While this stuff gets me excited, it never ceases to amaze me how indie movie producers/direction keeping thinking it is the price of technology that is preventing them from creating an oscar-worthy film.
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...)!
You're mostly right - people are using it as an excuse. But the cheaper equipment gets, the more people can dabble in the field. Five or ten years down the road, a small percentage of those people will be the high caliber talent.
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.
Heh, living in LA i can say the cheaper part is talent.
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.
when you are a BIG studio, and want to hire the best guys, they will only work if the union allows. and for the union to allow your production has to use professionals from all other unions (guilds).
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.
It won't disrupt the camera market as much as the world of indie movies, where it fills a void between top range consumer products and unaffordable pro gear.
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.
The "disruption" is the promise to get 12-bit RAW out of it for this cheap. It isn't necessarily disruptive (RED cameras are still competitively priced, considering the budgets of productions that could harness what RAW has to offer), but it's an interesting promise. Then again - just because it's RAW, doesn't mean that it's divine. Before a raw signal becomes a RAW file, it still has to go through a Wavelet/DCT compressor and might end up not being very useful. RED cameras have between 1:3 and 1:18 Wavelet compression. It's RAW, so nothing is pixelated, but you can't argue with entropy, and trying to only gets you more noise.
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'.
The RAW capture is uncompressed (unlike RED), and further, you can also choose to encode 10 bit 4:2:2 1080p in ProRes or DNxHD.
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.
This camera is worse-is-better than most of the existing cameras in the market (smaller sensor, no XLR, short battery life, etc.) so it is disruptive in some sense. The clever part is figuring out what corners to cut.
The thing to remember is that no matter how good the output format (and this one is quite good), the biggest problem with these cameras is still the CMOS/CCD. RED cameras have a notoriously noisy output, and I've been cursing a Canon 5D for weeks now because I couldn't get a decent grade without taking care of banding. The other thing is the dynamic range (again, sensor only), which is still a setback for most cameras. DSLRs have pushed the boundary there, but it still feels experimental working with them.
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.
You're probably already aware, but if not: Magic Lantern alternative firmware for the 5D makes it much much nicer for making videos. In the right hands (which are not mine ...) I've seen it make low-light video results much, much better.
Haven't tried it yet, unfortunately. Not being your own DP has some disadvantages too...
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'm with you on the importance of the CCD, but isn't it the whole point of lossless compression to fix your banding problem? I thought banding was because of the information thrown out by h264. When you color grade, you're smearing the darker pixels out over the whole range, and digits that h264 considered insignificant all of a sudden become significant again ...
Banding is fundamentally a problem with Bayer Filter sensors. Bring back prism spectral modulation 3CCD before you are considered cinema quality in my book.
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.
I don't think this is going to be a game changer, but it think it will be a success. It competes against the Canon 5D mk III. It will do well because of the RAW which Canon seems to be unable / unwilling to put in anything but the new C500. The main problem is the sensor size. It is not FF35 or even S35. This bucks the current trend. Black Magic is well known for its hardware and bought into software nicely, but this is their first camera.
This is a great price point. I have similar functionality with an external Samurai SSD recording box and a Sony EX1, but this product is much, much less expensive, and being self contained would be more convenient.
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.
Even though it is not PL mount and that camera is a tiny fraction of budget in a movie production I'm looking forward to see this one myself. I wonder how are they managing heat issues in that body size.
I don't know anything about movie production, but are camera costs really "a tiny fraction of budget" for indie film makers?
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.
If you can't make do with a cheap camera, you probably will want good lighting and sound (or else the expensive camera is literally wasted), and that is indeed much costlier than the camera in my experience.
Labor is the biggest cost on most productions. That is why you will hear about certain indie movies with $5k - $10k budgets that do well, and $10,000,000 movies with similar production quality. If you can get people to get excited about your movie project, or about gaining production experience, then they will often work for free or for spec. When that's the case, the biggest cost will probably be equipment.
Well, yes. Indie shoots will factor camera [rent] costs normally as no more than 10% of the shooting day's budget, and as the production scales up, this diminishes faster. Nonetheless, having your own camera for the price of 5-10 days is a benefit you can't imagine. I seriously hate renting essentials, it makes any production a hassle.
For example, great lens kit (to buy) costs 100 times more than this camera. Then there is electricity, grip, light, costumes... etc. But most expensive thing in shooting a movie is a) people, moving people b) set construction, permits, fancy grip.
Maybe look at it the opposite way: Perhaps indies should choose a camera that fits in their budget (and if that ends up being a "camcorder" instead of ZOMG 4K RAW, so be it) rather than letting the camera empty their wallet.
I've been using their low-end product for a while (Intensity); both their hardware and software so far has been solid, especially considering the price.
When it comes to cinema, optical fundamentals are the most important for getting high production value from an indie budget. That means lenses of course, but this is a camera we're talking about, which means sensor size has a huge impact. Compare the size of this camera's sensor (About micro-4/3s) to APS-C and Full frame 35mm. It is about 1/4th the size of a full frame sensor.
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.
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.
I would have loved it if they used a larger sensor. However not like canon dslr but more like sony FS100. Canon 5d2/3 have a problem reducing all these pixels down to HD. And it's not the sensor size but pixel pitch that impacts S/N ratio. At 2.5K I think this camera has a better pixel density than the canon5d2/3.
The biggest issue is DOF. Which will require fast lenses at shorter focal length that don't readily exist yet.
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...)!