By site editor Dan Chung:
Sunset from John Brawley Tests on Vimeo.
Australian DP John Brawley, who has been closely involved with the development of the Blackmagic cinema camera, has posted some persuasive footage shot with the upcoming M4/3 version of that camera. He shot the test footage handheld with a Voigtlander 17.5mm f0.95 and a SLR Magic 12mm T1.6 lens. To me, the M4/3 version of the camera makes far more sense than the EF mounted one – mainly because you can use excellent fixed focal length lenses like Voigtlander’s 17.5mm and 25mm f0.95 to get shallow depth of field. Adapters to Nikon, Canon FD, Sony Alpha, Leica M and of course PL mount will open up the available range of lenses tremendously, but sadly because of the lack of an electronic M4/3 mount some other popular M4/3 lenses won’t be very usable. Brawley notes that all the shots were done in RAW and then colour graded with a single node (ie – not heavily).
Reports from around the web, of cameras turning up at dealers in small quantities, seem to suggest that Blackmagic Design have made good on their claims to have restarted production.
The F-Stop Academy’s Den Lennie and James Tonkin have also been out doing some real world shooting with the camera and posted these videos recently. They are well worth a watch. Much of the shooting is handheld and with a minimal setup. I think the key to how they are working with the camera is the EVF they use (in this case the Alphatron EVF that connects via SDI).
‘A Night in Nine Elms’ from hangman on Vimeo.
A Night at Nine elms – BTS from HANGMAN | F-STOP on Vimeo.
In the past few weeks Blackmagic have also published an updated version of the camera firmware that allows users to see the set aperture when using Canon EF lenses. This addressed a common complaint of early adopters. For run-and-gun work, audio remains in my view the single biggest hurdle to overcome – there are several issues discussed in the older video below by Juicedlink. If these are solved I can see the Blackmagic M4/3 becoming a practical tool for real world shooting.
