That old Blackmagic…

 

Another of my cameras that hasn’t seen much use lately.  The original Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera or BMPCC for short.  

I’ve had mine since it was first launched in 2013 and originally I was planning to use it to shoot a short film, but life and work got in the way so the camera hasn’t really seen much use.  Then in 2018 Blackmagic released the totally revised 4k version which I also bought, so my original BMPCC seemed destined to languish in a box.

But lately I came across a few YouTube videos showcasing the camera in action and I was inspired to dig mine out and take it for a spin once more.

It’s a quirky camera with a lot of minor niggles and issues, but it gives a lovely image and the small size makes it genuinely pocket sized (unlike the newer 4k model which is far too big to fit in anyone’s pocket).

I took my new lensbaby Sol22 out for a walk through the local streets and had a lot of fun trying out the tilt-focus features on that lens.  I will write up a more detailed post about that lens sometime soon.

In the meantime I realised one thing that really is a problem with this camera.  Finding a compatible memory card.

When I hit the camera there was a very small number of officially compatible SD cards and at the time I opted to buy one of the cheaper (but still expensive) Sandisk Extreme cards. This one offering a 60MB/s    speed which I hoped would be good enough to shoot RAW.  It wasn’t.

Turned out that only the higher priced Extreme Pro cards could handle RAW shooting.  I wasn’t worried though, because faster SD cards come out all the time, so no doubt once I was ready to shoot my film there would be a cheaper alternative to the SanDisk cards.

So fast forward almost 9 years and imagine my surprise when I checked the official SD card list on the Blackmagic website only to find it hadn’t really changed.  No new cards and no cheaper brands.  Almost exactly the same list from 2013.

Worse than that, a quick forum list check made it clear that modern V30 Sandisk cards don’t work with the camera, even if they are the same model Extreme Pro that once did!  So although a brand new Extreme Pro card is really cheap (under £20 on Amazon) they don’t work with the camera.

So the only way to shoot RAW with this camera will be to find a second hand SD card.  So that’s what I’m going to be doing next, trawling through eBay in the hopes of finding a decent sized Extreme Pro SD card released before the V30 upgrades, that won’t break the bank and hopefully still has some life left in it.

The hunt begins.