We recently decided to purchase a new production camera.  Of course everyone would assume Java Post would choose the highly popular RedCam, given we have worked with Red footage since these cameras were first available, finishing projects from commercials to documentaries as well as several feature films.

After looking at the latest cameras and the image quality that was available for the kind of post work we do, we chose to go with the Blackmagic Cinema Camera shown below.

Compression is the biggest enemy of compositing, causing very fine detail such as hair to become jagged because important luminance and chrominance information is thrown away or lost.  The Blackmagic Cinema Camera combined with the RAW, uncompressed Cinema DNG format results in the best uncompressed keying or compositing format available.  Some people have called the Blackmagic Camera the world’s best green screen camera.  For this reason the choice of camera for a company such as Java Post was easy to make.

By comparison, the RedCam provides a compressed recording format only, with their frames at best being about 1.2 MB per frame.  The Blackmagic Camera’s uncompressed file format is 4 times larger at around 5 MB per frame.  The footage stays in this uncompressed format throughout colour correction, for us, Davinci Resolve -- considered to be the world’s finest colour correction system.

This camera also offers the widest dynamic range available at 13 stops.  What does this dynamic range mean to you?  It means an image that rivals what we used to work with when we were shooting 35 millimeter film.  The color is rich and the blacks are deep and dark with detail we have not seen in video cameras before.

Here are a few images we shot today with no colour-correction applied: