The joy and pain of high quality imaging.

The Blackmagic Cinema Camera is what some people in the industry would call a "game changer": indeed, for the price, it was the first time a low budget production would have access to an image quality quite comparable to cameras from RED or ARRI, the two leaders in cinema cameras.

Here is a few numbers: to buy a camera from RED, let's say the Scarlet-X (which is their cheapest option), you would need to cash-out near 8,000$ for the "brain", and about as much if you want a somewhat functional camera. For an ARRI Alexa, you would pay 80,110$ for a starter kit. For a functionnal Blackmagic cinema camera, you would pay... 3,000$, and that includes the camera and the DaVinci Resolve professional color grading software, available for 995$.

Arri Alexa

RED M

Blackmagic Cinema Camera

Now, granted, the Blackmagic doesn't shoot 4k like the RED, nor 3,5K like the Alexa. It is limited to 30 frames by second, so no slow motion. However, it does shoot in RAW at a resolution superior to 2K, which is the main delivery resolution in movie theaters.

What is RAW, and which should we care? RAW was first used in DSLRs: it was a picture format that would incorporate the "raw" information directly recorded by the sensor, uncompressed (as opposed to a JPG, even at its highest quality). It is a major step up in quality compared to virtually any compressed formats (excluding the "lossless" ones, which compress files without loosing quality), and gives us the ability to color-grade a picture very precisely, and quite heavily, without loosing quality, while any modification of, say, a video recorded from a 5D, would be degrading the image, sometimes pretty badly.

The Blacmagic Cinema Camera also shoots in compressed formats: PRORES, which is a format created by Apple, and DNxHD, which is the default codec of the proeminent editing software AVID Media Composer. While compressed, these formats offer a very high quality but require much less disk space than RAW, and are much less demanding to read. In short, they are a compromise, but a good compromise.

As a post-production manager, one of my first decision (taken after some discussions with the director of photography) was to decide whether the movie would be shot in RAW or in a compressed format, as this choice would have an impact on many parts of the workflow. We actually decided to shoot a bit of both: we will mainly shoot in a compressed format (to reduce costs: compressed data means you need less hard drive space) but some scenes will be shot in RAW. Typically, they will be the scenes that would require stabilization in post-production (shooting in RAW gives us a higher resolution than our output resolution, therefore, if we frame it a bit wider than we need, we can use a software to make the camera movements smoother), or the scenes that we won't be able to shoot many times (raw is more forgiving regarding exposure and framing, as well as setting the color balance and ISO, as you actually set both these parameters in post, as opposed to before shooting the scene when you shoot in a compressed format.).

Once we decided on the format, we had another decision to take: with the Blackmagic Cinema Camera, the option is given, when shooting a compressed format, to shoot in either "film" or "video" mode. The "film" mode has very low contrast and saturation (the file looks very grey, "flat"), while the "video" mode is quite saturated and contrasty. Both have their advantages: the movie mode is more pleasing to the eye as-is, but offer less information than the "film" mode.

Film mode

Video mode

Film + custom correction

We decided to shoot the while movie in film mode, which will allow us to color-grade our movie to our liking, which would have been more difficult if we chose to shoot it in "video" mode.

So, to summarize:
-With the Blackmagic Cinema Camera, you have three quality options: RAW, Compressed Film, and Compressed Video.
- RAW is the best quality, but takes significantly more space.
- Compressed Film is quite unflattering but offers more information than Compressed Video for the same amount of disk space.
- Compressed Video doesn't need to be color-graded, while Compressed Film absolutely does.
- As a reasonable compromise between space taken and image quality, we will shoot mainly in Compressed Film with some specific (difficult) scenes shot in RAW.