austindonald1 wrote:just received camera, I was fortunate to have winning bid on a new/unopened bmpcc for the same price they are selling used for. I ordered the small rig cage, a descent tripod, looking to get the external mic, and not sure if i should put a view finder directly on camera, or buy a 5 or 7 inch monitor, so i can 'fine tune' the focus and exposure.
A monitor is better because it gives you more and better ways to check focus and exposure (false color for exposure, bigger screen for checking focus, etc.), but there's a crucial catch: the mini-HDMI input on the original BMPCC is weak and vulnerable to breaking. If it breaks, it takes the whole camera with it. The smallrig cage includes some screws for stabilizing the mini-HDMI cable at the input and you should use those if you go with a monitor.
Your biggest challenge is probably going to be finding compatible SD cards. It's almost impossible to find any today because SanDisk made some changes in the last year or so and the models formerly recommended for the BMPCC (and the 5" video assist and the Micro Cinema Camera) no longer work.
Another thing in your long list of purchases and things to learn about is neutral density filters; you'll need a set of those (or a variable ND filter, more convenient but can be problematic since it's actually a polarizer). If you get a matte box you can efficiently use the same filters on all your lenses no matter their diameter; check out the Zip Box models from Wooden Camera. And you'll need an IR/UV filter for each lens too. When I was first starting out, I thought the only reason to use a ND filter was to allow you to open the lens wider in bright sunlight so you could still achieve shallow depth of field, and that's true but with the original BMPCC there's the added consideration that the image starts to get affected by diffraction if you stop down beyond f5.6 or so (one of the many things I learned from Denny Smith here on this forum). I notice the image getting softer around f11 and it's noticeably worse at f22. As someone who started out doing landscape photography and Elliot-Porter-style nature shots, I was used to maximizing depth of field and instinctively went for small apertures when outdoors...that's not what you generally want in cinematography though and it becomes a problem with the original BMPCC.
There's a generally useful and recent survival guide to the original BMPCC here:
http://data.pleintekst.nl//Blackmagic_P ... Guide.html Some things are already out of date on that page, including the SD card advice.
Resolve 18 Studio, Mac Pro 3.0 GHz 8-core, 32 gigs RAM, dual AMD D700 GPU.
Audio I/O: Sound Devices USBPre-2