Blackmagic Design Showcases the 6K Pocket Cinema Camera at NAB NY 2019

An interview from the 2019 NAB Show in New York City with Bob Caniglia of Blackmagic Design. Blackmagic Design creates the world’s highest quality video editing products, digital film cameras, color correctors, video converters, video monitoring, routers, live production switchers, disk recorders, waveform monitors and real time film scanners for the feature film, post production and television broadcast industries.

In this interview Bob talks with us about the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K, a new handheld digital film camera with a full Super 35 size 6K HDR image sensor, 13 stops of dynamic range, an EF lens mount and dual native ISO up to 25,600 for incredible low light performance. This new model builds on the popularity of the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K but has a larger Super 35 sensor size with 6K resolution, allowing higher image quality. The EF lens mount model works with a wide range of lenses from companies such as Canon, Zeiss, Sigma and Schneider.

Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K is available immediately from Blackmagic Design resellers worldwide for US$2,495.

The elegant design of the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera packs an incredible number of high end digital film features into a miniaturized, handheld design. Made from lightweight carbon fiber polycarbonate composite, the camera features a multifunction handgrip with all controls for recording, ISO, WB and shutter angle right at their fingertips. Because it's an advanced digital film camera, the sensor is designed to reduce thermal noise allowing cleaner shadows and higher ISO. Plus the large 5 inch LCD makes it possible to get perfect focus at 4K and 6K resolutions.

Featuring a larger 6144 x 3456 Super 35 sensor and EF lens mount, the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K lets customers use larger EF photographic lenses to create cinematic images with shallower depth of field, allowing creative defocussed backgrounds and gorgeous bokeh effects. This means that customers can shoot in 6K and then in post production zoom and re-frame to allow wide shots and close ups to be created, all from a single camera and without losing image quality.

Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K and 6K both have an incredible 13 stops of dynamic range which means they preserve more detail in the lightest and darkest areas of an image than simple video cameras can. This allows customers to set exposure for an indoor scene such as a cafe and still retain the details of bright outdoor light coming through a window. Customers even get more colors than the standard DCI-P3 colorspace used for feature films.

The Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera features dual gain ISO up to 25,600, which means both the 4K and 6K models are optimized to minimize grain or noise in images, while maintaining the full dynamic range of the sensor. The native ISO of 400 is ideal for scenes with on-set lighting. The gain is set automatically as they adjust the ISO setting on the camera, so it's easy to capture great images when they don’t have time to set up lights.

The new 6K model will shoot up to 50 fps at 6144 x 3456 16:9 or 60 fps at 6144 x 2560 2.4:1 and 60 fps at 5744 x 3024 17:9. For higher frame rates they can window the sensor and shoot up to 120 fps at 2.8K 2868 x 1512 17:9. Customers can even work in true anamorphic 6:5 using anamorphic lenses in 3.7K 60 fps at 3728 x 3104.

Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera records using standard open file formats so customers don’t have to waste time transcoding media. Recording works in industry standard 10-bit Apple ProRes files in all formats up to 4K or 12-bit Blackmagic RAW in all formats up to 6K. Best of all media files work on all operating systems plus customers can format media cards and disks in HFS+ for Mac and ExFAT for Windows.