Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4k Test

PRAGUE, Czech Republic- I wanted tough lighting conditions. I wanted darkness. I wanted different temperature and types of light bulbs blasting into the same ether. I wanted conditions where most cameras would struggle.

I wanted tough sound conditions. I wanted blah, blah, blah, you get the point: I wanted to find out how well the new Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4k handled difficult filming conditions.

When I was at the St Martin’s Festival a couple of weekends ago and I realized that the scene was exactly what I was after, so I shot a short video.

The camera did well. I’m really impressed. The BMPCC4K is marketed as having high-end low light capabilities, “duel native iso,” and it satisfied these boasts in full — especially with a micro four thirds sensor.

That said, I’m coming from shooting on the original Pocket Cinema Camera, which was notoriously lacking in low light capabilities. With the new version the improvements are … wow. That’s all I have to say about that.

But what I’m really impressed with was the sound quality. I recorded the audio for that video in camera. Albeit, I used a Zoom F1 Field Recorder to feed the camera, not the camera’s native mics. But nonetheless the sound quality was impressive.

Expect more short videos like this on our YouTube channel. Or “video notes” as I guess they could be called. I’m making it more into a repository of everything told through film rather than a concise story in and of itself. So sometimes there will be full-length documentaries, sometimes doc shorts, and sometimes just some shots of an interesting place that I find myself in. I want it to be the video version of this blog — just a collection of what I do.