Posts tagged blackmagic
SF Embassy @ Reykjavik

We are proud to share with you all a bit of our experience coming to Reykjavik as part of the SF Embassy, an amazing group of some of the most creative and talented individuals in San Francisco.

We were carrying around our brand-new Blackmagic Design Pocket Cinema Camera, and shot for the first time with it throughout the week. We love the quality of the images we get from that tiny camera, the incredible range for grading, and we can't wait to use it more and more in our projects.

Check it out below, or go to our work page to see it in higher quality on Vimeo.

The SF Embassy went on a ten day trip to Reykjavik, Iceland, to participate in the Iceland Airwaves music festival. More than 60 "SF Ambassadors" fell in love with everything Iceland has to offer in terms of arts, tech, nature, and people.


We will be traveling to Iceland for ten days to participate in the SF Embassy program and the Iceland Airwaves festival. Stay tuned for tons of updates, photographs, videos, and more, on this incredible experience of music, art, startups, creativity, and more. 

We're bringing our trusted 5D, GoPro, and the brand new Blackmagic Design Pocket camera, so rest assured we will have some images for you.


We're getting really excited about some of the gear we've been seeing come out of NAB this year. We haven't had a chance to try it yet, but we'd like to share some of our favorites right now and the ones that we're most excited about, some bigger than others.  

Sony F5/F55.

These have been a favorite of ours for a while now. The cameras offer a perfect blend of form factor modularity and high quality codecs. The image they produce is pretty outstanding to be honest and the highlight rolloff coming from the F55 seems very close to the Alexa, based on some of the tests. These are becoming pretty common to rent now, so if you're interested in us using one of them for your projects consider it done. They offer some of the best quality image out there at the moment, in some ways better than the RED, but as usual different cameras different brushes. It all depends on the look of the piece and what you want to make of it.

Sony PMW-F55 CineAlta 4K Digital Cinema CameraSony PMW-F5 CineAlta Digital Cinema Camera

Redrock  Micro One-Man-Crew slider

Another awesome rig from Redrock Micro. This one just seems like a great easy add-on for putting your second camera and not even thing about it while shooting interviews. Immediately set this up in a couple of minutes, touch a couple of buttons and the slider will pan smooth parabolic motions for you. This is perfect for shooting a second perspective during interviews and for $1500 we definitely intend to have this on board in the next few months. We're all for making shoots easier and less complex. Check out the video below. The slider is available to pre-order on their website now and will ship in a couple of months.

Movi Rig

Definitely one of the most talked about products so far has been this crazy awesome stabilizer based on a digital 3-axis gyroscopic gimbal. Vince Laforet posted an amazing video he shot using the Movi rig and called it the "game-changer" of the year. Since he hasn't used that word for any other product since the 5Dm2 first came out, it's a pretty big deal. The Movi rig permits you to do shots that you could never *easily* have done before. It's pretty incredible stuff and since the video says it all, here's the film that Laforet shot:

That alone is already pretty cool, but you really should watch the behind the scenes to get a feel for what this baby can do.

Now, the rigs are still pretty expensive. The MT-10 is capable of holding cameras up to 10lbs and costs around $15,000, but it definitely offers a lot of versatility for a much more portable thing. Imagine you go on a shoot somewhere remote, you could easily budget this in instead of having to carry a steadicam, a jib, a slider and other things like that. Does it replace all those? Never, but it adds a lot to a production budget for an equivalent price of all those items together. Now... what this also means is that in a year or two there will be much more affordable stabilizers based on similar designs and tech, so it's only a good thing for the film industry, especially the indie filmmaker. They are also planning on adding iris/focus control on the handles, so that solo operators can control everything easily.

We personally cannot wait to try one of these. For now, read more info on Laforet's great blog.

BlackMagic Design

BlackMagic took NAB by storm last year when they released the Cinema Camera. Pretty amazing 2.5K camera, for a really affordable price that shot uncompressed RAW and ProRes with 13 stops of dynamic range. Since then, they've gotten a lot of slack for not delivering it on time. The MFT mount version of the camera is only now shipping to a handful of people so they annoyed a lot of people with their supply issues. They say they've learned from their mistakes and that they sorted out the issues, and of course, they released another bombshell announcement at NAB this year. Not one, but TWO new cameras that sound and look really promising: the Pocket Cinema Camera and the Production Cinema Camera 4K.

The Pocket Cinema Camera is for less than $1000 a pretty amazing deal. The size of a very compact photo camera, it's a Super16 digital camera that shoots compressed RAW and ProRes. It has a MFT mount so you can get cheap affordable pretty good quality lenses, and there's a ton of them available. And it's small. Really small. It has the similar touch screen on the back and a lot of the functionality of the Cinema 2.5K camera. It has a removable battery and it only weighs 355g. Crazy stuff. Cannot wait to see what people do with this. It's very small, so obviously hard to hold for filming, but I'm sure this will bring a ton of potential to places you could never bring a camera before. And it shoots RAW. Compressed. Pretty Amazing. You can get the full gist of the camera on this link and of course pre-order it already through B&H:

Blackmagic¤Design Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera

The other camera they announced is the 4K bombshell. Based on their design of the 2.5K camera, it now has a Super35mm sensor instead and an EF mount. The camera has 12 stops of Dynamic Range (which is slightly smaller than the 2.5k Camera), but it shoots compressed 4K Raw and ProRes out of the box. With the EF mount you can access all the L lenses, but better yet all the cinema primes from Schneider and Zeiss. Even though I hate the form factor of the camera, there are plenty of cages and rigs built for this already that provide a ton of flexibility. The screen, if it's the same as the 2.5K is pretty unusable in bright light, even with the sunshade, but with any of these you should really invest in a monitor like the SmallHD. It captures 4K ProRes directly onto a SSD card, which is awesome and you can use the interface to tag and add metadata directly onto the footage as you shot.

It comes with DaVinci Resolve Lite, which is weird since the 2.5K camera comes with the full version of Resolve. It's worth investing in Resolve if you want to take full advantage of the RAW footage, so consider that an extra $1000 investment on top of that eventually. Either way, with 4K this camera will last you a while and could definitely quickly become a great Cam-B for a lot of shoots. We have one on pre-order already and can't wait to start shooting with it! Check out the official website for tons more gadget porn and you can pre-order yours as well from B&H: