The Pocket 4K footage we've all been waiting for

Andreas Neumann came to the rescue and made a REAL test of the camera.

I was disappointed that it was going to look like the GH5 judging by the first three videos, but this puts that anxiety to rest, ladies and gentlemen. Now THIS is the BM look we've come to know and love.

Definitely pre-ordering now!

Wow. Personally, I'm blown away. The only thing that would make it better is if BMD comes out and says, "BTW - shipping tomorrow".

Wow. Personally, I'm blown away. The only thing that would make it better is if BMD comes out and says, "BTW - shipping tomorrow".

Same!

Can't wait till October 5th.

This is what I like to see, real world use out in the field. The detail of the landscapes from up in the air was amazing. great natural contrast and shadows. beautiful skies. Much better. In love. Nice one blackmagic.

The detail of the landscapes from up in the air was amazing. great natural contrast and shadows. beautiful skies.

And this was shot in ProRes. Imagine how they'd look in RAW...

... exactly the same.

Seeing the 4k version on vimeo is just straight up mind blowing...wow
Youtube 1080p version doesn't even do it any justice

... exactly the same.

What do you mean?

... exactly the same.

What do you mean?

There should be minimal difference between 4:2:2 HQ and RAW when it comes to dynamic range and color, assuming no significant errors in white balance.

Seeing the 4k version on vimeo is just straight up mind blowing...wow
Youtube 1080p version doesn't even do it any justice

It's 4K on YouTube, too.

Seeing the 4k version on vimeo is just straight up mind blowing...wow
Youtube 1080p version doesn't even do it any justice

It's 4K on YouTube, too.

After reading your comment i checked and realize that my firefox and safari only play 1080p and don't have the 4k option, but chrome has the 4k option (thats really strange)

... exactly the same.

What do you mean?

There should be minimal difference between 4:2:2 HQ and RAW when it comes to dynamic range and color, assuming no significant errors in white balance.

What I'm trying to say is, with RAW I can reduce the highlights enough to recover the "lost information."

... exactly the same.

Well not exactly the same. It was rumored early on that RAW gave a stop or two of dynamic range, not sure on it's accuracy but what I do know is. Raw is sharper but can however produce moire (which I can't wait to see tests of) you can easily shift your log curve/ exposure or iso but where you can gain dynamic range is digitally by checking the highlight recovery option in the camera raw tab in resolve. The Red channel is often the first to clip, if the blue and green channels are okay resolve can use that information to reform the clipping red channel. It's an amazing way to gain dynamic range in raw.

I highly doubt highlight recovery or denoising would have been used in a camera test though.

Seeing the 4k version on vimeo is just straight up mind blowing...wow
Youtube 1080p version doesn't even do it any justice

It's 4K on YouTube, too.

After reading your comment i checked and realize that my firefox and safari only play 1080p and don't have the 4k option, but chrome has the 4k option (thats really strange)

Youtube switched to a different compression codec for 4K over a year ago, and include 1440 several months later.
Apple's native browser "Safari" will not play this new codec, so you only get to watch it in 1080p or 4K if the video was posted over a year ago (before the switch). If you want to watch current 4K Youtube videos you have to use Chrome.

I believe Apple's stance for not using the new compression is that "it's complete garbage (not my words) and detrimental to your computer's performance" i.e. like Flash.

Thanks for that information Timothy. I hope that doesn’t apply to Vimeo 4K.


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Even in 4k YouTube compression doesn't do the camera justice.
Just compare the ground details at 0:23-0:30 and the ballon's metal plate at 0:31-0:38
At YouTube it looks blurred and plasticky while at Vimeo you can see the roughness and scratches.
Or the woman's face at 1:45 - Vimeo holds the texture of the skin while YouTube evens that out.

What I'm trying to say is, with RAW I can reduce the highlights enough to recover the "lost information."

ProRes log files retains the highlights as well, it's not clipped compared to the raw files.

I'm so blown away

Sold me on the camera ! Definitly going to buy one as a B cam for the 4.6k and lowlight situations.

Love you Blackmagic !

Seeing the 4k version on vimeo is just straight up mind blowing...wow
Youtube 1080p version doesn't even do it any justice

It's 4K on YouTube, too.

After reading your comment i checked and realize that my firefox and safari only play 1080p and don't have the 4k option, but chrome has the 4k option (thats really strange)

I'm on Firefox and 4k works !

Yes much better. The skin tones are tolerable but there is very little direct lighting examples in there. So, not much testing of that. The sky is not so blue, but it was shot wideopen as a test. It needed a few more stops just for skin and sky rendering, but the sky can be fixed.

What we are not getting is which prores scene mode/profile is being shot in these clips. If BM could ask for that to be included, it would help a lot. The old pocket had a few profiles to choose from. It could just be that there is a propfile I would use most of the time.

Anyways got to get through the posts here to go back to looking at all the new 8k TV's just announced. Haven't seen a super colour OLED yet (rec2020 and maybe greater hdr). But boy do I want a stick on 8k plastic oled (poled) to stick onto the back of glass pane in my table.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, some of us cowboys in the bunkhouse wish we could manage mounting a modern 4K 65” OLED Dolby Vision/Dolby Atmos mustang.


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I'm not way inclined.

The good thing about 8k, is that good 4k 65 inch screens might get cheaper.

I believe Apple's stance for not using the new compression is that "it's complete garbage (not my words) and detrimental to your computer's performance" i.e. like Flash.

Having seen the results, I'd agree with that. I have to keep firing up Internet Exploder to view these videos because Chromium is pitifully slow and doesn't support most of the resolution options. The highest I can get in that piece of trash is 1440p, and even that's choppy.

Some of the sample clips I saw from Mavic 2 Pro samples looked like much via YouTube, but the original samples look great on my 27" 4K monitor... and those are recorded in HEVC.

There should be minimal difference between 4:2:2 HQ and RAW when it comes to dynamic range and color, assuming no significant errors in white balance.

That is true, though there will probably be some more detail in the raw particularly in the highlights due to the compression of going from raw -> full raster -> 4:2:2 chrome subsampling, plus the compression required to scale down to 10 bit from 12 bit values.

But you're still spot on regarding color and dynamic range.

What I'm trying to say is, with RAW I can reduce the highlights enough to recover the "lost information."

ProRes log files retains the highlights as well, it's not clipped compared to the raw files.

Well, in my experience, something that looks slightly blown out in ProRes looks a bit clipped when I reduce the highlights, whereas RAW is able to reduce them without the clipping.

If you're shooting log and correctly normalize the footage, you shouldn't see any significant difference. Resolve does offer a raw highlight recovery feature for marginal instances, where there's still some data to be found in the highlights. But once the sensor clips, that's it. Recording format won't matter.

OTOH, Andreas Neumann agrees with you: he also thinks raw would be fabulously better. Just note here that 7 figure feature films and TV shows routinely shoot Prores rather than raw, because raw isn't worth the overhead on shoots which otherwise spend lots of money on production value. And that's Alexa raw they're forgoing, not $999 raw.

Just a side note; the raw highlight recovery feature is for when you have clipped a channel and want to use the other (non-clipped) channels to create a better version.

If you're shooting log and correctly normalize the footage, you shouldn't see any significant difference. Resolve does offer a raw highlight recovery feature for marginal instances, where there's still some data to be found in the highlights. But once the sensor clips, that's it. Recording format won't matter.

OTOH, Andreas Neumann agrees with you: he also thinks raw would be fabulously better. Just note here that 7 figure feature films and TV shows routinely shoot Prores rather than raw, because raw isn't worth the overhead on shoots which otherwise spend lots of money on production value. And that's Alexa raw they're forgoing, not $999 raw.

Got it. I was aware a lot of TV shows were shot in ProRes. Back when I had the original pocket, I noticed a huge difference in sharpness between ProRes and raw (1080p). Maybe something similar will happen with the 4K.

Back when I had the original pocket, I noticed a huge difference in sharpness between ProRes and raw (1080p). Maybe something similar will happen with the 4K.

I think, in all honesty, you were mistaken. What you will see in BMPCC raw is a lot more moire.

The raw tab in Resolve does add default sharpening to raw clips, but even that isn't enough to distinguish raw from log, on a shot-by-shot basis. In any event, sharpness isn't resolution, which is going to be about the same with both formats.

Hey Guys and Gals: which dealer(s) in USA is known for earlier BMCC4K Pre-Orders fulfillment? Rumor has it that B&H Photo (New York City) is on the latter, (East-Coast) end of the food chain.

ResolveStudio 14.3...014 | MiniMonitor | DTV 10.9.7 | Win8.1 x64 | ROG G751JL, 2.8GHz Intel i7HQ, 24GB DDR4, 1TB HD, 500GB EVO 850, 2GB GTX965M | Mackie MCU Pro | Softube Console 1 Mkii | Shuttle Pro 2 | more...

Back when I had the original pocket, I noticed a huge difference in sharpness between ProRes and raw (1080p). Maybe something similar will happen with the 4K.

I think, in all honesty, you were mistaken. What you will see in BMPCC raw is a lot more moire.

The raw tab in Resolve does add default sharpening to raw clips, but even that isn't enough to distinguish raw from log, on a shot-by-shot basis. In any event, sharpness isn't resolution, which is going to be about the same with both formats.

And if it's true that Raw and ProRes look similar then why do people even bother to shoot raw?

Because it doesn't have baked in ISO or white balance settings. Also it allows for uncompressed video if you like that sort of thing.

And if it's true that Raw and ProRes look similar then why do people even bother to shoot raw?

They do look similar. It really depends on your post pipeline. If your film is effects heavy, you'd probably want to go with raw... but you might choose to be economical about it and only use raw for shots that you plan on pulling keys on or similar.

You really won't see that much difference if you're only doing light color grading though, even though you'll lose some highlight detail with 10-bit ProRes -- mostly though, you wouldn't be able to see that missing detail even if you hadn't lost it.

And if it's true that Raw and ProRes look similar then why do people even bother to shoot raw?

Lots of major television shows shoot Prores instead of raw.

And if it's true that Raw and ProRes look similar then why do people even bother to shoot raw?

There are many reasons.
You could read all night, hours and hours of discussions that would explain that to you.

A clipped highlight is a clipped highlight, no way to bring it back, if it's RAW or ProRes.

But the trick of copying the channel that wasn't clipped (if any) is old, colorists have used it for a long time and Red had it in their software from the beginning (called DRX). Would work with ProRes too. It means that you get back detail in the highlights, but loose color. Won't help much with a neon sign or a car's rear lights, but with some practicals in the scene for example and can get you close to one extra stop depending on the color temperature.

A question, how does the highlights, skin tones, and scenes, compare to ProRes on a good Arri, or the 4.6k mini? Do we still get the white shinny highlights like that other clip?

A question, how does the highlights, skin tones, and scenes, compare to ProRes on a good Arri, or the 4.6k mini? Do we still get the white shinny highlights like that other clip?

A question that you'll get lots of answers to - after the camera arrives and gets those comparisons.

A clipped highlight is a clipped highlight, no way to bring it back, if it's RAW or ProRes.

Actually, I've played around with my own BMCC footage on Adobe Camera Raw (works better for that than Resolve) and I'm able to bring back highlights that look clipped. This is what I've been talking about all along, maybe I didn't explain myself correctly.

And if it's true that Raw and ProRes look similar then why do people even bother to shoot raw?

I would flip it around.

CinemaDNG RAW 4:1 - 97 MB/s
Apple ProRes 422 HQ - 110 MB/s

I don’t think you will get much better image with the HQ prores compared to a 4:1 compressed RAW. So why use Proes HQ? It’s not more economical..

I don’t think you will get much better image with the HQ prores compared to a 4:1 compressed RAW. So why use Proes HQ? It’s not more economical..

4:1 RAW is much more CPU intensive than ProRes, and won't work period in Premiere. Since the frames are individual files, moving the data around is also slower than one contiguous file.

A clipped highlight is a clipped highlight, no way to bring it back, if it's RAW or ProRes.

Actually, I've played around with my own BMCC footage on Adobe Camera Raw (works better for that than Resolve) and I'm able to bring back highlights that look clipped. This is what I've been talking about all along, maybe I didn't explain myself correctly.

Of course you can, but then it's not really clipped. Even a simple Sony stills camera has nearly one stop of highlight you can bring back (from Superwhite). Actually, I found not more than maybe 1/3 of a stop difference in DR between Raw and ProRes with an UMP46.

I've found the same like Uli said with my UM46k. With my BMCC it was better to shoot RAW because you could bend the image much easier in post, but with the UM46k I found the ProRes HQ footage out of the box looks so good that I can have a very fast turnaround by just shooting ProRes and not RAW, slapping my tweaked curve presets onto it and add some minor adjustments.

And if it's true that Raw and ProRes look similar then why do people even bother to shoot raw?

Most people don’t.

JB

Although I’ve been an advocate of shooting raw uncompressed or raw 3:1, I admit it makes for a more time consuming workflow as you may need to optimize all media (at least I had to) but with ProRes now it’s load and go with a few tweaks when the exposure is good and a more straightforward grade suffices.

4:1 RAW is much more CPU intensive than ProRes, and won't work period in Premiere. Since the frames are individual files, moving the data around is also slower than one contiguous file.

All true! If you are a Premiere guy (no pun intended). But if we are talking about quality and economics(file size) from a Resolve perspective, then I believe cinema DNG is a better format. One of the great advantages, speaking from a Resolve perspective, is that you can edit directly from the portable SSD you have recorded to. That saves a lot of time. No we can have several BMPCC4k cameras with SSD doing a mulitcam shot, in RAW, and edit directly from the SSD’s. I’ll jump to Resolve if I where you

I don’t think you will get much better image with the HQ prores compared to a 4:1 compressed RAW. So why use Proes HQ? It’s not more economical..

4:1 RAW is much more CPU intensive than ProRes, and won't work period in Premiere. Since the frames are individual files, moving the data around is also slower than one contiguous file.

Actually, it need not be that bad. Different files are just series of linked blocks. You can set up each file sequentially too. This is how they are recorded optimally by high data rate cameras. When you load into ram memory they can be lined up seperately from the organisation on the disk. Once in memory you can jump around a bit too. Going a step further you just have a series of addresses of the blocks (pages in memory) as long as you have enough memory (for everything) it should be pretty fast. Still a tall order. Memory is a lot faster.

The other issue talked about here, with Raw to ProRes datarate comparisons. Raw data is half the uncompressed data, so at a similar rate you are probably getting much better quality. People are saying how good ProRes in on mini and whatever compared to Raw, which is good enough, but what about on pocket 4k? I was interested in the pocket to shoot 4k ProRes, for the very reason said here, faster turn around. So, good ProRes is a big thing on recommending this camera, if people are forced to go raw to get around these issues I will recommend it to very few people. Real life work, needs to be fast handeling.

4:1 RAW is much more CPU intensive than ProRes, and won't work period in Premiere.

Save your money and upgrade to better software so that you can have more freedom in post for when you need it, and save disk space at the same time

Since the frames are individual files, moving the data around is also slower than one contiguous file.

That's the one down side. Hopefully BMD is still working on a clip format for raw akin to X-OCN and RedCode. Now that nVidia will be able to accelerate wavelet decode soon...

Although I’ve been an advocate of shooting raw uncompressed or raw 3:1, I admit it makes for a more time consuming workflow as you may need to optimize all media (at least I had to) but with ProRes now it’s load and go with a few tweaks when the exposure is good and a more straightforward grade suffices.

When things are busy it's really a no-brainer.
I think raw is a great option but, yes, the workflow issues are just impractical for many/most producers.

Just a for instance, we're booked solid for the coming months and I've got footage coming in everyday that needs to be offloaded, put into a timeline w/ a rough edit to show to clients - a few a week.

ProRes is a godsend for this. And I've yet to have a client ask "but is it raw"?
Shooting raw is an unnecessary luxury in a busy production environment.

One of the things I'm most anticipating is the new extended Video and Gen4 LUT
If you're in business, quick, quality turn around means more profit and for that I'm incredibly grateful to BM.

Yes Jim, I also have a similar workflow, and I am looking forward to seeing the new Pocket version of Extended Video also for fast turn around boradcast projects. Extended Video on the Ursa Boradcast looks good, imporved roll off on highlights, so the new Pocket should be better.
Cheers