NAB 2013: News Shooter looks at Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera

Digital video site www.newsshooter.com is at this year’s NAB show in Las Vegas, and has been taking a look at the Pocket Cinema Camera from Blackmagic. The Pocket Cinema Camera is a small, 1080 video camera with a Micro Four Thirds lensmount and an eye-opening MSRP of $995. Click through to see newsshooter’s video, straight from the floor at NAB.

The Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera uses a Super 16 imaging area (around 12.5 x 7.4mm), and an ‘active’ Micro Four Thirds lens mount, giving full aperture control of native lenses. The camera can capture footage in Apple’s 10-bit 4:2:2 ProRes format Blackmagic promising to add the open, lossless CinemaDNG Raw standard later.

Click here for our announcement news story including press release and detailed specifications

Click here for the original article on www.newsshooter.com

Comments

Is it strictly a video camera or you could shoot still images??? I have some Olympus prime lenses micro 4/3 that I’ve been using on my OMD EM5 so please clarify??? Thank you.

Almost certainly video only. Blackmagic makes no reference to stills at all.

Thank you.

And it only does up to 30 fps. It needs 1080/60 in order to minimize jello. So it’s not a replacement for an action cam like the GoPro

The frame rate has nothing to do with the Jello effect. The sensor read speed is what matters.

No, jello is related to global shutter or not. So, its not sensor read speed either. A global shutter will never give you jello no matter how slow of a frame rate you are at, its will just blur. The global shutter will read all the pixels at the same time vs something like gopro which does not have a global shutter, it has a rolling shutter, which pretty much is horrible. That got to be the next thing to change on the hero cameras as the hero 3 still has a rolling shutter.

You need a certain amount of mass to have smooth dampened movement, or in fact just trying to hold it still. So forget longer lenses unless one is tripod mounted or … one ends up with one of those ridiculous shoulder rigs … which takes one away from the “pocket” concept.

You can always add mass, but you can’t take away mass. If you find it’s too light, connect it to some weight via the top or bottom tripod hole.

This is going to be an outstanding seller!!!!!

Still no sign of whether “Active” means that it can auto focus the lens or not. Dpreview, a little help here?

They don’t say. My guess would be aperture control only.

The same as the original 2.5K BMCC with EF-mount, the pocket camera offers setting of focus and the iris via the camera. Focus button turns on peaking. Iris button automatically adjusts lens iris settings so no pixel value is clipped.