Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera - ProRes Resolve Grades

Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera Colour Grading Breakdowns from Juan Melara on Vimeo.

Earlier this week John Brawley made available the first ProRes files from the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera. Being a fan of it's bigger brother, I had to take a closer look at them...

If you want to check them out for yourself, download the files from the link in this article on EOSHD.com. Theres also a few more available on John Brawley's Copy.com account. The files in this post are G008_1_2013-08-06_0906_C0007.mov and G008_1_2013-07-27_1514_C0001.mov.

First up is a landscape scene. Below is the log ungraded image straight off the camera. Looks nice and flat, but a lot more desaturated than I would have expected/wanted...

Luckily there is a LOT of information to be dug out and pushed around. Below is a relatively natural grade from Resolve. It's quite incredible the amount of information that lurks in the ProRes 422 HQ files! Who needs 444 and raw!?

Here is an outdoor scene with some skin tones. Below is the log ungraded image.

And above is another grade from Resolve.

In these two grabs I'm playing with a few different methods of adding saturation to the image. Ways that look a bit more organic and less heavy handed than just boosting the saturation value...

What I really like is the way the camera rolls the highlights into clipping. To my eye it looks very very filmic. I have made this a bit more gradual with a custom curve, but it looks pretty good straight out of the camera.

The full resolution crops do show a bit of moire, exaggerated by my abuse of post sharpening, but to my eye it's not really any different to the moire in the BMCC footage. There is a little bit of noise present but it looks pretty good - most of it nice and tight rather than big and blotchy.

Like I mentioned before, I would prefer to see a bit more saturation in the log images. As this could possibly make better use of the ProRes codec.

Overall I'm impressed. It's pretty incredible the quality of images coming off a sub US$1000 camera!