Blackmagic BMC
Anamorphic Options for the Blackmagic Cinema Camera
09 months ago
One of the advantages of anamorphic lenses and adapters is a wider FOV. Since they are basically just horizontal-only wide angle adapters they certainly are a help for those looking for a wider field of view with EF Mount lenses. Here’s my experience with anamorphic lenses with the GH2 (1.85 crop), and how they should work on the Black Magic Cinema Camera.
1. Panasonic LA7200
1.33x adapter, focus-through
recommended taking lens
Tokina 11-16
Nikon 17-35 (Sigma 17-35 2.8-4 lower budget option)
Designed for the DVX100, this adapter works best on the GH2 at 17-20mm and can work down to 14-15mm depending on the lens.
I’ve found that placing a +.25 diopter between the taking lens and the adapter clears up Chromatic Abberation. On the BMC, the Tokina 11-16 should be the best option for this adapter. I estimate it should go nearly to 12mm wide and be in the excellent zone by 15-16mm. Also note: This lens has blue flares, but getting oblong bokeh requires the use of front diopters and very limited focus.
2. Bolex Moller 8/19/1,5x
1.5x Adapter designed for 8mm film. Dual focus – In macro, this lens will change to 1.33 an can focus as close as 0.5m.
recommended taking lens
Nikkor 28mm f2 or equivalent (f2-f4 without vignette)
Nikkor 35mm f2 or equivalent (should not vignette on BMC)
Manual focus prime lenses past 35mm should work without vignette, zoom lenses need to be tested.
These lenses are fairly rare, but show up on ebay from time to time. The adapter itself is very tiny, but has sharpness equal to an Iscorama 36. Because the rear element is only 24mm in diameter, wide angle lenses will vignette over f4. This lens is also dual focus, but can be used to rack focus in certain situations. (working on a tutorial for this)
3. Iscorama 36 (also other related 1.5x Iscoramas)
recommended taking lens (outside of what it comes with)
Any sharp manual Nikon or Canon prime lens down to 28mm, possibly 25mm, depending on lens design. You will also need a clamp from redstan.com. You should have no trouble adapting this lens to any prime up to 105mm. Redstan also sells a .4 72mm achromat diopter that is necessary for focus closer than 6ft. This achromat changes the ratio to 1.33. I’ve liked using the Nikkor 50mm 1.8, 1.4, The Nikkor 35mm f2 and a few other Nikon prime lenses.
This lens is really fantastic in build quality and image quality. Probably the closest to cinema anamorphic quality you can get in a cheap anamorphic, as well as being able to resolve over 4k resolution. The potential downsides are that it can be difficult to rack focus and is harder to adapt to taking lenses due to its triangular shaped rear element. When adapted extremly wide the edges of the frame can succumb to distortion which is normal for older anamorphics.
There are many other anamorphic lenses out there. Most are 2x adapters, which means you crop on a 16:9 sensor or you shoot in an extremely wide aspect ratio. Lomos are probably the most well known, but I have little experience with them. Be sure to add whatever experiences you’ve had to make this a better thread. When the camera ships I’ll post samples and information on workflow.
First RAW Blackmagic Cinema Camera Footage
09 months ago
With the release of the first RAW footage of the Blackmagic Cinema Camera we can start to take a good look at footage that the camera will record natively. At first glance it looks like an Alexa with a 2.3 crop sensor. If you look closer, you will see it only has one flaw: A tiny bit of aliasing and moire. This is not as bad of a problem as it is on other cameras since we can fix this mostly in realtime with debayering settings and chroma blur.
Here’s an example:
Certainly for me the moire is a non issue, and since were dealing with raw footage, there will surely be better fixes to come along. All in all the RAW footage released yesterday shows that the BMC camera is unmatched by most cameras under 15k and provides and image quality that can be graded and changed with as much flexibility as a Red camera.
Bolex Anamorphot Compatibility Chart
010 months ago
Bolex Anamorphot 8/19/1.5x Compatibility chart
Before we get into Bolex tutorials, here’s a chart showing basic compatibility with different cameras. Canon DSLRs will be similar to the Red Scarlet at 4k.
Optimal Prime Wide (widest with no vignette up to f22)
Panasonic GH2: 40mm
Black Magic Cinema: 31mm
Red Scarlet 4k: 46mm
Red Scarlet 3k: 37mm
Widest Prime with minimal circular bokeh
GH2: 35mm
BMC: 28mm
4k Red: 40mm
3k Red: 32mm
Absolute Widest – no vignette faster than f2
GH2: 28mm
BMC: 22mm
4k Red: 32mm
3k Red: 26mm
Blackmagic Cinema Camera Cineform RAW Software
01 year ago
This is my first trial for making a scripted GUI conversion tool for the Blackmagic Cinema Camera and converting the output to Cineform RAW. Why do this? Cineform RAW is very similar to Redcode in that the RAW files can be manipulated on the fly with Firstlight and it has very good performance with most NLEs.
On to the software. At this time it’s limited to CinemaDNG files only and is basically for testing purposes for once we get RAW files from the new Blackmagic camera. You can download sample CinemaDNG footage to test with here: http://www.ikonoskop.com/dii/footage/
How to use: Download the software here New Version – Added framerate options, and filename is set by the time you make the file – so no way to overwrite previous files.
(Windows only)
1. Make a new directory containing DPX2CF.exe – This comes with Cineform Studio Premium and is a command line utility. It needs to be in the same directory as DNGtoCineform.exe
2. Start the program, follow the prompts. It is all very simple with no choices on frame size or frame rate at this time.
3. Do not use this program on any footage that you are not afraid to lose! Right now that would be Ikonoskop users. Also, this program will overwrite its output.avi file everytime without asking first. Another issue with the compiler is that you cannot save your output.avi file to the directory where this program exists.
Blackmagic Cinema Camera Preorder
01 year ago
Listed at $2995, I would expect the street price to be slightly lower when it comes times to ship. Markertek has it at $2845, so other sites will probably match closer to the release date.
Preorder Blackmagic Cinema Camera from B&H Photo Video
Here’s a DSLR / Cinema Sensor Size Comparison chart
Thoughts on the new 2.5k RAW Blackmagic Cinema Camera
01 year ago
Wow! What an announcement! This new camera is very close to the old Scarlet 3k for $3000 that was promised long ago. Instead this is a $3000 camera with a built-in $1000 RAW recorder, $1000 software, $750 Canon EF mount and a $250 camera?
Of course this has opened up more questions about how the camera operates, and the lens choices possible. The sensor itself is very interesting. 13 stops DR, if true, is much higher than competing DSLRs. Doing a little searching around, there was a sensor announced in 2009 – A sCMOS sensor with very high DR with an active pixel area of 16.64×14.04mm, exactly the same as this new blackmagic camera. Another camera with an sCMOS sensor is the pco.edge, an industrial camera, but maybe a good camera to look at the datasheet for to see lower resolution high speed options that are available with this sensor. I’m not saying this sensor is in the new blackmagic camera, but it looks very similar.
On to camera mounts: The ideal mount for this camera would be a 4/3 mount that is adaptable to PL, B4, OCT-18/19, EF, Nikon F, PK, OM, and I’m sure I’m forgetting a few. From the spec sheet and website it says that is supports both EF and ZF, but only pictures of EF lenses are shown on the camera. Hopefully this will be cleared up soon. With a 4/3 mount you could use the excellent lenses designed for this sensor size already from Panasonic, Olympus and Voightlander. For now, the Ideal zoom is the Tokina 11-16 – hopefully electronic in both Canon EF and Nikon G mounts.
