Newbie Questions for Black Magic Cinema Camera

i am absolutely fascinated by the black magic camera. i am 34 and have been making movies since my parents bought a vhs reecording video camera.

if you have the time, would you be willing to either point me to a great article/website or explain to me a few things about camera's in general? i mostly act and direct, but i am being called more and more to shoot things nowadays, and i want to know more about the process of shooting footage.

specifically, (i know, these are really elementary questions)

does the black magic camera record audio with an on board mic? how would i record audio if it doesn't?

what do i do with the DNG files? i couldn't pull them into my NLE program, and when read that premiere could, i downloaded premiere and it had a problem with them as well? does the black magic camera record as an mpg or avi like other cameras?

what does "13 stops" mean? and for that matter, what does "2.5k" mean?

i have many more questions, but those are the ones i am really curious about. i've used a panasonic dvx and hvx pretty much my entire "career" of shooting church videos, local commercials and stuff. but i absolutely will be buying this camera, and i need to up my level of expertise.

does the black magic camera record audio with an on board mic? how would i record audio if it doesn't?

Yes, the camera has an Integrated mono microphone - but it's not particularly useful because of the handling and fan noise. It also has two 1/4” jacks for professional balanced analog audio, switchable between mic and line levels.

what do i do with the DNG files? i couldn't pull them into my NLE program, and when read that premiere could, i downloaded premiere and it had a problem with them as well? does the black magic camera record as an mpg or avi like other cameras?

The easiest way to process the DNGs will be using Resolve Lite (which is free to download from the Blackmagic site - or if you buy the BMC, a full version ships with the camera). However you can also record to ProRes files, meaning you can easily drag those files straight into your favourite NLE.

what does "13 stops" mean? and for that matter, what does "2.5k" mean?

See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposure_(photography)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_resolution

• Yes, the Blackmagic Cinema Camera has a built in mono mic. However you almost never want to use an on-camera mic (especially one built into the body of the camera) for important dialogue recording. In that case you'd use an external mic (boom or wireless lav perhaps) to record it. The camera has 1/4" audio input connectors.
  
• At this stage support for CinemaDNG is not widespread. It's a format that was pioneered by Adobe, but they don't actually support it in Premiere Pro. However After Effects does support it. Also the camera includes a full license for DaVinci Resolve which also supports CinemaDNG and can be used as a method of "processing" the footage for use in an NLE.
  
  If you don't want to deal with the raw files you can opt to record in either ProRes or DNxHD which are edit-friendly codecs supported by Final Cut Pro and Avid Media Composer respectively (and also other NLE software). They are much easier to use immediately without any pre-processing, but there are some drawbacks when compared to the CinemaDNG.
  
• Thirteen stops is a measure of dynamic range within the image. It effectively tells us how far apart the darkest and lightest areas of detail can be before they simply become white or black. Thirteen is a big number (and probably one that will be disputed somewhat). Film is usually considered to be 13-15 stops, standard DV is closer to 6 stops, the RED One is rated at about 11 stops.
  
  The 2.5K refers to the size of the frame. Approximately 2,500 pixels across (the height would be determined by the aspect ratio). Normal HD 1080 video is about 1,920 pixels across (the 1080 name is from the height instead) - it is usually called "1080" but is considered "close enough" to consider 2K as well. The benefit of the larger frame size is probably mostly about being able to reframe slightly in post production (whereas 4K being much larger has a significant advantage in being a higher resolution).

Overall, if you were good at operating a standard video camera (which is more limited in many ways) then you should be able to adapt to the BMDCC fairly well, and you'll start to pick up on the increased flexibility that it offers as you experiment.

There are going to be some serious challenges though - lens control is very different to a standard camera. There's no servo zoom. Focus and exposure control are quite different.

In many ways cameras that are "digital cinema cameras" (starting, arguably, with the RED One) have more in common with film cameras than they do with video cameras. The rigging, operation and workflows that come up around them are usually a lot more like their equivalents in film than in video production.

Good luck. No one is an expert on this stuff, really. There are a lot of cameras, with a lot of commonalities, but they are all somewhat unique in various (and important) ways.