Gadgetory

this video is brought to you by the Corsair Vengeance k70 and k95 these fully mechanical keyboards are designed for performance gaming visit Corsair comm slash Vengeance gaming to learn more this my friends is a little bit unusual for us this is the Blackmagic pocket Cinema Camera and if you're not familiar with Blackmagic what they've basically done is they've taken the camera industry and kind of given it a wake-up call given it a shake but the introduction of their two and a half K Blackmagic Cinema Camera they introduced like massive dynamic range which basically amounts to capturing detail in low-light and highlight at the same time giving you a lot more flexibility in post-processing to work with the footage so they introduced that camera for just like wicked crazy low pricing then they turned around and introduced a 4k version for $4,000 and a 1080p version for $1000 and dropped the pricing on the two and a half K to 2500 bucks so essentially for every line of vertical resolution you're paying about a dollar which is you know sounds great on paper and all that but what do you actually get and the answer is you get a pretty wicked looking image we're actually going to include some test footage that Brandon b-roll took with this particular camera because we've already actually opened it up before at the end of the video so do check that out but let's start with what's inside instead of including stupid discs they include yay an SD card that has the software and manuals unlike the two and a half K and the 4k camera it doesn't come with a full version of DaVinci Resolve which is black magics color correction software so it just comes with the lite version which it should be noted is actually free for download for anyone so it's thousand-dollar software for the full version so it makes sense that with a thousand dollar camera they didn't necessarily include that next inside we find the power adapter which you may actually find yourself needing because the integrated battery is not really anything special there we go as well as international plugs so there's our normal u.s. plug that looks like an e u1 wherever the heck all these things are from alright so they include those as well as a carry strap and what's neat about the fact that they include like a wrist carry strap forward is that even though it produces some fantastic images it is small enough to look like pretty much a normal point and shoot now when it comes to cameras hardware is a thing but it's not actually the only thing things like codec licensing make a big difference to what kind of an image a camera can produce so for example the camera we're shooting this on the sony fs7 hundred records in AVC HD which isn't a fantastic codec in terms of retaining color information so what that means is that the image might look great to you guys but if we're shooting in the dark or if we're shooting in non-ideal conditions we might not be able to play around as much with how the image looks in post-processing not so with this particular camera out of the box it comes with apples ProRes codec which means basically well the opposite of what I just said so there's more that you're going to be able to work with in post it's better than h.264 which is better than AVC HD and coming in a couple of months with a firmware upgrade you're actually going to be able to use lossless cinema DNG which is basically almost like it's raw but it's not uncompressed raw so there will be a little bit less flexibility but you still should be able to do an absolute butt ton with it in post given that you can shoot in RAW and it has 13 stops of dynamic range so we've only found a handful of cards that will work with it without dropping frames including this Sony UHS one card which is there 94 megabyte per second card so that's usually a read speed spec which is sort of irrelevant when you think about it because rights are what people actually care about on these devices so it comes only with a micro four-thirds mount unlike the two and a half K which is also has an EF mount option but unlike the two and a half K camera this one has an active micro four-thirds mount which means you can use lenses that control the aperture electronically versus being stuck with manual lenses so I think for that reason a lot of people were going with the EF mount on the two and a half K so now you don't have to be quite as concerned about the lack of mounting options speaking of lack of options there's not a whole lot in terms of stuff going on here so on the back you find a large LCD that quite frankly it's kind of poopy it's not that great you're going to want to use an external viewfinder the good news about it is it's about as big as they could have made it and it features a one-to-one zoom in so you can get your focus right so at least it has that but color really doesn't look true to life on it at all you've also got controls over here so you can navigate the menu this way the power button is here and then on the bottom of the camera you find a simple tripod screw in you've also got the battery compartment down here which also contains the SD card reader and the USB slot for pulling data off of it speaking of batteries the battery is nothing special however already even though it just launched you can get cheap batteries so don't worry too much about it in fact it's recommended to just carry like a two bakka like you know strap of batteries if you're going to shoot with this thing on on an ongoing basis now this is cool on the top of the camera you've also got another tripod mount so this is going to work with standard accessories like whether you want to you know put like I don't know like a hot shoe adapter there or whether you want to mount whatever it is you want to mount to it that's really handy and then you've also got dedicated playback buttons as well as of course a record button since this does happen to be a camera which brings us to the left hand side of the camera where we really find the bulk of the the i/o so there's the power in micro HDMI microphone in more on that in a moment headphones out for monitoring as well as a LAN sea connection which is used for remote control of the camera it's more of a pro grade feature now that microphone Ian yeah right now because the preamp built into the camera just isn't anything special levels are very very low so most people are using external audio recorders in order to get reasonable audio with the video that they're shooting with this camera it's possible someone will release like you know a dedicated design for this camera preamp so you'll actually be able to use the audio input onboard otherwise it's really recommended to use a zoom or some other kind of external audio recorder now before we dive into the menus here I just want to talk a little bit about the overall build quality of the camera it is absolutely beautiful the soft touch finish on the front of the camera has just the right amount of grip that you never feel like you're going to drop it or lose it but without feeling like it's just going to flake off and peel off the back has a slightly more subtle slightly more plastic feel to it and then the middle piece right here so the top piece that wraps all the way around the side and to the bottom is solid aluminum and just feels absolutely fantastic the camera does get a little bit warm in your hands so that should be noted however if you buy a ruggedized case for it or something like this you will likely never notice those things so let's dive into a couple of things in the menu here so number one is white balance so if you're evaluating the temperature so the color of your light the screen doesn't really help the profiles it shoots and don't really help because they tend to be quite flat and the fact that there's not much granularity to the white balance selections and will make this a little bit challenging for some people however if you're willing to work around it then you can and particularly if you're willing to grade it in post you can usually compensate for any inaccuracies in while you were shooting another thing of note so there's that there's all the microphone options although you probably won't use them unless something sort of dramatic happens over here we've got our recording options so ProRes right now is the only option for recording format dynamic range you can select either film or video and then you can go anywhere up to 30 fps this is really cool so this is a time-lapse interval you can set frames seconds or actually up to 10 minutes so it has dedicated time-lapse built into the camera and then finally we've got more kind of similar settings including HDMI overlays or not overlays I think that pretty much wraps it up other than to address the black dot issue so very very strong light sources have been actually blacking out you can fix them in post but Blackmagic has a firmware fix that'll be coming very very soon for that and I think thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Blackmagic pocket Cinema Camera don't forget to subscribe to - tech tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos like the video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it and leave a comment if you thought we did a reasonably good job of something that really we don't talk about that much also last thing guys if you're looking at this going oh wow it's like a pro grade camera for like a thousand bucks and sounds like a great deal maybe I just won't buy like some other camera bear in mind the way that this works the footage you get out of it will have to be worked on there's no such thing as you take a video with this camera of your kids birthday party and it looks perfect out of the camera this is a pro grade equipment they expect that you know how to use software like premiere or resolve or etc etc etc so that's just something to bear in mind here guys