McDonalds’ “SuperGood” Ad Campaign Shot with Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera!

In a press release today (see link below), Blackmagic Design announced that the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera had been selected as the POV camera for an upcoming McDonalds ad campaign. During the shoot, the camera was attached to the mouthguard of a motorcycle helmet and recorded first person point of view video in 12-bit RAW, which was later transcoded and graded in DaVinci Resolve 10.

Production Company: Native Sons Films, Woodside, CA for Stern Advertising, LA

Interesting quote from Director and DP Joe Murray of Native Sons Films explains why he didn't use 8 bit cameras or a GoPro:

“I also wanted it to look authentic, as if you are looking through a human eye, not a camera, so the footage had to have a sophisticated, cinematic look. Even though it’s a roving, quick point of view, I didn’t want over sharpened, highly compressed images or barreling distortion with a fish eye look. I wanted a naturalistic wide lens look with correct corners and smooth, high quality images, and I couldn’t have done it with any other tool...” Not bad for a camera that costs less than $1000 !

Full press release with more production photos at soundandpicture.com here.

A Whole New Camera - Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera Upgrade to CinemaDNG RAW!

Yesterday, Blackmagic set the filmmaking community on its ear (again!) with the announcement of the firmware v1.5 RAW upgrade to the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera.

With the addition of lossless CinemaDNG RAW, the BMPCC is now the least expensive unhacked 12-bit RAW solution in the marketplace, and a tremendous value for money at $995.

There are already some impressive examples of RAW footage, like this one from Ron Stratton on Vimeo Plus:



First raw video from Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera
I guess it's time to pick up a few $127 Sandisk Extreme Pro 64GB cards and start shooting RAW. 
Or, for about the same price as 4 of the Sandisk cards, a $328 Blackmagic HyperDeck Shuttle and a $200 ADATA 256 GB SSD (Adata offers more GB per $ than the other brands on the Blackmagic approved list.

I shoot ProRes with an ADATA 64GB SDXC card - it's a rock solid performer with no dropped frames. ProRes, we hardly knew ye.

While You Wait - Five Downloadable Pocket Cinema Camera Videos

Click on the image to go to the download page

For your grading pleasure, the folks at Wooden Camera have posted five gradable videos from the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera.

Something to keep you occupied as you sit by the front door waiting for your Pocket Camera to arrive.

Just Bought a Fast SDXC Card for my Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera

Since the cameras seem to be really shipping (!), it is time to buy a memory card.  After all these months of waiting, it would be pretty frustrating to have the camera waiting on my doorstep when I get back from Spaceport America next week - with no memory card to put in it.

Looking at this list of fast cards on blackmagicuser.net, I couldn't bring myself to spring for a 95MB/s $133 Sandisk Extreme Pro 64GB - so I bought an ADATA 64GB (95MB/s read, 45MB/s write) for $56 (on sale at Amazon) instead.  ADATA, an established DRAM and NAND flash memory manufacturer from Taiwan, just entered the high speed SD card market a few months ago, so their prices are a little lower than Sandisk's.  On sale, this card is a very good deal.

At 45MB/s write, the ADATA will be good enough for ProRes, but won't cut it for CinemaDNG RAW. When Blackmagic issues the RAW firmware update, I'll buy a faster card, but until then, this will do.

First Magic Lantern RAW video from the Canon T3i/600D!

Vimeo user Luis Roberto dos Santos just posted this short clip from his Canon 600D, modified with a "pre-alpha" version of the Magic Lantern RAW firmware .  The clip was recorded to a slow card - so there is some flickering and macro blocking - but it blows standard fuzzy Canon .H264 compression away:


If Magic Lantern is successful at stabilizing the code, this will be huge - possibly bigger than the 5D Mark III news.  RAW video from a $549 still/video camera body? It's a hybrid camera revolution!