Blackmagic Does It Again, Again

Well, I think it's pretty safe to say that absolutely no one saw this coming - the Blackmagic Cinema Camera. Blackmagic always does good NAB - introducing products that gets everyone's attention and as a result, their booth is getting busier and busier each year. This year it was insanity, from the very first minute the show opened to the last second on Thursday. NAB always has a few booths that are packed, and Blackmagic has joined that elite club. The long faces in the Matrox and Motu booths are testament to that.
And of all the announcements Blackmagic made at this year's NAB, this one got the most attention. In fact, this camera was the talk of the show - people were looking at the Canon stuff, and surprisingly no one was talking about the Sony FS700, but everyone was talking about this camera.

So, why? Is it because it is coming from such an unlikely source? If Panasonic or Sony announced this very same camera, would it have gotten so much mindshare? So while our waiting list grows at the DV Shop, let's deconstruct this little retro box.

The Good
- Price ($2999)
- Comes with DaVinci Resolve (a $999 value)
- Size and weight
- Takes Canon lenses, and Nikon lenses with an adapter
- Thunderbolt
- Nice big 5" LCD
- Can record in ProRes, Avid DNxHD, or RAW
- Claims of 13 stops of dynamic range
- Metadata entry while shooting (providing one has the time)
- Menu system seems well thought out and elegant
- Out-of-the-box thinking from a company that has never made a camera before

The Bad
- No XLR inputs, only 1/4", and no HDMI out
- No autofocus (unlike Panasonic AF100, Sony FS100)
- Small sensor (slightly smaller than the AF100)
- RAW takes up a lot of space on those expensive SSDs it records to - 30 minutes of footage on a 256GB SSD that costs about $400. ProRes and Avid are much smaller file sizes - about 2.5 hours on a 256GB SSD. For comparison sake, AVCHD records about 3 hours on a 32GB SD card that costs $60 (albeit in 4:2:0 colour space)
- Blackmagic has no history of making cameras. In fairness, neither did Go Pro or Red, but as anyone who went through the first year of Red can attest to, sometimes experience is a good thing.

The Ugly
- Battery is internal and non-switchable when it runs out after 90 minutes. Yep, 90 minutes - that's how long the internal battery lasts. To shoot longer, you'll have to either run AC, or get a Switronix adapter to run off D-Tap off of Anton Bauer or V-Mount batteries, which adds cost and weight.

As for picture quality, that will have to wait until it actually ships in late July. On paper, it certainly looks promising, with the caveat that you have to do a lot of colour grading in post.

Hats off to Blackmagic for once again shaking things up. Even if this camera doesn't live up to the hype, it's a good step towards the kind of innovation the industry needs.