<span style="color:yellow; <vb:comment>font-weight:normal;</vb:comment>">Blackmagic 4

[Kholi]

I feel like I'm going to spend a lot of unneeded time telling people this, so until it sticks... well, I'm going to stick it.

Do your experiments, very much encouraged, but you'll see that 400ISO, even underexposed, is really what this camera wants. 800 ISO isn't BAD at all, and to me it even offers an interesting look that's slightly different in ProRes.

But 400 ISO is the 4K camera. It loves it, and will return many good images to you in exchange for it, even if it's being starved for light.

Let's get out ahead of the confusion that a higher ISO means better lowlight performance. =D It took me a bit to get it, as well.

Any other B4K shooting tips are welcome.

For instance:

Exposure (02/16/2014)

Although I shoot 400ISO, I treat the camera as 640 ISO, or rate it as that when approaching light. That means I'm underexposing images a bit. To me, I feel like this gives you the fattest image to work with where DR is concerned. Noise penalty is not great at all and color remains rich.

[Brian@202020]

Interesting. The manual says to use the "lowest ISO for the avaliable lighting conditions". So basically they are saying the lower the ISO the better, which would be ISO 200 if the ISO options are the same as the other BMD cameras.

[Anthony Marino]

Same with the pocket camera. I'm almost always at ISO 800, rarely use anything else. IMHO from my observations so far where the 4k camera lacks in the shadows, it makes up for in resolution. It's almost like a trick, you see 12 stops of DR that may not be as deep at 13 but to me it looks a lot cleaner. A tighter image no doubt. It's a production camera, we use lights in production. There's a ton of cameras better in low light but not as cinematic, we're still in the age of the almighty trade off. What are you gonna do? It's still a beauty.

[Kholi]

Interesting. The manual says to use the "lowest ISO for the avaliable lighting conditions". So basically they are saying the lower the ISO the better, which would be ISO 200 if the ISO options are the same as the other BMD cameras.

THere's really not much reason to move out of 400 ISO, that manual likely needs some changing.

[mrbrycel]

THere's really not much reason to move out of 400 ISO, that manual likely needs some changing.

Will there be a noticeable sacrifice in dynamic range when shooting 200 vs 400?

[Peter J. DeCrescenzo]

I'm maintaining a list of "BMPC-4K shooting tips from early users" on BMD's forum:
http://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/vi...hp?f=2&t=19289

Comments, questions and additional BMPC-4K shooting tips are welcome here or there.

[Ashenwraith]

200 looks way better. I always shoot 200 now.