To recapitulate the past year. Autumn of 2016 saw a major investment in a new digital film camera, the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera, plus two SDXC flash memory cards and a dual USB charger to go with the two EN-EL20 spare batteries. I also aquired a brand new workstation that would match up the CinemaDNG RAW workflow … More Pimping up the BMPCC – My Wish List for 2017 and beyond…
Herein below is attached my first official short movie presented by Gorilla Film Studios (formerly MasterPlan Productions), entitled The XmasTree Hunt. It was directed, recorded, edited, mixed and graded by yours truly, Tomas Stacewicz. Music by courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) used under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) license, and the Jingle Punks. Drone … More A Short Narrative Documentary – The XmasTree Hunt
Recently, a heated discussion erupted on the Blackmagic Forum following a plead to Blackmagic Design to incorporate Bolex Log and Bolex Wide Gamut RGB support as an option in the Camera Raw panel of DaVinci Resolve. The biggest benefit from the implementation of such a feature, the pleader Alex Mitchell holds, is that highlight information … More The Big Three – The Fraternity of Digital Super 16 Shooters
In a previous blog post, where I delved somewhat into the question of over- and underexposure with CinemaDNG RAW, I stumbled upon the topic of the seeming similarites between the flat image of RAW and the Log (logarithmic) profile curve whose exposure f-stop range perfectly emulates the iris of the human eye. Let me reiterate … More The Logic of RAW – Why it’s better to overexpose (than to underexpose) with the Blackmagic Cinema Cameras
When I bought the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera (BMPCC) three months ago I mainly had to rely on two or three year old video reviews, which describes a product in a working progress, to base my decision on. I only saw perhaps one or two reviews that were less than two years old, but never … More Who reads yesterdays paper? – An updated review of the BMPCC
The other day, I took some shots with the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera of our newly decorated Christmas Tree. I only used the light coming from the electric christmas tree LED lights, fed from the mains with 220 Volts, 50 Hz. The scene was shot on CinemaDNG RAW, with the camera set to 24 fps, … More The Strobe Effect – How to match your Camera to your AC Mains
Studying Steven Ascher’s The Filmmaker’s Handbook has left me somewhat perplexed and made me reflect on the issue of exposure when shooting RAW. Or rather, what lattitude of error exists in wrong exposure. Is it better to overexpose or underexpose RAW footage? Exact and balanced exposure is of course always the preferrable, but what is … More The RAW factor – Is it better to shoot overexposed or underexposed?
Lately there has been a quite heated discussion over at the Blackmagic Forum concering the decision by Blackmagic Design not to implement the feature of deleting footage on the SD card in-camera. Blackmagic Design share this attitude with professional digital camera companies such as Red Digital Cinema Camera Company and Arri. Some argue against this … More A Dangerous Method – Against deleting footage in camera
For the last week or so I have worked tirelessly in finding a way of upolading my first camera test movie entitled Lux ex Tenebris with as high quality to the image retained as possible. Iv’e done all of my editing and grading in DaVinci Resolve 12.5 and when it was time to render the … More Lux ex Tenebris HQ – The art of maximising your YouTube upload
Herein below is attached my first camera test movie presented by MasterPlan Productions, entitled Lux ex Tenebris. It was filmed, edited, mixed and graded by me, Tomas Stacewicz. Music by courtesy of Chase Rayment (starfrosch.com/hot-100/artist/chase+rayment) used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported Licence (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). The movie is 17:32 minutes long and it was published … More Lux ex Tenebris – Camera Test Movie I
Finally, our new computer reached our doorstep approximately one week after the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera had arrived. I ordered both items at the same time but the computer had to be assembled at the Swedish company Inet from scratch following my directives and specifications. Our expectations were high, especially my teenager son who looks … More The Black Mistress has arrived – My initial experiences with our new Workstation
The Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera is a wonderful and compact digital film camera with a really high bang for the buck factor, the bang being a Super 16 Sensor in Full HD and CinemaDNG RAW codec with 13 stops of dynamic range and 12 bit RGB 4:4:4 colour space. But it has to be remembered … More Eastern Promises – Retrofitting the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera
Guerilla Film Soldier 