BlackMagic 6k Vs 4k IN-DEPTH COMPARISON + My Thoughts

I spent some time with this black magic 6k camera and just like every other new camera I would conduct a lot of tests to answer one main question is this camera good for me or not in this video I will share with you the results of my Blackmagic 6k and 4k comparisons and how this cameras impressive features are mixed with a lot of setbacks that kind of threw me and a lot of people in limbo unable to decide whether to keep this camera or not [Music] first let's break down the three main selling points of the Blackmagic 6k the first obvious one is the 6k resolution which is a great step forward keep in mind that this is not the first camera to announce the 6k recording remember the Panasonic s1h that was announced last May this era will host 14 plus stops of dynamic range 6k at 24 frames per second 10 bit color depth Blackmagic would lose on both fronts of the full frame and the dynamic range at least on paper but pretty much wins everywhere else I assume Panasonic are probably a little bit pissed off right now especially with the price tag of $4,000 compared to almost 2500 dollars for the Blackmagic they'll probably Bank now on the full frame capabilities of the s1h which could be the deal breaker for some of the Blackmagic potential customers super 35 sensor that decision is a little bit debatable because it places the camera in the realm of the pro video cameras that was the standard for like 70 years now keep in mind that the full frame look was almost exclusive to photography the five-year revolution is probably what paved the way ten years ago for the full frame to become the new thing in film and finally the EF mount I can boldly say that this is not the wisest decision in 2019 there's no simple answer to this so stay with me at the end of the episode and I'll tell you why and details so first I want to show you what I discovered while testing the camera I guess 6k and 60 frames per second were a bit of a smokescreen and distraction from the elephant in the room which is the crop factor so the crop factor in essence is the sensors physical size and its resolution and factoring in the recording resolutions which in the case of the Blackmagic 6k would crop further into the sensor every time you increase the frame rate which is what they call window quick disclaimer before I start there are different methods used to calculate the crop factor of any sensor for the purposes of my review I'm basing my calculations on the diagonal ratio of a standard 35 millimeter full-frame treaty to sensor if you want to learn more about capacitors and how they're calculated I leave a link in the description to a detailed article that can help you understand more about this subject what that said I feel as a DP and in a real world scenario the decimal fraction discrepancy of 0.01 between each method will never affect my decision but rather I'd trust my us to judge the final image projection and you crop factor value as a guide to weather the sensor fits my style of shooting or not with that out of the way let's dive in so to have a proper crop factor in comparison here's my methods first I got the Blackmagic 6k and I shot them both codecs the Blackmagic raw and the pro res simply because each one gives you a completely different set of options so for the Blackmagic Raw you have the 6k full the 6k 2.4 to 1 windowed the 5.7 K windowed the 2.8 K windowed which is for the 120 frames per second high speed shooting then I would go to the pro res which has the ultra HD sampling the full sensor the 4k sampling 5.7 K of the sensor and three full HDS formats one of them sampling the full sensor the other is sampling 5.7 of the sensor and the third one is sampling 2.8 of the sensor and that's also if you want to shoot 120 frames now for the Blackmagic 4k the Blackmagic Raw and the pro res are pretty much giving you identical results in terms of frame size and crop factor Sandra's gonna shoot in black magic raw I was matching the codex compression with the Blackmagic 6k which is the constant bitrate 3 to 1 and of course it's a much simpler setup with a 4k d CI sampling the full sensor the Ultra HD which is a windowed mode the full HD which is also another windowed mode now for the lenses I chose the Sigma 50 millimeter 1.4 art series set to 2.8 and for the Blackmagic 4k the only 50 millimeter I have that fits into the Micro Four Thirds mount is the Lumix 35 100 zoom 2.8 of course I set it to 50 millimeter F 2.8 as well to match the Sigma 50 millimeter keep in mind here I'm only testing the field of view so the quality coming out of the lens is not the issue right now but I'm gonna spice things up with adding a metal bounded Apter first one will be the metabolome alt raw point 71 matching it with the same Sigma 50 millimeter 1.4 that is set to 2.8 then I'm gonna swap it with a meta bone XL point 64 while keeping the same lens of course okay so here's the first test the Blackmagic 6k with a sigma 50 millimeter shooting raw [Music] [Music] now let's try with the ProRes lam was involved with the Blackmagic 4k using the 35 100 millimeter lens that is set at 50 millimeter of course and shooting in black magic raw now let's add the meta bone adapter ultra on 71 and changing the lens to the Sigma 50 millimeter [Music] and finally we're swapping the meta bones ultra with excel point 64 so as expected the black magic for cave with a marathon Excel would offer us the widest feed the view or smallest crop factor of almost 1.3 X which is the closest we can get to the full frame on both cameras it would be followed with the same camera adding the metabolome try offering us a 1.4 X crop factor then in the third place comes the new Blackmagic 6k shooting natively with no adapters at 1.6 X which is a typical crop factor range of the super 35 cameras and at the last position with the highest crop factor comes the Blackmagic 4k shooting with a 2x crop on its native MFD mount but here's an important side note even though the meta bone is offering you a wider field of view keep in mind that you're putting glass between your sensor and your lens so no matter how expensive or great your lens is it will still pass through the glass of the meta ball and the madam owner is not a perfect glass at the end of the day it will definitely change a little bit of the characteristics coming from the lens so for sure shooting natively is a better choice but again if you're okay with this small shift that's gonna happen with the meta bone then definitely is the Blackmagic 4k will give you a considerable wider field of view than the Blackmagic 6k now the image quality so using the same setup of the Blackmagic 6k I couldn't properly conduct this comparison so disclaimer this would not be considered as a scientific test because if I retain the same focal length of 50 millimeter the difference in lenses will affect the distortion the exposure and probably the colour as well as the image but I would say this difference would not exceed 5 to 10 percent and it will give us a little bit of a fair look into how each camera stands against the other so let's check it out first I'm starting with the 6k ungraded I scaled it 220 percent to match it with a field of view of the Blackmagic 4k now this is the 4k as you can already see there's a little bit of a barrel distortion in the lens but again this distortion has nothing to do with the image quality now side by side it's obvious that there's a difference in expose but I promise you both tests are following the same exact settings on both cameras the strange thing is that I know that the 35/100 panasonic lens is actually a little bit darker than most other lenses I have again I know that these are not the same lenses but still I know them by heart and I was not expecting this so since the Blackmagic 6k has a little bit of a higher tolerance into the highlights probably it's kind of crushing things down a little bit in the mid-tones and the blacks but from the looks of it I do love the gamma curve in the Blackmagic 6k you can see how the mid-tones and highlights have a much nicer roll-off they're kind of balanced less contrasting than the 4k it's kind of a more pleasing image I would say and these mid-tones and highlights are pretty much where the skin color comes in now if I scale things to 400% and of course the 6k would be scaled to 180 percent to match the field of view you can see with the high resolution in the 6k you get a higher signal-to-noise ratio which makes the 6k have less perceivable noise so now the 4k looks a bit noisier and less pleasing than the 6k image also looking at the Blackmagic 4k I feel it has more colored noise versus the monochromatic noise that you can find in a 6k so we can kind of use the cliche of a more organic looking noise that is more of a grain than noise while the 4k has a little bit of a digital noise especially that I can also see a little bit of a fixed pattern noise here which is expressed by the horizontal noise lines that would spread all over the image now I'm just applying a basic gradient to the 6 game and of course since the image looks a little bit different it took me some work to come up with a luma curve that would match only the luminance levels of the 4k to the 6th game I intentionally tried to match the luma levels only so I can see if there's any color difference between both cameras now putting them next to each other you can see that the 6k has a little bit of a warmer tone as well I didn't want to mess around much with the colors to kind of see what comes out of the sensor and I don't think this color shift would be the result of those lenses that I have but again this would call for further testing in all cases having this warmer tone in the Blackmagic 6k would truly look better on a skin tone than on the 450 and finally testing the depth of field on the cameras page Blackmagic was claiming that you'd get a shallower depth of field on the 6k I believe what they meant to say is want to use lenses with longer focal lengths with the 6k to match the same field of view on the 4k and as we know lenses with longer focal lengths when resulted in a shallower depth of field so in my case and all of EF lenses owners you will simply use the same lenses you own on both cameras which also means you're already using an adapter on your Blackmagic 4k and the test I'll use the 50 millimeter lens opening it to its widest aperture of 1.4 and use the met upon ultra then swap it with the meta bone XL another disclaimer if you're using adapters or as we call them speed boosters that contain lenses such as the meta bones you're effectively changing the properties of the lenses you attached to them so the reason why I'm conducting this test still is simply for me to see how my current Blackmagic 4k configuration of lenses and speed boosters will stack against those same lenses on the Blackmagic 6k and whether I'll get a shallower depth of field or not so I'm starting off with the Blackmagic 6k on a 50 millimeter as you can see it has a very nice soft bokeh in the background but as I move to the Blackmagic 4k with a metabolic cell you'll see that the bokeh size is slightly bigger which as I mentioned that speed boosters altered the focal length of the lens with perceived shallower depth of field now the thing that I wasn't expecting as the metabones ultra bokeh size is actually the biggest of the three which doesn't make much sense honestly but still the conclusion is if you add meta box to your lenses you will get a slightly perceived shallower depth of field and if you put the same lens without any adapters on the six game but also we need to account for what I said before about how to speed boosters affect the characteristics of the lenses which is pretty obvious in our examples here when you open at one point for the image become softer than what it looks like if you don't add any speed boosters such as in the six game so with those tests in place and after fiddling a little bit with the camera there are important things to consider before picking this camera over the 4k first thing is that you don't have 4k raw recording I assume there won't be any in the future since raw means unprocessed which means sampling a one to one pixel resolution or as they call it windowed mode which means to shoot 4k raw you need to window the sensor and only record the 4k portion of the 6k sensor which after some calculations will be cropping 2.61 X let me just use a clip and show you how it could look like the camera so imagine that this is your field of view while shooting at 6k if you swap to 4k raw recording this is the new framing you will get [Music] now the second point is you cannot shoot hundred and twenty frames ProRes in 2.8 k like how you can do it in raw pro res 120 frames only lives in the realm of Full HD I assume this would need a processing power the camera just doesn't have to record that much data and transfer it from raw and real time also there's no 6k pro res I'm not surprised upon that first I thought this would be due to the processing limit of the camera but red cameras have the same quirk now this point is more of an FYI just for you to know that all the pro res codecs are done sampled from 6k 5.7 K and 2.8 K that the Blackmagic 4k is a one to one sample pixel it only adds the pro res compression to the one to one pixel ratio you need to know the crop factor of the 6k is between 1.6 and 3.4 X and you don't have much options for speed boosters or adapters due to the limitation of the lens mount there's only this look at after company I mentioned in my previous video but I'm not sure how good they are or anything so I would love to hear if any of you guys tried them on the Ursa mini and if you did any technical tests to compare it with and without this goes back to the same concern I had before of adding glass between the sensor and your lens with that said this is another reason why the EF is not the best mount choice also we know the 6 K is twice the price of the 4 K even though it's still pretty low for what it offers compared to the market but still you can buy - 4 KS for the same price of one 6k I assume this hike in price is due to the stronger processor and from the testing that we did now probably it's a different sensor as well the 6 K has better highlight roll-off which in turn makes the image slightly better and generally more pleasing right off the sensor compared to the 4k but if you're planning to color correct and grade in post which I assume everyone will then the difference is very manageable in my opinion as a DP I know it's my job to work within the limitations of the camera and I'm sure I'll be on set where I have to match the 4 K and the 6 K cameras as mentioned the signal-to-noise ratio in the 6 K is higher than the 4 K which results in less perceivable noise but similar to what I said about the color right off the sensor it's less noisy but it's a very manageable difference you will probably have to Dino to the footage on both cameras anyway in post I'm actually working on an episode to talk about this in detail finally there's a slight color shift between the 4k and the 6 game the 6 K as we saw has a little bit of a warmer tone to it which could work in favor of the skin tone so this is just to keep in mind if you're planning to buy 6 K as an A or B cam to your 4k you need to know that you have to do a minimal amount of both color and luma matching in both again a very manageable difference nothing to worry about so in conclusion if you really want to get the best out of this camera then you're compelled to shoot in RAW now let me tell you about the 6 key features missing from the 6 K that could have made this camera close to the holy grail for all DPS and film makers so first thing is having a full-frame sensor we already saw the Panasonic s one H which jumps straight to full-frame from there MFT sensor in the gh 5 so why did black magic take this middle step into the super 35 realm the 6 K would have made a lot more sense if it was a full-frame camera this way your windowed version will potentially give you a super 35 field of view in 4k and it would record a 1 to 1 pixel ratio without any down sampling that's kind of similar to the super 35 mode in the Sony a7 cameras offering you a super 35 crop with a click of a button the second thing a brighter flip screen since their screen has proven to be impossible to use outdoors on a sunny day and of course with a flip screen in most cases you won't need to add another monitor saving an average of $500 plus which I would gladly offer black magic if they add this feature as you already know there's a Chinese hack that can offer you the flip screen part but not the brightness of the screen and of course no need to mention the problems that were all having with the battery life I feel a professional video camera should at least last for one hour on a full battery charge so the smallest npf battery I believe would be able to keep the camera alive for at least an hour again those batteries are pretty much the standard in all pro video cameras I would also wish to have more mounting points especially if I'm going gorilla mode and I don't need that case to grab the attention I also wish for more customizable buttons this could be physical buttons maybe on the left side of the camera or simply give us the option to customize the iris and focus buttons on the right which I assume many of us are not using especially when using manual cine lenses last but definitely not least if they wanted to go Canon then the canons new RF mount were been the best choice for this camera especially in 2019 so the RF is a full frame lens mount you can buy the simple EF 2 RF mount what I feel is a better option of an adapter with a drop-in filter this way you can add a variable nd or polarizer filters behind the lens just like in the Alex emini or Canon cinema lineup which was a major selling proposition for their us our cameras keep in mind that this month's revolutionary design has been picked up by red in their new comodo camera they've been teasing us with for some time now which comes as a proof of the awesome potential of this map those lens adapters and their filter accessories are a little bit pricey but then consider this we already bought the Mehta bonds for six hundred and fifty dollars so if we consider just buying the drop-in filter with a variable nd it will amount to seven hundred dollars which is only fifty dollars over the meta Boehner adapter price pretty reasonable keep in mind these are all features that are within black magics reach they already have the technology they probably just need to flick that switch black magic six case image quality is pretty awesome it's new skin tone friendly generation for color science mixed with a very nice and smooth highlight roll-off it's probably the main selling proposition for it but its lack of versatility against the 4k is what confused me I personally find that the 4k has a lot more value for my style of shooting which made me consider for a moment whether to keep it or not then I felt that I can get very good images still from the 4k and match them with the 6k to a very close degree the main reason that pushed me away from the camera was the crop factor so if you're buying this camera then probably the Sigma 1835 1.8 will be your very best friend unless you're shooting anamorphic then the camera will make a lot more sense to you the other reason that pushed me away is the feeling that I need to shoot at 6k Raw in order to get the best out of the camera in terms of the field of view and the resolution which means you're gonna need to invest more in fast storage media like SSDs of course like the very famous Samsung t5 not just for recording but also for editing so my final verdict is I'm gonna skip this edition probably I'm gonna rent it for a couple of shoots but I didn't find any compelling reason for me to own it I'm really happy to see how Blackmagic is stepping into the 6k realm in such a small form-factor and how they perfected their color science that makes me really excited to see their next generation hopefully a full frame version of this thanks again for watching I would really love for you to share your decision about the camera in the comments below and if you like this video and want me to shoot more of this then please hit the like button and subscribe to the channel as I have a lot more stories from my experience on set that I would love to share with you in upcoming episodes thanks again I'll see you next time [Music] [Music]

Channel: The DP Journey

Views: 118,159

Keywords: bmpcc 4k, blackmagic pocket cinema camera 6k, blackmagic design pocket cinema camera 6k, blackmagic pocket 6k, bmpcc 6k, bmpcc 4k footage, 6k blackmagic, 6k Vs 4k, BlackMagic 6k Vs 4k, pocket 6k, comparison test, blackmagic pocket cinema camera 6k vs 4k, blackmagic 4k vs 6k, pocket 6k camera, iso test, croip factor, FOV, field oif view, S1H, panasonic s1h, 6k video, blackmagic 6k, bmpcc 6k footage, comparison, crop factor explained, 4k vs 6k, bmpcc 6k review, 6k camera

Id: IBO-D-30teU

Length: 19min 33sec (1173 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 20 2019