Blackmagic Design Pocket Cinema

JULIA’S GUIDE TO THE BLACKMAGIC POCKET CINEMA CAMERA 4K

Welcome to the BMPCC4K.

Before this camera was in your hands, it was in mine, being used to film bands at sweaty shows, interviewing rednecks in the middle of nowhere in Tennessee and Alabama, and filming various shaky cat themed videos. This is everything I know about the BMPCC4K.

Quirks of this specific BMPCC4K:

-It stops recording – sometimes an exclamation point will show up on the red record button on the monitor. If this happens, you are NOT RECORDING! Be careful with this because it could mess up an entire project, but it forced me to edit a lot more creatively than I ever would have.

-Sometimes the monitor doesn’t show the settings; it goes to a completely clean screen of just what the lens sees. To fix this, I try to switch from LCD and HDMI and turn status text on and off in the monitor settings, turn the camera off and on again, but I never really figured out a perfect solution to this one.

-The battery symbol in the monitor is not accurate, as in it will say you have like 60% battery when you actually only have 15.

PROS of this camera: light and compact, in-camera audio, cinematic and good quality, giant monitor

CONS of this camera: glitchy, bad battery life.

Now onto the real manual:

SD CARDS

This camera takes SD cards which Gordon will give you. After you shoot on them, you can take that card and upload the videos to your computer using an SD card reader. There are two different slots for SD cards, but I’ve only ever used 1. It doesn’t matter which slot you use; it will record either way. On the monitor, you can tap the SD card and it will show you how much time you have left on it. If you’ve already uploaded the videos to a computer, you can format the SD card by tapping format and holding the format button for 3 seconds. This will DELETE every video or picture you’ve taken on that card.

RECORDING

There are 2 record buttons, both with a circle symbol. One is at the top of the camera, and the other is smaller and on the front. If you have your SD card in, you can simply press either of these and you’ll start recording. A red light will come on in the front of the camera and you’ll see the record button on the monitor change. You can record in RAW, which takes up a lot more space on your SD card but has more possibilities for color correction when you’re editing (meaning you have more control over the colors, brightness, contrast, etc). You can also record in ProRes, meaning it will save space, but you’ll have less control over the color correction and will have to use a LUT (which is basically like a photography filter but for videos; there are many different LUTs that will make your footage look wildly different, and you can download them off the Internet for free, or look in your editing software for them). You still have control over brightness, contrast, colors, etc with a LUT, but just less control. I exclusively recorded in ProRes when I used this camera. When recording, the footage may look unsaturated and washed out, but don’t worry because it will look normal when you add the LUT when you’re editing.

After recording, you can press the play button (little triangle on the bottom right) to see all the videos you’ve recorded. There’s no video gallery, but you can look back at the videos by pressing the rewind button twice. That will make it go back 1 video.

PHOTOGRAPHY

To take a photo, there is a “still” button to the right of the main record button. It has a picture of a camera on it. If you press it, there will be no implication that you took a photo, but don’t worry, you have. The photo will show up in your SD card later.

TOUCHSCREEN MONITOR

When looking at the monitor, you should see the numbers at the top, which tells how long you’ve been recording for, the frames per second, shutter speed, iris, ISO, white balance, and tint. You can change these settings by touching them and dragging the slider to what you want. Mess around with them if you don’t understand what they are, but I’ll give a basic overview.

FPS (Frames per second) – how fast/slowed a video is; 24 is the norm, but you can go up to like 60 meaning your video will be in slow motion

Shutter speed – how fast the shutter is opening and closing. Controls light

Iris – aperture/how wide the iris of the lens is opening. Controls light

ISO – controls light also

White balance – controls color

Tint – controls color

Generally, I tried to have a 180 degree shutter speed, 800 ISO, and like a 5.6 Iris, but it all depends on what setting you’re in when recording. If it’s dark, up the ISO, you will figure it out.

AUDIO

One thing about this camera is that the in-camera audio is awesome, so if you’re not doing something serious, I wouldn’t even recommend connecting a mic to the camera. To see how high your audio levels are, there’s an audio section in the menu you can check. Make sure your audio levels are in the green and you’ll be fine.

I did, however, end up connecting a mic to the camera; a RODE shotgun mic, which is a big long mic that sits on top of the camera. If you do want to do this or another mic, all you have to do is plug in the connector of the mic into the camera, where there is a symbol of a microphone. Then make sure the mic has batteries and is turned on, make sure that the audio is going out through the mic, which you can change in the settings (Mic-out), and you’re good.

MENU (SETTINGS)

The Menu button is a button with 3 horizontal lines. When pressed, you can access the settings.

RECORD: (1) This is how you switch from RAW to ProRes (mentioned in the recording section of this manual) as well as resolution. When you press the arrow right you get to (2) the dynamic range. Film is better quality, but doesn’t “Bake in” the colors (meaning it will look like trash when recording but great after you add a LUT), and Video is worse quality, but you don’t have to add a LUT as it bakes in the colors, and you can see what it will actually look like when recording. Extended Video is a mix of both. The frame rate can be changed here as well. Off Speed recording lets you record in another frame rate, which you can change there as well. Then you have the SD card settings, I’d just set it to Fullest card, which records on whatever SD card is the fullest. The last button tells the camera to stop recording if a frame has been dropped. (3) Timelapses, if you’re into that. Detail sharpening makes your videos sharper and is baked in to the footage. Record LUT to clip bakes in a LUT that you want.

MONITOR: (1) LCD vs HDMI – keep it on HDMI for more options. If on HDMI you have the clean feed, which doesn’t show anything on your screen except for what youre shooting; Display 3d LUT shows the LUT on the monitor when recording to see what it will end up looking like when you edit; Zebra adds stripes where the camera picks up complete white, for example if you record the sun or a bright light, stripes will come on where it’s extremely bright; focus assist puts a red color on everything in focus; frame guide lets you test out different aspect ratios; grid turns on a grid; safe area guide turns on a box inside the screen; false color turns on the false color guide (2) status text turns on/off the text where you can adjust your ISO, iris, etc; display lets you switch from if you want your audio levels to show on the screen or your codec and resolution to show; screen brightness is pretty self explanatory

AUDIO: (1) there are 2 audio sources. If recording straight from the in-camera microphone (as in you don’t have any mic plugged in), it should be on Camera Left for channel 1 and Camera Right from channel 2. If you do have a non-XLR mic plugged in, it should be set to 3.5mm left – mic and 3.5mm right – mic. The audio levels will show and should always be in the green; if they’re not you can adjust them to be louder or quieter. (2) the headphones volume can be adjusted if you’re wearing headphones, which you can use to hear the audio, and the speaker volume can be adjusted if you’re playing videos from the camera. Don’t worry about XLR phantom power.

SETUP: (1) lets you adjust the date and time, language, shutter angle vs speed (same difference; won’t affect anything but I used angle); flicker free shutter reduces flicker when filming lights; image stabilization is not supported on this camera. (2) Set function button lets you set presets or toggles that you can easily switch between without changing all your settings. (3) you can turn the tally light (the red light you see on the front of the camera when recording) on and off, and change its brightness; can factory reset the camera; and see details abt the camera such as the hardware id and the software version. (4) Bluetooth can be turned on and connected to the iOS Blackmagic app, but I never did it.

PRESETS: (1) You can save more presets, which can be used for different places (ex: filming outside vs inside has different settings)

LUT: (1) you can import LUTs into the camera to be baked into the footage, and can switch between different LUTS, but I’d just wait until you’re editing. The LUTs can be turned on and off within the camera, and whether you want them to be baked in. If you want to install LUTs from the internet to be used within the camera, look it up, but it’s possible.

BATTERIES

Not gonna lie, the batteries go fast. Like they’ll die around 20-30 minutes of recording, and there’s not getting around that unless you have a battery pack, which Gordon doesn’t have. Just make sure wherever you are that you have the charger and that you’re constantly charging at least 1 battery. Then you can just switch out the battery when it dies. Also, as mentioned at the top of the manual, the battery symbol in the monitor is Not Accurate, so watch out, you never really know when it’s gonna die.