Blackmagic Design attracted a huge amount of attention with their plans to release a digital camera. John Brawley, an Australian cinematographer, has been helping Blackmagic with the development by using the camera in real-world production environments to give them professional feedback. In part 2 of this four-part video interview, John talks about his experience with digital cameras and digital production.

I’ve split our conversation up into four parts, to help make it easier to watch.  To keep John’s comments in context, I think it’s important to watch everything.  What you won’t get is a comparison of various digital cameras based on technical data. What you will get is real-world knowledge, and some really crappy audio (totally my fault).

Apologies for the poor audio, but if you can stand the low quality – and after a while you start to ignore the hum – you’ll find the videos divided up into four parts:

Part 1 – An introduction, and a general chat about the art of cinematography

Part 2 – The impact of digital cameras

Part 3 – The Blackmagic Cinema Camera

Part 4 – Post-production with the Blackmagic camera

I have to apologise again for the poor audio, and can only suggest that you shouldn’t send a compositor to do a sound recordist’s job, but perhaps the annoying hum is a reminder that this isn’t a professional production, just a casual chat amongst friends- and we’ve invited you to join us.
If you’d like to get in touch with me and offer tips on the correct way to plug in a microphone, or you’re interested to know if I’m better at compositing than I am at sound recording, head over to my website and look around.

Thanks very much to John Brawley for his time and willingness to help out.

(N.B. Many thanks to Andrew Deme for cleaning up the audio. I had a number of emails offering advice but Andrew went ahead and processed the files for me. Cheers Andrew!)

iPhone/iPad friendly – Part 2