Blackmagic Pocket Camera gets Raw video
posted Tuesday, November 12, 2013 at 2:36 PM EDT
The Micro Four Thirds lens using Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera has just received a major feature upgrade: it can now shoot Raw video, which will a major boon for serious serious video users.
In an announcement, Blackmagic stated:
The new Blackmagic Camera 1.5 software update adds CinemaDNG RAW file recording so customers can now capture super wide dynamic range in a single file. Wide dynamic range RAW image recording allows users to capture the brightest highlights and the darkest shadows simultaneously, capturing more of the scene than is possible with a regular video camera. CinemaDNG RAW files give users incredible freedom to be able to adjust the exposure manually during color correction with Davinci Resolve allowing more flexibility for incredible feature film look color grading.
The camera will use the "open standard lossless compressed version of CinemaDNG RAW". However, not all video editing software is compatible with this format. Blackmagic points to DaVinci Resolve 10 as one possible option, or else using Davinci Resolve Lite to transcode the video to more widely used formats.
The addition of Raw to the Blackmagic Pocket will make it that much more attractive as an affordable alternative to other cameras — especially with its sub-$1000 pricetag. However, the small sensor means that you're dealing with a 3x crop factor on lenses.
We'll be interested to see what sort of footage comes out of the new feature being added. Just make sure you have a large, fast SD card for storing all those enormous Raw video files.
(via NoFilmSchool)