JoeZito wrote:Hello,
I will soon be shooting a doc about my family so instead of renting a bunch of gear, I figured I would buy a camera. I absolutely love the look of the pocket camera but wanted to know if anyone had experience with resizing the footage in edit. I'm trying to avoid spending extra for 4k and hoping the pocket camera holds up when enlarged from a medium to a close up. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
Best,
Joe
If your doc is mainly composed of faces, medium shots and close ups, and you won't be doing any push ins or extractions on the image before your upscale to 4K, you'll be fine. Using good lenses, holding focus, keeping your camera steady, making sure you don't underexpose the image (BMD sensors need light!), color grading with care, and using a high quality algorithm for the upscale, will make far more difference to the end result than simply grabbing a different camera just because it is "4K".
If, on the other hand, you want extremely detailed wide shots (like some of the eye popping wides captured on IMAX in the recently released Dunkirk), you will need a camera that resolves more detail than the pocket. I don't mean you necessarily need a 4K recording camera, just a camera setup, even one that is "only" HD, that is able to generate more perceived resolution than the pocket which can suffer from aliasing in certain situations.
I've shot and graded a ton of footage from BMCC, and I own both the Pocket camera and the 4.6K Ursa Mini and to me the biggest difference in the images isn't the resolution I see on screen, instead it's the dynamic range and color quality I can get out of them. On the Ursa Mini 4.6K even when I'm cropping the sensor at 1920x1080 to capture 120fps, the dynamic range and color of the images are definitely better than the BMCC and Pocket. In other words, I don't think resolution should be your biggest concern. If you like the dynamic range and color you are getting from the Pocket, you will be happy with your final results, even once upscaled to 4K.
This recent demo by Steve Yedlin is long but worth watching from beginning to end because he illustrates in great detail how at normal viewing distances there is no visible difference in the perceived resolution between a high quality 2K source image upscaled to 4K versus a 6K source image downscaled to 4K:
http://yedlin.net/ResDemo/