Blackmagic Production Camera 4K Review

Description
Item ID : 338

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Professional Quality

The Blackmagic Production Camera 4K promises incredible performance for very little money. No other camcorder offers Ultra HD video resolution, Super 35 size sensor with global shutter (that eliminates rolling shutter issues).

Budget-conscious filmmakers, documentarians and commercial producers that are looking for a quality imaging tool owe it to themselves to check out the Blackmagic Production Camera 4K. It uses the same unique and robust body design as the Blackmagic Cinema Camera that is 6.5 inches wide and 5.2 inches tall and weighs 3.8 pounds. Unlike most traditional camcorder bodies, it is somewhat awkward to handhold for long shots and most shooters will quickly find that at least a basic cage or shoulder mount is a must for nearly all shots not on a tripod. But don't forget, the word "Production," does imply a professional tool in which a steady mount is considered standard.

New Sensor

The Blackmagic Production Camera 4K's sensor is 21.1mm x 11.9mm which gives you a 1.7 crop factor. It is significantly larger than the Blackmagic Cinema Camera's 15.8mm x 8.9mm sensor with a 2.3 crop factor. For example, a 100mm lens on the Blackmagic Production Camera 4K will give you a 170mm field of view whereas the same lens on the Blackmagic Cinema Camera would yield 230mm. An added benefit of the larger sensor is that you'll get a shallower depth of field at the same f-stops.

Rolling shutter is a thing of the past. The global shutter built into the sensor finally overcomes the dreaded skewing during pans and fast motion that comes with every rolling shutter sensor found in most DSLRs. Now vertical lines remain vertical even during fast pans and fast moving cars, kids and creatures, all keep their natural shape. For comparison, we mounted our Blackmagic Production Camera 4K and a Blackmagic Cinema Camera side by side on a tripod and did some fast pans focused on a wrought iron fence. The difference is stunning. You no longer need to pass out Dramamine to your audience before your action sequences. While there are no more rolling shutter issues, we did notice there is a very slight lag in the LCD screen response as compared to the Blackmagic Cinema Camera that becomes most evident when doing fast pans.

Some early users of the Blackmagic Production Camera 4K have reported dead or "stuck" sensor pixels that appear as small white spots on their images. We tested our sensor for this by recording three clips with the lens cap on at each of the available ISOs; 200, 400 and 800. We grabbed a still frame from each and imported them into Photoshop and carefully reviewed each at 200 percent. We did not find any dead pixels. These same three images did, however reveal the noise differences in each ISO setting. At ISO 800 we saw noise above 10 percent as indicated on our RGB parade scope in Premiere Pro CC.

Tests

The noise we saw in our ISO test images led us to test the Blackmagic Production Camera 4K in low light. We shot several scenes in low light at ISO 800 and found that the noise does become noticeable in not just the darkest tones but the middle tones as well. This is clearly not a camcorder you'd want to use when you do not have control over the lighting environment. At ISO 400 the noise clears up considerably and at ISO 200 the image is very clean if you have adequate light for proper exposure.

To test contrast and dynamic range we shot scenes at midday in a heavily treed area. We exposed for the brightest parts of the scene by pressing on the iris button. This prevents clipping of the brightest parts of a scene but we found we overrode this setting about half the time as we preferred to allow small parts of the scene to clip in favor of having a little more exposure. But it is a quick and reliable way to get an initial, if overly conservative, exposure. We graded these clips with the included DaVinci Resolve 10 and found we could raise the blacks to bring back some detail in the shadows without introducing much noise or sacrificing any highlight information. We graded the same scene shot with the Blackmagic Cinema Camera and could tell there is less dynamic range, but it is hard to tell if this is just the acknowledged one f-stop or more.

We tested color reproduction and separation by shooting some highly saturated and textured clothing on bright green grass. There is no auto white balance function. White balance settings are limited to six presets from 3200 to 7500. If you need to fine tune your white balance more than this you'll need to do it in post. Even after increasing the color saturation in post by 25-percent and viewing at 400 percent, we could not detect any bleeding between colors or reduction in the sharpness of the clothing detail. With ProRes 422 and (later) CinemaDNG RAW, there is plenty of color information to play with without sacrificing image quality.

Additional tests revealed that skin tones look natural when using the right white balance and not over saturated like so many modern camcorders do by default. In fact, when shooting in the film dynamic range setting, shots initially appear flat by design. We shot a resolution chart with increasingly fine vertical and horizontal lines to test for moiré and anti-aliasing. The Blackmagic Production Camera 4K's new sensor shines in its ability to practically eliminate these imaging challenges. The only imperfections we could see were those actually present in the printed chart itself and not a result of poor resolving power.

Editing any 4K footage will give your system a workout and the ProRes 422 files produced by the Blackmagic Production Camera 4K are no exception. We were able to get real-time performance and do basic editing with our four-year-old 8-core 2.33GHz Windows 7 64-bit system running Adobe Premiere Pro CC. For more information on the demands of editing in 4K, check out our article, Editing in 4K: Minimum System Requirements.

Audio

The Blackmagic Production Camera 4K comes with a built-in mono mic that is sensitive enough to capture most ambient sounds which also means it will pick up noise from the camcorder's cooling fan. It is there primarily to record reference audio. It is the two 1/4-inch balanced audio inputs that will record quality line or mic level sound although there is no phantom power. You set levels manually and need to use headphones as there are no visual level indicators. The playback quality on the Blackmagic Production Camera 4K itself sounds quite thin but clear. The actual recorded audio when played back on an edit system has very low noise. Clearly audio is not a key feature of this camcorder and many producers will use a separate audio recording system.