David Brodosi reviews Blackmagic Design Pocket Cinema Camera 4K

David Brodosi

David Brodosi - the picture is excellent. Brodosi has never owned a BM camera before but the hype is deserved. You can read specs and stats all day, and it has less range than some other cameras. BUT in terms of getting an excellent skintone and good highlight roll-off, this is up there with Canon and Arri. It's not how many stops the camera can hold, it's how things fall into place making PICTURES - and this seems to keep all the bits in the right places. David Brodosi owns a lot of Sony gear and uses a lot of Sony gear and love it - but Sony doesn't make it easy to get good skin/rolloff, this does. And this does it very affordably. Excellent B-Cam for Alexa - the BMPCC4K Film-Video V4 LUT is a great starting point match to K1S1 (Alexa). Other Positives - Timecode input! FINALLY! XLR Audio Input w/ Phantom, great menus, super flexible recording media options (the Samsung T5 drives work beautifully), 4K Prores. I pair this camera with a speed booster .71x to roughly equal super35 and keep focal lengths consistent. That's a huge reason this camera is great vs. the newer 6k - full-chip recording in 4k. My clients are barely doing 4k and hate RAW - so being able to do 4K Prores without windowing is a killer feature. Negatives - bad port placement makes it difficult to rig the camera. No SDI. Bad battery life (but lots of options for the power itself, and cheap cables available). Screen impossible to see outdoors and doesn't tilt. That's really the only huge issue. I'm not a DSLR person so I'm sure these are issues with most DSLR.

Blackmagic Design Pocket Cinema Camera 4K

Blackmagic Design is on a mission to democratize professional quality film production and the Pocket Cinema Camera 4K is its most effective weapon in that fight yet. It considerably more affordable than other cinema cameras, and even cheaper than many hybrid mirrorless cameras that lack its high-end video features. It’s built around the Micro Four Thirds system and uses a very similar sensor to the one found in the Panasonic GH5S mirrorless camera (a camera that costs about twice as much). Blackmagic has taken things several steps further by including professional filetypes like Apple ProRes and even RAW video which can be recorded to SD or CFast 2.0 cards, or directly to an external solid state drive (SSD) over USB 3.

The camera features a gorgeous, 5-inch, Full HD display that is perhaps the best built-in monitor we’ve ever seen. The touch interface is also brilliantly designed and offers a surprisingly simple interface for such an advanced camera. Add to this the advanced audio inputs and controls, including both 3.5mm and mini-XLR, and you’ve got everything you need to make your next blockbuster.

Designed for professional movie workflows, the Pocket Cinema Camera doesn’t offer the creature comforts of a modern hybrid camera. Autofocus is slow and often inaccurate, and there is nothing like the face or eye-tracking autofocus found on mirrorless cameras from the likes of Sony and Panasonic. It’s also designed to be a single component within a larger rig, and many operators end up spending hundreds of not thousands more on accessories to fully kit it out. Even so, no other camera provides such a good starting point as the PCC4K for filmmakers who want the best quality on tight budgets.

Photo of David Brodosi

David Brodosi on the beach