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New Blackmagic Cinema Camera Firmware 1.5 Just Released – Unlocking RAW Recording On Pocket Camera!

For those of you Blackmagic Pocket Camera shooters that are reading this – today is a very good day for you! After a very long wait, Blackmagic Design have finally released the new cinema camera firmware that unlocks RAW cinemaDNG recording capability in the Blackmagic Pocket Camera.

Many early adopters of the camera were initially upset that the shipping version of the Pocket Cam wasn’t able to shoot RAW out of the box (as advertised), but thankfully their frustration can finally come to an end as Blackmagic have now made the firmware available for download through their website at www.blackmagicdesign.com. For those of you that have been shooting RAW on the Blackmagic Cinema Camera, or really any other RAW camera for that matter, you know how hard it is to go back to any compressed format after RAW – even one as strong as ProRes. Speaking for myself, even though the majority of my work doesn’t call for the RAW format, I still use it as much as possible as the image quality is absolutely unbeatable, making it hard to pass up.

So while today’s news is very exciting, it’s surprising to me that the firmware update does not include any other new features or upgrades (with the possible exception of some bug fixes) for the BMPC or BMCC. In fact in a way, today serves as a reminder that that Blackmagic hasn’t given a significant update to the original cinema camera (EF or MFT) in such a long time. Critical features like the ability to view your remaining SSD space and audio meters are still not present, and unfortunately these shortcomings do cause issues in real world shooting scenarios. While the BMCC is one of my favorite cameras that I’ve ever shot on (and lately I’ve been using it more than ever), the issues have definitely shown themselves to me in working environments and there have been a couple of instances where I’ve lost takes as a result of not knowing the camera was about to roll out as the SSD was filling up. And I’m certainly not the only one waiting. There are a whole slew of BMCC shooters that are eagerly awaiting a proper firmware update with no hope in sight, not to mention the huge amount of BMCC 4K customers that are still sitting on their pre-orders, waiting for the 4K camera to become a reality.

For now though, at least we finally have the power of RAW on the Pocket Camera and that is a very big step in the right direction. I’m just crossing my fingers we see a 1.6 version out soon with more significant BMCC updates as well. Here’s hoping!

For more on shooting RAW on the BMCC, check out my RAW workflow with DaVinci Resolve and FCP X that I used for my Sundance submitted film, Brother Sister.

About Author

Noam Kroll is an award-winning Los Angeles based filmmaker, and the founder of the boutique production house, Creative Rebellion. His work can be seen at international film festivals, on network television, and in various publications across the globe. Follow Noam on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook for more content like this!

5 Comments

  • Hi Noam , Could you PLEASE tell me how to get version 1.5 firmware onto my BMPCC please, I have gone through the black magic site and I have no idea where to find it, its like they don’t want anyone to have it. Thanks, Quentin

    Reply
  • Flaaandeeers
    at

    One quick question Noam.
    I have a 64GB Extreme Pro card and will get a couple more of them. And with that and a laptop I think that I’ll be covered for the amount of footage I might shoot in one day.

    My question is about editing and storage hard drives. What would be your budget recommendation about this?
    I have an i7 PC with 16GB of RAM, a decent Nvidia card and an SSD for the OS, but I’d like to know which would be the basic hard drive setup for editing RAW.
    I only shoot short films once in a while and will be using ProRes for the other casual stuff.

    Thanks in advance and keep it rolling as usual.

    Reply
  • Flaaandeeers
    at

    It’s SO hard to go back to compressed formats now. SO HARD!

    Reply
  • Xiong
    at

    So true on the technical side, they need to solve these problems. They’re too busy trying to break grounds with their hardware they let their software fall to the wayside. Im guessing maybe when they ship their 4K version they’ll have all this sorted out.

    Reply
    • That’s what I’m for hoping too… Once the 4K version is out and the whole lineup is complete, it would seem logical that they could go back to the drawing board and start to massage out the kinks in each of the cameras.

      Reply

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