Guest post by Clinton Harn:
Blackmagic 1.8 Firmware, UI overview, AF, Debayer, 1600 handling & moire test from Clinton Harn on Vimeo.
A couple of weeks ago Blackmagic Design’s Grant Petty took the wraps off the latest 1.8 firmware for his company’s cinema cameras. It was a unified release that aimed to bring together the look and feel of user interface for all the cameras in the range – in line with the upcoming URSA models. Petty was keen to point out that this firmware release is not the last and that more will follow with more feature improvements.
The Pocket Cinema camera received a boost to it’s autofocus performance with active Micro 4/3 lenses. This is something I was keen to test out as the previous firmware’s AF is all but unusable in most circumstances. Thankfully I had two BMPCCs on hand to compare the old and new directly.
The big news with the firmware update for the original BMCC is that debayering of the image when shooting ProRes or DNxHD is supposed to be much better. This should make the image cleaner and less prone to moire. To see if it was improved I spent some time shooting charts. The EF version of the BMCC also adds autofocus for EF lenses but I was unable to test this as I only have the passive MFT version of the camera to hand.
Also untested in the video is the new losslessly compressed RAW DNG recording in the 4K Production camera – I don’t have one of these.
Audio is supposed to be generally improved in this firmware release but apart from some interface changes I don’t see any dramatic changes here – still no audio level meters.
Check out the video for my full rundown and conclusions.
