you have an HDMI monitor (like I do) you have to get a SDI to HDMI adapter. You could spend $280 to get the Black Magic convertor, or you could get a cheap convertor like the $45 ViewHD 3G-SDI to HDMI Video Converter that seems to work pretty well; I also have a 5V USB battery to power the convertor.

Batteries are another consideration when working with the BMCC. Do NOT depend on the internal battery of the BMCC. If you are shooting on location you will need to have external batteries to power the camera. Bescor http://www.bescor.com/ is one company that makes external battery packs specifically for the BMCC. So when you are shooting on location you may need to bring batteries for the camera, the HDMI convertor, and your SDI or HDMI monitor.

If you are shooting for any length of time, you will want to have at least one extra SSD drive, and some way to transfer data from the SSDs to a computer. I am using two 240GB 6G SSDs from Other Word Computing. I also have a portable Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex FireWire 800 dock adapter that I use to transfer files to a MacBook Pro on location.

OWC SSD and the Seagate Goflex FW800 dock

Seagate also makes a portable Thunderbolt adapter that requires a Thunderbolt cable.

It is also important to note that you can’t reformat the SSDs within the BMCC. This is another reason that you should have a laptop if you are shooting on location with the camera and if you are on a PC make sure that you can format drives in either ExFat or have software to format in MacOS HFS extended. Also be aware that if you are shooting RAW you will fill-up a 240GB drive in just over 20 minutes verses 2 hours and 20minutes if you are shooting ProRes.

Although SSDs are pretty sturdy, especially when compared with hard drives, I store the SSD that is not in the camera in a waterproof Pelican padded hard case.

Pelican 1010 case for storing the SSD

Some people have expressed concern with the SSD in the camera failing if the camera is vibrated, like if the camera is vehicle-mounted. I might tape the drive door closed so that the drive doesn’t become dislodged, but other than that, I don’t think it would be any more fragile than any other camera.

Probably the best way to shoot with the BMCC is to shoot in Prores with the film S-log profile and then monitor your shots with the Rec709 broadcast profile. You can always switch playback between both profiles, if you want to look at both. I am finding that I tend to shoot underexposed with the camera because the monitor looks overexposed. The iris control (for lenses that support it) sets the exposure so that no pixels are clipped. There are also zebra bars that you can set at 90 or 100%. For shots where it is feasible, I am using my light meter to set exposure also. The primary lens that I am using is the Tokina 11-16mm F2.8 DXII and I am almost always shooting with a Hoya Vari-ND filter to get to F2.8, so that I can get narrow DOF. The Tokina lens doesn’t achieve infinity focus on the camera’s EF mount, so for longer shots, I’m using the Canon 50mm and 100mm lenses which seem to be okay at F4 or better.

The BMCC has a focus button that toggles a peaking display to check your focus and you can also tap the touch screen for a one-to-one pixel display to aid in focusing. If you turn-on overlays for the external SDI monitor you can also see the peaking display there, which is great, especially if you have a focus puller.

If you are shooting in a controlled studio situation, you can tether the camera to a laptop via thunderbolt and take advantage of the Ultra Scope software that ships with the camera. I haven’t tried hooking up the SDI output to an external recorder yet, although I did bring up the camera over Thunderbolt in QuickTime 7 player for worlds most expensive webcam.

There are quite a few production idiosyncrasies that you will run into when shooting with the Black Magic Cinema Camera, and I hope that I’ve covered some of the more important ones in this article. In the next article in this series, I will talk about post-production workflow.

The EF mount and lens issues

We had ordered our BMCC in August of 2012 through Adorama and finally received the camera in March of 2013. And it is an EF mount, as there are still no Micro 4/3 mounts shipping. I ordered the Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 DX II lens before we received our camera and we also have 24-105mm F4 and 100mm F2.8 Canon lenses from our Canon 5DMk2.  My tests do show that the Tokina does not achieve infinity focus unless it is stopped down to about F8. (see the video below.)  This is definitely a problem. Black Magic will fix your camera if you send it to an authorized service center, however, in searching the Black Magic site, I haven’t seen a procedure for doing this. Anecdotally I have heard that the turn around time for the fix is 7-10 working days.

This issue is one reason that I would prefer the M4/3 mount model if it were available. The EF mount, while it is an intelligent mount,  has some limitations. First, not all Canon or third Party EF lenses are electronically compatible with the mount. Second, using full frame lenses with BMCC is wasting a lot of optical quality, both, due to the 2.4X crop factor and only utilizing the center glass of the lens. Third, the M4/3 mount with it’s shorter flange distance will allow you to use a much greater variety of lens than the EF mount, including vintage 16mm film lenses. However, be aware that the M4/3 mount model is not an electronic mount, so many M4/3 lenses like the Lumix series will not work with the BMCC.

Operating the camera

The BMCC does not come with a lens or a Solid State Drive when you purchase it. You must supply your own SSD. While the BMCC manual list a couple of tested  drives, there is no definitive list of drives that will and will not work with the camera. I had purchased an OCZ  512GB 6G drive to use with camera, never imagining that such a fast drive would have problems. The first shoot we took the camera out on, we discovered that the camera was dropping frames. Fortunately we had already planned on shooting that day with a 5D and ended up shooting with the Canon, since the BMCC footage was unusable.

We are now using 240GB 6G drives from Other World Computing and have had no issues with those drives. Fortunately I was able to use the OCZ drive in my edit suite. Another thing to note about the SSD is that you have to format it as either ExFat or MacOS Extended. And to use it with a PC that means you need to format it as ExFat. Also note that you cannot format the drive in the camera, you have to format the SSDs on a computer.

The SSD and the lens issues aside, the camera is really simple to operate. The menus are simple and straight-forward.  There are basically two ways to shoot with this camera; in RAW 2.5K mode or as HD in either ProRres or DNxHD format. In order to shoot in RAW, you need to have a considerable investment in SSDs and storage.  You need to plan on going through a 240GB drive every twenty minutes of shooting, and have a plan for swapping drives and transferring footage to safe storage. For bigger budget productions where quality is paramount, RAW is the way to go. While ASA and color temperature are somewhat irrelevant when shooting in RAW, You should still set them, to have the most flexibility in post.

Shooting in HD is much more affordable and easier to manage than shooting in RAW. The Prores and DNxHD codecs are both high quality 10bit 422 codecs and are well suited for editing most content. There are two profiles that you can select when shooting HD; The film profile that uses a log gamma curve and gives you 13 stops of dynamic range for color grading, or the video profile that uses the REC709 standard gamma curve for traditional video editing and monitoring. An important thing to note with the camera is that you can record using the film profile, while monitoring with the video profile to give you a better idea of what the final graded footage will look like. This is really helpful in judging your lighting and exposure because if it looks good in the video profile monitor, the actual recorded footage should give you even more latitude in post-production. Below is a short film we shot as a test of the BMCC in Prores HD mode with the film profile.

Like I said before, the menus are simple and straight-forward, and practically all the settings are manually adjusted and tailored to a knowledgeable professional that knows what color temp and shutter angle are and how they should be set. Beside the menu and transport buttons the only two other buttons you have worry about on the camera are the focus and iris buttons. When you press the iris button, it stops down the EF compatible lens so that no pixels are clipped and displays the f-stop. The focus button toggles focus peaking in the monitor. I’ve found that these buttons are intuitive and effective.

While the camera is simple to set-up and shoot with, there are a couple things that a cinematographer needs to be prepared for. You really need to have a high quality eternal SDI monitor or electronic viewfinder to compose and light your shots. The built-in monitor is practically useless, even with the provided hood, the glare from its shiny surface makes it unusable in daylight. You will also need an external battery power source. The internal battery should not be depended on, period. My experience is 40 minutes from totally charged battery till the camera shuts off. Beware.

I cut my teeth shooting 16mm and 35mm motion picture cameras, film cameras had 20 minute reels, manual settings, needed external batteries, and their viewfinders where far from ideal. Not to mention the hassle of dealing with film and processing. But they were preferred over broadcast video cameras for the quality of the final image. The Black Magic feels like a film camera except without all the hassles.

In Part three of my series on the Black Magic Cinema Camera, I will talk about workflow and post-production for this camera.

I’ve been shooting with the Black Magic Cinema Camera for the last month and what follows are my first impressions. In part one of this series on the Black Magic Cinema Camera, I will explain why this camera is different than DSLRs or even pro camcorders

Everybody knows that the Black Magic Cinema Camera was a revolutionary product when it was unveiled at the 2012 NAB show. Why then do they try to compare it to any other camera, and especially the Canon 5DMK2 DSLR?

When I say it’s not a DSLR, I mean that the BMCC doesn’t do a lot of the things that DSLRs do. The full frame and even the APS-c sensors on DSLRs shoot better stills, gather more light and have narrower depths of fields than the ”Super 16mm” sensor on the BMCC. DSLRs also have much more sophisticated automatic exposure and focusing features and they are much more forgiving to non-cinematographers. So with a DSLR it is much easier to make pretty images easily. Notice that I didn’t say better images.

Before I get into extolling its virtues, I need to point out a couple other things that DSLRs and pro camcorders have an advantage over the BMCC. The DSLR form factor is lousy for shooting handheld video, The BMCC is even worse. It’s heavy and it’s totally non-ergonomic. If shooting with a DSLR is like shooting with a brick, the BMCC is like shooting with a cinder block. This is, of course, why the camera rig business is doing so well. Audio inputs generally suck on DSLRs, While the audio inputs on the BMCC suck a little less, they still suck. I’m sure there is an excuse for not having phantom powered XLR inputs on the BMCC, it’s already a big heavy brick, why not make it a slightly bigger brick that’s much better? And then there is the fan, The BMCC gets hot, not as hot as a Red One, but pretty hot. And like the Red, it has a noisy fan, unlike the Red, the BMCCs fan doesn’t turn off while you’re recording. Another irksome thing is the battery life, which is to say that there is none. You turn the camera on and within 5 minutes the battery indicator is reading 75%, a half hour later the battery is flat, My experience is that the stated 90 minute battery time is wishful thinking on Black Magic’s part. So basically the internal battery is useless, either keep the camera on AC power or find an external battery solution.

Now let’s talk about some of the great things about the BMCC. Some genius at Black Magic Design woke up one night and had the brilliant insight that if you slapped a sensor and a lens mount onto one of their HD video recorders that you would have a pretty good video camera. Forget about the 5-year (or longer) R&D cycles of the big boys, Black Magic just went and made it. Of course, there were teething pains like the long sensor sourcing and QC delay, and the miscalculated EF mount flange distance. But in the end they have produced a very elegant solution for shooting cinema quality 2.5K and HD video.

While the ability to shoot 2.5K RAW is a great solution for some shots, it is not really practical to shoot raw on a daily basis. My test got about 22 minutes on a 240GB SSD. Then add the transfer and transcoding time involved as well as disc space on your edit system and you realize that you might want to reserve RAW recording for special situations. This is actually a good thing, in that the Prores 422 HQ recording mode can get over an hour on the same 240GB drive. And it is extremely high quality video, especially in film mode. Simply stated, even in Prores, the video quality from this camera is as good or better than cameras costing 4-5 times as much. But you have to know what you are doing to get the best from this camera. You have to manually set color temperature, shutter speeds and shutter degrees for example. And shooting with film mode requires color grading in post production. So while it is not as easy to use or a convenient as a DSLR or pro camcorder, it more than makes up for it in the quality of its images.

In part two of this series I will talk more about the nuts and bolts of operating and getting quality images from the Black Magic Cinema Camera.

You can check out a short interview of me by Patrick Sheridan of the Emerging Filmmakers Project at the Emerging Filmmakers Blog: http://efpdenver.wordpress.com/2012/11/13/an-evenly-matched-game/

The festivities start at 8PM, Thursday November 15, 2012. $5 admission and free beer till the keg runs out.

Wish us luck at the Starz Denver International Film Fest as well as Sundance and others.

I’ve wrapped post production for my short film “Love and Robots” and now I am in the process of entering it in film festivals. The film is entered into the Sundance festival, The Boulder International Film Festival, and the Festivus film festival in Denver Colorado. “Love and Robots” is the story of a female robot who wonders if robots can experience the emotion of love. It was shot with a Panasonic GH2 DSLR camera with a dedicated volunteer cast and crew and no budget to speak of.

I am also in the process of finding a venue for the unofficial world premiere. You can check out the trailer at: http://loveandrobotsfilm.com/trailer.html we also have an Internet Movie Database page and a Facebook page.

It is now some three months since that initial post and I no longer have FCP X installed on my Mac. Here’s the story of how I fell out of love. After editing a couple of minor projects with FCP X, I decided to edit my short film project titled “Love and Robots” with it. First off I struggled with FCP X’s media management when it dated my event as 2009, probably because I hadn’t set the date and time in one of my cameras. I then created my project, thinking that projects in FCP X where similar to sequences in FCP 7. I discovered much to my surprise that you can’t rename a project once it’s created. And even stranger, if you duplicate a project, it duplicates and renames the media associated with the project. And don’t try to move your event from its initial location on your hard drive, because FCP X loses it and you can’t reconnect the event, unless you move it back to the folder where it was created. What about FCP X’s much touted metadata and keyword organization? Well, I had several hours of footage and hundreds of clips that I carefully logged into scene smart folders. I had shot this project on a DSLR, so I was using double system sound. So when I went to use the highly touted sync clip feature, I found the matching video and audio clips for a take and synced the clips, FCP X then proceeded to sync the clips and created a new clip, which lost all the metadata from the original clips. All the hours I had spent organizing my video clips into smart folders were lost. The lesson here being, that you need to sync your clips before adding smart keywords. So like a date that can’t handle their wine, FCP X’s media management turns really ugly, really quickly.

As far as just editing video, FCP X did an admirable job. There were some little peeves, like not being able to copy and paste clip attributes, not being able to key frame color correction parameters, and not being able to edit a text template without, creating a new template in Motion. All of these were little irritating things, but not relationship breakers.

That brings us to the big break-up. Everybody knows that FCP X’s most glaring flaw is its inability to export XML or even an old fashioned EDL. Having XML support is critical in any film project because several people need to collaborate on the project. So when it came time to want to do some effects work in Adobe After Effects and to edit the soundtrack, FCP X essentially locked me in the hotel room. I was stuck not being able to export my sound as tracks. Practically every editor out there separates their audio into tracks, usually the first two are for dialog and then ambience and then effects and then music. And usually you can send these off to the sound editor for further editing. Well since FCP X doesn’t use tracks per se. You can’t separate the various parts of your soundtrack. And worse yet, you can’t export your sound as separate clips. “Round-tripping” soundtracks is critical to film workflow, and this is something that slammed the brakes on my project and made me abandon FCPX as a viable editor. This is a massive fail, that unless it is resolved, will kill Final Cut Pro as a professional  editor.

I had to export my movie and since there is no EDL support, I had to go through the movie cut by cut and hand-log all of my shots. I then reconstructed my entire edit using Final Cut Pro 7. Essentially Final Cut Pro X cost me four weeks of editing. Needless to say the thrill was gone. And like the end of  a bad romance, in a fit of rage I threw out Final Cut Pro X. Now my Mac is free of it, good riddance.

I finished the film in Final Cut Pro 7 and now I am slowly weaning myself from eight years of loving Final Cut and have started to edit on Premier CS5.5. It is sad.

You can see the trailer for Love and Robots at: http://www.vimeo.com/28967865

Okay, first sentence; it’s not perfect. But something this revolutionary, never is. In the words of Morpheus, you need to “Free your mind.”

iMovie Pro...Not!

I should just say that I have been editing video as a profession since 1985 and I’ve worked on everything from old CMX tape editors to KEM flatbed film editors to most the NLEs out there, I’ve edited national PBS shows and I teach Final Cut Pro editing at the local community college.
The most important thing I ask of an NLE is that it be fast and be intuitive. On these two counts, I’ve found Final Cut Pro X to be both. I’ll also add the caveat that while I’ve only logged about 16 hours using the new app, I’ve been able to do some pretty amazing stuff in that 16 hours.
Before I get to all the complaints that editors are posting (and they are well documented, to say the least) I want us all to take a deep breath and look at the bright side of life, as it relates to video editing. FCP7 was getting old, editors have been flocking to Premiere because of 64bit architecture, and “native editing” which FCP7 didn’t do. Also for the five editors in the world that edit 4K on a regular basis, FCP7 didn’t handle that workflow , so you had to use proxies (boo hoo!) Well, ladies and gents, FCPX does do 64bit, “Native” editing and 4K. I’ll actually use that 4K editing for time lapses, so hooray for 4K! The 64 bit is nice and in case you haven’t noticed we’ve now got a whole new host of 64 bit effects, They alone are worth your $300 that you are crying about spending on a full-featured NLE. It’s even got “Looks” included. I do love Stu and Red Giant, but for the price of Red Giant Looks, I’ve got a whole NLE attached.

Titles and Text sucked in FCP7, They suck a whole lot less in FCPX, font previews is just one little thing that makes me edit faster, and everyone knows a fast editor is an employed editor. Oh yeah, those nice 64bit effects and transitions are rendering in background while I keep editing, I wonder if I’m going to miss the “render wander” hmm… no more billing for watching the render bar, no wonder some editors are upset.
Video editors hate making friggin’ slide shows. But almost every friggin’ project involves animating Joe the photographer’s wonderful stills into the project. At times I’ve contemplated (gag) going into iMovie just to use the Ken Burns effect. For the record, I hate iMovie and I would hate iMovie Pro, if that’s indeed what FCPX was (and it isn’t.) But if I can take a still sequence and Ken Burns it without having to key frame, that’s mo’ money in my pocket. Yet another FCPX feature that makes me a faster editor.
Once you get over the initial new GUI shock, FCPX turns out to be very intuitive. I was able to make some edits right away without even opening the Help menu, where all the documentation is stored, a far cry from the four volumes of dead tree manuals that came with FCP6. For me anyway, the trim window and the precision editor are far more intuitive than FCP7.  Slipping, sliding rippling, and extend edits are all a piece of cake. Also I have to mention how easy syncing is now. On FCP7 I have the Plural Eyes plug-in just to handle syncing dual system sound. I shoot with a DSLR, so most of the time I’m doing dual system sound. With FCP X it’s as easy as importing the sound clip and choosing “Synchronize Clip” from the Clip menu, that’s it ! It’s simple and just works.
I’ll have to say that initially I’m not a big fan of FCPX’s media management. You kinda have to get over the ideas of projects, sequences, and bins. And that’s sorta like saying you have to get over the idea of breakfast, lunch and dinner. And no “Save As” is just freaky. I’m thinking events are like projects used to be and projects are like sequences used to be. I’m still messing with this whole new paradigm, So I’m going to say that I need to mess with this more to judge it. But I will say this, there are those that are saying you can’t put footage on an external drive and that you can’t share projects and assets, That is just plain wrong. You can import clips to wherever you want, and FCPX can use them, it does give you the option to copy the clips to the same drive as your project file, but you can opt out if you wish. And you have menu options for sharing and copying assets and projects for another editor to use. It’s no Final Cut Server, but big post houses that are running FCP Server are going to stick with FCP7 as long as their slow moving corporate giant minds will allow.
That brings me to “native” editing. Why the hell do you want to edit h.264 on a SD card natively? Because you like to be slow? Okay, most of you are smart enough to transfer your cards to the hard drive where you can import them into the NLE for editing. But then you say “I’m editing H.264 natively” you may think you are, but for all those edits you’re making, the NLE has to transcode and make I frames and reconstruct the GOP structure, that’s just the way it is. So while FCPX will let you do that now, the smarter way to edit is to let FCPX turn all that long GOP crap into beautiful 422 I framed ProRes for you in the background while you edit away “natively” and when you export your project , you’ve got a nice archival quality ProRes copy of your program. You DO have an archival ProRes copy of every program that you create, don’t you?
If you are worried about output formats, spring $50 for the new compressor or use your old compressor on your exported master file. And if you need to go to tape, you really should already have AJA or Matrox or Black Magic hardware. DVD? You probably already have DVD Studio Pro and the DVD standard isn’t going anywhere soon, so upgrading DVDSP is pointless. Blu-ray? You can output to an external burner and you even have limited custom menu options available in Compressor.
At this point I should point you to the excellent David Pogue article where he talks to Apple product managers to dispel many of the myths about FCPX. You can read that article here: Pro editors weigh-in on Final Cut Pro X
Now, let me tell you what i hate/ dislike or need to have added to FCPX. I need AAF export or XML export to send projects to After Effects. I need round-tripping or multitrack export to Soundtrack Pro or (gag) OMF export to send audio to Poor Tools (SIC.) Multi-Cam would be nice, although I don’t use it much in FCP7. I need more numeric input options. There are a lot of the time where I’m editing “by the numbers”, so knowing where to type in time code numbers for ins, outs and durations would be great. You should be able to tag clips on import like the old “Log and Transfer.” I’ve found in the “Import from Devices” window that you can import partial clips from devices, but you can’t label them in that window before importing them.
Finally, I’m going to directly quote David Pogue as to the bottom line:
“Professional editors should (1) learn to tell what’s really missing from what’s just been moved around, (2) recognize that there’s no obligation to switch from the old program yet, (3) monitor the progress of FCP X and its ecosystem, and especially (4) be willing to consider that a radical new design may be unfamiliar, but may, in the long term, actually be better.”