Mon Aug 19, 2013 4:45 pm
I very recently decided to cancel my preorder for a BMPCC and get a BMCC EF in stead. I"m not going to tell you that you should get a BMCC in stead of the BMPCC; both are awesome cameras; I'm simply going to tell you why I made my choice and you can decide if those reasons match what you are interested in.
A little background first:
I am primarily a VFX artist/supervisor and I find that having the ability to shoot test footage for proof-of-concept work is an incredible advantage when it comes to securing bids and even saves me time figuring out methodology/workflow during pre-production in stead of after principal photography has wrapped. My Canon is pretty nice, but it shoots at h.264, and the compression artifacting(even with ML) just isn't good, especially if I have to pull keys, meanwhile the additional crop factor imposed by shooting at lower resolution in raw turns even my 28mm wide angle lens into an almost telephoto lens.
At first the Pocket Cam seemed to give me exactly what I need, it is very affordable, it is versatile, it has an interchangeable battery which is pretty cheap, and it runs off of cheap SD cards, and(biggest of all) it shoots at 1080p prores with hopefully raw capability down the road.
Unfortunately, after considerable thought I realized that the BMCC is more advantageous to me, and fits my needs much better, despite the added expense.
-unlike the BMPCC which has limited "experience" and a lot of unanswered questions about its performance in the field, the BMCC is a known quantity. I won't be buying the camera only to find out that it has some unexpected quirk or flaw that really hurts its usefulness to me. The BMPCC also doesn't have raw capability yet, and despite promises from BMD, there are no guarantees, as far as I'm concerned, the BMPCC doesn't have the capability until it has the capability.
-the BMCC is capable of shooting at 2.5K resolution. Now, I don't know the reasons why the engineers at BMD decided to pick this in stead of standard 1080p, but I know the reason why it is something I want. Since nearly all the displays out there only show up to a 2K resolution, that extra bit of image size is actually not for show. Rather it gives me the ability to crop or stabilize footage in post while still being able to show at 2K without losing any resolution.
-The storage media that the BMCC uses is actually cheaper per byte than a camera that uses a SD or CF card. Sure, you have to get more memory at a time, but when shooting raw or even prores, you are going to need it. Also, the number of SD cards you'd have to carry around for any kind of extensive shooting would be ridiculous, there is a big risk of losing some of them or getting them mixed up.
Sean Pfeiffer