The document discusses shooting test footage with the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K to practice workflows and get familiar with the camera. It provides details on what was liked about the camera, such as image quality and focus assist features, and what was disliked, like short battery life and lack of phantom power. Plans are discussed to edit the footage in DaVinci Resolve instead of Premiere Pro due to performance issues editing 4K BRAW footage in Premiere.

1. FMP Production Experiments

2. Shooting with BMPCC 4K – My Thoughts and Feelings
I shot a short sequence with my friend Elliot so I could practise shooting something real with the camera and colour
grading. I just wanted to get use the workflow and post production so I didn’t even think about cinematography or
lighting or sound.
What I like
• One thing I love about this camera is the image quality with the sharp lens I paired with the 4K sensor even the
worst condition footage looks amazing straight out the camera.
• The assist features on the camera are also amazing. The focus assist red lines are very helpful in getting good focus
as the camera/lens/adapter combo doesn’t support AF. Also, having the audio levels on-screen are useful to monitor
the audio goring into the camera. There is also a headphone jack on the camera so I can monitor the audio to make
sure it sounds good.
• The compactness of the camera means its easy to hold with one hand and easily rigged up to a gimbal/tripod. I tried
one handed shooting on the test shoot as I was walking down the stairs backwards and had to hold onto the railing.
The footage came out smooth as the weight of the camera with all the accessories meant all the little shakes were
eliminated. Its nice and small but heavy so it’s the best of both worlds
What I don’t
• One thing I don’t like is the battery life on the camera is disgraceful. I got about 40 minutes of recording time which
is unusable when filming outside or away from an outlet.
• Also, there is no phantom power form the microphone so I can’t use the college røde microphones as they require
power that way. I can use my Takstar as it has a battery built in but its no the best in quality
• One final issue with the camera is that it uses a MFT lens adapter so I have to use an adaptor for my canon glass

3. Focus Assist
One Handed Shooting
Using the railing as a focus point
to give emphasise to the shoes

4. Editing BRAW in Premier Pro vs DaVinci Resolve
My issue came with using Premier Pro to edit 4k BRAW footage, it wasn’t having any
of it. I looked into using proxy files but found out that Adobe Media Coder is
incredible slow at creating the files and it would waste so much time as my computer
is really slow during the time it took to create the proxy files for the experiment and
will only be longer with all the footage from a big shoot such as this one. The proxy’s
still chugged my computer which just wasn’t easy to work with
• I love Premier Pro and Adobes whole workflow and really wished I could edit my
footage smoothly without having to go through the rigmarole of creating proxies
and editing off the cloud and my SSD at the same time.
• I then loaded it into DaVinci Resolve Studio and it played back like a dream. It was
smooth and didn’t choke once. I also used the college mac to test this and even
though they are lower spec computers they worked fine too. I feel like this is going
to be the be what I use to edit the short. My issue with DaVinci is that I have never
used it and will have to learn very quickly how to use it in order to edit this thing
well. I really wanted premier pro to work as I have spent my whole college time
using premier and know how to use it really well.
• I'm just grateful that I figured this out now so I can blitz a Resolve tutorial and make
something great

5. DaVinci Resolve Studio (editing)
DaVinci Resolve Studio (colour grading)

6. Premier Pro (useful panels)
Premier Pro
Pros
• The layout much more modular
• The integration of the Adobe Suite works so much better
• I know the software very well
Cons
• Doesn’t handle BRAW well
Resolve Studio
Pros
• Works well with BRAW footage
• Has the equivalent of After Effects and Audition built in
• The layout is setup nicely
Cons
• I don’t know how to use it as well as Premier Pro

7. Learning DaVinci Resolve Colour Grading
To prepare for colour grading the film I had a blind
stab at colouring a shot from the test footage I shot
and then I watched a tutorial on things I didn’t know
how to use such as the level curves and the reading
histograms etc
• I have a basic understand of the process as I have
done colour grading in premier pro so it wasn’t
totally unguided. I know what to do but not where it
is so I spent a lot of time clicking through menus
seeing what is there.
• After randomly clicking through I found the Camera
RAW editor so I could adjust the ISO, WB and other
gamma controls. This is going to help fix al the
mistakes I make on set
• The LUTs tab was easy to spot and I just selected the
one I had been using in camera that is made by
Blackmagic. This instantly made the footage look
better as it took away the LOG look of the video.
• I played around with the levels tab as well to master
the RGB channels and get the desired look

8. Before
After

9. After Effects Hack Animation
Inspirations and visual looks and my plan
• I want my film to come across very realistic so I will be building my
own system UI assets around the look of the windows and mac
terminals.
• I plan to use geektyper.com for any shots where the screen in not the
focus so they will have to look similar to that. geektyper.com has a
very basic style that will make it easy to create my own
• I will take the text from geektyper.com and overlay that on top of the
UI I design in photoshop. It’s not the most elegant way of doing it but
it will work

10. The look
my own Mac terminalA Windows PC terminal
A screenshot from Mr. Robot
Geektyper.com terminal

11. How I did it
• I created the basic background in photoshop and made two
versions. One with a background and one without, this is so I can
layer them better in after effects.
• This just makes it look more natural to have the text go off the
screen but underneath the top tab
• For the animation I took a brute force script off GitHub and copied
it into word so I can format it and add some extra text to the
beginning
• I took them into after effects and started to follow a tutorial by
After Effects Tutorials w/ Mikey.
• To start I copied the text into after effects and set the layout how I
wanted. I then did a Scale animation with in the text layer. This
meant that the text would appear on screen as if it was been typed.
• I then used these lines of code to make it scroll and move with the
animation
• Everything worked out great except for the fact it runs from the
bottom up and not top down. I don’t know how to fix this but it
works if I start playback a few seconds in.
• I took this video and made a short clip working with it
GitHub script

12. def findPassword(chars, function, show=50, format_="%s"):
password = None
attempts = 1000
size = 10
stop = False
while not stop:
for pw in product(chars, repeat=size):
password = "".join(pw)
if attempts % show == 0:
print(format_ % password)
if function(password):
stop = True
break
else:
attempts += 1
size += 1Bottom
Plate
Text
Top
Plate
Layers
def findPassword(chars, function, show=50, format_="%s"):
password = None
attempts = 1000
size = 10
stop = False
while not stop:
for pw in product(chars, repeat=size):
password = "".join(pw)
if attempts % show == 0:
print(format_ % password)
if function(password):
stop = True
break
else:
attempts += 1
size += 1
Merged

13. In After Effects
Text scrolls up
Text is hidden
behind the
top plate

14. Making a split screen short clip
I shot this with a top down shot of the keyboard with the BMPCC at
about 70mm with the canon lens. I also shot the side on angle with a
Goodmans Action Cam I have to give the GoPro looking warped effect.
• I edited this in DaVinci, After Effects and Premier Pro, did all the
graphics in Photoshop and recorded the audio with my phones built
in microphone.
• I used my slate to sync the keyboard sounds with the top down shot
as I wanted realistic keyboard sounds and the apple keyboard is the
most recognisable keyboard sound I had available. For my
production however, I will be using a proper microphone and a
mechanical feel keyboard for that really clean and crisp click-y sound
I want
• I shot the beginning at 400 ISO but moved it down too 160 it
eliminate some of the grain I had picked up and make it match the
dark style of film. I also did this so I could open the aperture of the
lens to f/2.8 so I could get the nice bokeh effect to give my film an
artsy look. I shot the keyboard scene at 1600 ISO as to close the
aperture of the lens so it would all sit in focus as I was having trouble
to get it all in focus with f/2.8 I used 180° shutter angle to make sure
the motion blur looks natural. I did it all locked off as I had to also act
in it so any large movements where out of the question.
• Overall I am happy with what it looked like, I didn’t want to have to
make it look like a destroyed live stream but the quality of the action
cam at lowlight is awful I had to make the other things on screen
match, it doesn’t look terrible but its not what I wanted. I will be
using a dslr to shoot any bits that dot want the quality of the
Blackmagic and I will warp it in aftereffects.

15. BMPCC 4k Footage
Additional BM Footage
Action Cam Footage
AC Overlay
Title
Colour Grade
Fake User Interface
Sound Effects
Music
Before Grade/Correction After Grade/Correction
Music Volume Ramp