Tyler Purcell

Thanks! That's just my personal stuff too. I do commercial stuff with the pocket cameras all the time. It's always fun to show up with a backpack of camera gear and a tripod slung over the shoulder to a commercial shoot. People come out to help me unload my truck and I'm like, "no need!" LOL I wouldn't recommend the pocket, or any small camera to anyone doing commercial stuff. Mostly because it lacks the battery/display/IO that are required for bigger shoots. I've gotten away with A LOT with the pocket, more then I should. But hey, that's what I live for! The pocket camera has a "histogram" built in. It's basically a graph which shows your signal, the blacks and highlights. It also has adjustable zebra stripes and focus clipping. So when I'm shooting, I'll start by setting the histogram where it should be based on experience and then I look at the shot to make sure there are no highlights in the zebra. There is a grid of green dots on the image on the focused area. So immediately you know what's in focus and what's not. The best thing is with the viewfinder adaptor, where your face is against the display, you can really get focus quick. As you can see from my videos, I'm rarely out of focus and MOST of what I've posted are one to two takes. Most of these "aids" don't exist on the DSLR's, though do on the other cameras like the GH4 and C100.

It's nice to have and sure you can disassemble your rig, but you wouldn't be recording 10 bit 4:2:2 at that point, so again... what's the point? 99.98% of the other people in this world, don't follow your meticulous legal approach to things. If I had to ask, beg or pay permission to shoot things, I would never be able to make anything, ever. If I had your philosophy, I'd be living at home working a regular job, dreaming of making products, but never able to. I have a Canon DSLR for stills that use the same Rokinon primes. I'm not a nature photographer, but every nature photographer I know, uses Nikon or Canon DSLR's, for good reason too. First off, there is no comparison between a zoom and a prime in terms of quality. The very best zooms are still nowhere near the quality of even decent primes. Second, the pocket uses the center of the glass, so if your lens isn't very crisp/sharp it will be soft. Also, most still glass won't work on a video camera because the focus is very temperamental. You won't notice focus issues as much with the larger imager camera, but you will notice aberrations in the edges of the glass. Trust me, I've used Canon L series glass for years. I use to shoot stills with the stuff and it's amazing. Yet put it on the pocket camera and it's soft. There are a few zooms that work well on the pocket, but they're expensive cinema style zooms. So yes, on your camera, the lens will be "crisper" in the center, where it won't be as much on the edges. On the pocket, it SHOULD be crisp in the center and edges. I highly doubt you put in the effort. You can see from the 13 video's I've posted so far, the camera looks pretty damn good when being used right. Nice! Well, it would be great to get it out there for people to see.

Yep! Don't listen to the skeptics. You can make the camera pop if you want! I just generally don't grade things so vibrant. See, the problem is everyone shoots "test" footage. Nobody goes out and actually does production with it. People are looking for the pretty shot and I'm just focused on capturing the moment. I don't have 10 takes to do something, I don't even have a 2nd take. If I don't get it the first time, I loose the shot and I can't get that moment back. This is why things like 10 bit 4:2:2 are important. This why having a decent piece of glass is SOOO critical as well. Now I'm not saying the pocket camera is any good at ENG shooting, but holy heck is it a lot small then the alternative! Honestly, my shoulder rig sits in my bedroom and my camera backpack sits next to the front door because it's always in use by someone.

So... lack of depth of field? Watch the first 2 minutes of my youtube series episode on suspension building: So... lack of wide angle material? Watch this New England Diving promo I produced. At 37 seconds in, there is a great high-angle wide shot that I could never get without a wide angle lens. I put the camera on my mono pod, stuck it in the air and GOT THE SHOT! Watch it in 1080p full screen and notice how you can see the yellow house at the end of the street and the white car in front of it. On the Pro Res HQ original, you can see the numbers of the license plate of that car. Can't read them, but you can see the outline. In my eyes, you don't need more resolution then that. So you want a "big" camera? How about carrying around your "rig" in a public place and nobody noticing it? Well... you would never get away with that here. Ohh and talk about low light, this is pretty incredibly low!

If you're out shooting scripted narratives in controlled environments (which is NOT what most people do) then who cares how big the camera is. I shoot everything gorilla, get the shot quick and move on to the next shot. I don't have time to waste assembling a rig as well. Sometimes I have to start shooting seconds after I arrive, and just the build time of attaching lenses, mounting to the rig and getting audio setup, is too much time. I've missed critical material due to setup time and again, if I had a big camera, I'd be kicked out of the places I'm shooting because nobody knows I'm using a video camera, since it looks like a still camera. So the "small camera" movement is critical if you actually want to disguise what you're up to. As I suspected, you haven't used the camera. Testing/nature footage doesn't count. I posted 10 projects above, shot with the Pocket Camera. Stuff I did for fun on the side of my regular work. If you want to see more, I have a lot more to give. This makes me wonder how many completed projects you've shot with the GH4!!!! I've cut two feature doc's with GH4 material in them, many of the shots I did myself. How many feature doc's have you made with the GH4? All of these problems is because you didn't try. You just gave up and didn't bother learning. Field of view is solved with a speed booster, but as you can see from my videos, it's not a problem. The lack of crispness is the result of junky lenses, not a fault with the camera. My batteries last 42 minutes, the length of a card, no problem at all, and they have hundreds of cycles on them. If I can put money into a small companies hand made product, I will do just that, even if the Chinese alternative has more bells and whistles.

In Log, the files are even more flat then that. When colored they SHOULD and WILL pop. The problem is, my color suite at the time some of those videos were made (more then 2 years ago) wasn't very good. Today, everything is DaVinci resolve and it works great, but back then, I was stuck using apple color and the calibration with my monitor sucked. So I didn't know what I had and honestly, I turned the shows around so quick, I didn't have the time to make it look much better.

Watch some of the clips I posted, see if that look is acceptable. Watch them full screen, see how crisp even the horribly compressed files look... the later stuff that's colored in DaVinci looks pretty good for a $1000 camera.

Close... twas the remains of indian curry! Yea, when I'm home, I'm either sleeping or editing.

My 2nd series, which isn't finished yet, is called "Experts". And again, the first one was made a long time before I knew how to color properly.

You can see how at the beginning, I kinda sucked at coloring. As I got more familiar with coloring, the stuff became more vibrant and more cinematic as well. All the stuff edited with FCP7 was colored with Apple Color. All the stuff edited on Avid was colored with DaVinci. There are a lot of mistakes in these shows as well, all of them were one day shoots, some only a few hours. Turn around was usually 3 days total from acquisition through finishing. Do I dare say, all of this content and the stuff below, was all done in-camera. No external recorders, no external audio gear outside of my wireless and shot gun mic plugged directly into the camera. In fact, only 2 of those shows was shot using my shoulder rig, almost all of it was made before I got the shoulder rig.

Ohh and if you want samples of "youtube" content I've produced that's not bullshit camera tests... here ya go! Here is the first series I shot with the pocket camera.

The URSA Mini 4.6k is currently on 4 professional shoots, according to my friends at Blackmagic. Since the camera JUST SHIPPED, people are finally starting to use it. The 2.5k and 4k production cameras have been used on several decent sized shoots. Heck, the film I'm working on was shot half with the 2.5k and half with my pocket and when it's done, it will be a half million dollar movie, even though it's a feature-length documentary. Many large-budget features including Mad Max Fury Road, have used the 4k Cinema camera as a "crash" cam because it's small and doesn't cost a lot of money. In the recent past, DSLR's were used for that purpose, I can't tell you how many crashed/smashed DSLR's I've been privy to seeing in the last few years. They give up high frame rates and they give up high sensitivity. I would love to have 48FPS, but it's just not a reality now. I do all my slow-mo in post and it comes out OK I guess. I could care less about high sensitivity. In fact, I'd rather have an imager which has a base ASA of around 350, rather then 800 like the pocket camera. Let me be frank, I know the guys at Blackmagic, I know them well. I talk with them on a monthly basis, not just because I work in the industry, but because they want my feedback. Blackmagic doesn't build cameras in China like your precious GH4. They're all hand made in Australia and that in of itself is a HUGE deal because it means things take longer to make. Your GH4 is made by using pre-existing chip set's, made to Panasonics spec. The blackmagic cameras are all one-off chip sets for their own products. Yes, up until the 4.6k, they were BUYING imagers from another company, the 4.6k is their first in-house developed imager. However, that's a big deal. That's what makes Red, Arri, Canon and Sony so great, they develop their own imagers and chipsets. The difference is that, those other companies in-house chipsets cost tens of thousands and Blackmagic offers it for sub 10 grand. 2/3" CCD cameras were almost the same size imager. Blackmagic simply brought back that smaller sized imager in order to make a smaller, higher power camera without the "large" imager issues. So what are the large imager issues? - Glass makes a much bigger difference with a large imager. - The CMOS imager is scanned from the inside out and on a lager imager, that takes longer. So the rolling shutter effect is more pronounced. - Larger imagers require more power from the CPU because there are more pixels to process. When more resources are taken up by the imager, less can be used for things like RAW capture. There are many more issues, but honestly those are enough to get the point. The only benefit of larger imagers are the inherent depth of field, which is very easy to create with the pocket camera using a wide-range of tools like a speed booster and longer lenses which are open wider. I use all Canon mount and Arri B lenses on my pocket camera without any problem. Flat Pro Res mode on the pocket camera is very good, it offers FAR more dynamic range then ANY MPEG camera. Yes, with an external recorder in Log mode, you can get CLOSE to the pocket. I have yet to color anything out of an external recorder, so I can't comment on how much better it looks. All I know is the material I color right form a GH4 has poor dynamic range. Again, I rarely use the RAW mode, it's unnecessary. You can stop there, the original camera was flawed. It was a great idea, but it failed in my opinion. We aren't discussing that camera what so ever. I would never recommend it to anyone, even though it does deliver pretty good images. The Magenta "issue" isn't an issue. People are over-exposing the camera and as I said earlier, any camera will tent to tint/change color when over-exposed. The URSA mini tends to shift to Magenta, but I'm sure it will be fixed/reduced with a future update since the camera has only been in the wild a month! Did you even bother shooting a product with the pocket before you gave up and dragged it under the bus? I got two of the very first pocket camera's, before anyone else had them. Since then, I've finished more then 30 projects, exclusively shot on the pocket. I have at least 10 projects sitting on drives waiting for time/material to finish and another dozen or so currently in production. I'm hoping by the end of NEXT year, to have 50 projects completed, all shot on the pocket. I do want an URSA 4.6k, but I'm gonna wait until I've booked a feature shooting job where I need 4k compatibility. You can call me a Blackmagic fanboy, but in reality I just like the pocket camera. If you add a shoulder rig, mattebox/follow focus and external recorder, you've now defeated the whole purpose of owning a small camera, might as well buy a BIG camera. The whole point of a small camera is to be unnoticed, to shoot anything you want without anyone even knowing you exist. To me, that's the amazing part of the pocket and why I love it so much.

Here is my kit... 2xPocket camera ($800 used each), Kinoteknik Viewfinder adaptor ($109), Rode Video Mic Pro ($249), Sennheiser EW100G3 wireless kit ($789 retail) CineCity shoulder rig ($450 shipped), Manfrotto MVH500A tripod ($249 retail), Zoom H4N audio recorder ($199 retail), Rokinon 4 lens prime kit (8mm, 12mm, 24mm 85mm $1400 retail) Canon EF to Micro 4/3rds adaptor ($49 retail), taramac camera bag ($159 retail) 4x 94MBps 64GB SD cards ($49/each) The whole kit is manual, no electronic iris so you don't have to use the menu to adjust things. The viewfinder adaptor allows you to push the camera against your face when shooting, so you get nice clean shots hand held without the shoulder rig. As much as I love zoom lenses and prefer them over primes, decent completely manual zooms are expensive and STILL zoom's, don't have the proper ratio's for cinema zoom/focus pulling. So you will never get a stable/steady zoom without some sort of electronic aids. Plus, most still zooms are slow, where the two larger Rokinon primes are F1.5, which is fast enough. I rarely use the 8mm and 12mm lenses in my kit, they are only around for those quick one-off shots. I also have yet to use my fancy Zeiss 12-120 zoom on the Pocket camera because it's big, heavy and expensive. Since I use the pocket for run and gun shooting, I can't imagine carrying around a fancy set of lenses with me, they'd get destroyed in a matter of weeks. Here is my pocket camera video, it explains the whole kit in more detail. Ohh and P.S. I got my Mac Pro for $900 on ebay 4 years ago. Today they're like $500, which is a steal. I'm sitting here right now, rendering 4k red material to 1920x1080 with 4 nodes, two key's per node and 4 grades in real time... on a 10 year old computer, using firewire drives. Good luck doing any of that with a 10 year old PC. All I've got is some ram and a fast graphics card, both of which are the same cost as the PC equivalent. Just snapped these pictures..

The black spot issue was fixed 2 months after the camera came out 2 years ago. So yea... not a problem. The muted colors are very typical with the Blackmagic because the camera by design, isn't overly saturated. This is a great function in my opinion because most of the other cameras are so overly saturated when the file is delivered, it's very hard to make changes and if you over expose accidentally, the colors will actually shift. This is why people who shoot digitally, generally underexpose by a stop or even more, so they can make sure that doesn't happen. I shoot documentary stuff with my pocket cameras and there are times I can't react to the iris fast enough, but I still need to get the shot. So it's over-exposed and I have to fix it in post. Again, if you're in a controlled environment, any camera will look great. If you're out shooting random stuff you may not have control over, then you need that latitude.

Apple has been shipping 16GB of ram on their Retina 15" Macbook Pro's since they came out, which is plenty. The great thing about that computer is that it's got thunderbolt, USB3 and with an inexpensive adaptor, you can get E-Sata, Firewire and many flavors of fiber. So you can basically use ANY storage device anyone gives you or you feel fit to use. Plus, the more recent models have excellent video cards, not the best, but good enough for this kind of work.

Buy a Blackmagic pocket camera, buy a cheap set of Rokinon primes, simple wireless audio kit and buy a used Macbook Pro so you don't have any compatibility issues. That whole kit will cost you LESS then the C100 + glass + Ninja + home-made PC AND look just as good. But hey, I've only been doing this for 25 years, what do I know! ;)

Yep 3G is 10 bit 4:4:4, which most monitors won't accept.

From my understanding, PSF is an interlaced signal which can be used to distribute progressive material. There is no motion between the two fields, so the equipment simply combines them. PSF is most commonly seen/used on HDCAM or DV/HDV recordings which use broadcast standards to record. P is simply progressive frame, which can't be carried on an interlaced signal. P is most commonly seen/used with cameras/equipment that don't use broadcast standards. So PSF would be used for standard monitors that only can accept normal broadcast video standards. P would be used for monitors that can accept a true progressive signal. Most HDSDI monitors CAN accept a true progressive signal. 23.98 is only a "for broadcast" frame rate, so for a monitor output of a camera, it's not really going to make any difference on a film set.

Yea and that's the problem with Windows. It doesn't work most of the time for anything else but basic operations. You first need special versions of the operating system in order to make it work on the network. Then you need special drivers to make everything on the computer work right. Then you need some magical fairy dust to get it bound to the network and get share points to mount properly. Then all it takes is some know it all client to break everything and bring you back to the dinosaur age. There are so many backdoors in windows, even if you lock it all down, people can break through and do whatever they want. So as a business whose job it is to keep computers working, it's an absolute nightmare. By contrast, on the mac side there are no back doors. If you want to get in, you need an administrator login and password. No shift key, no F8, nothing will get you in without it and clients aren't allowed to touch anything related to the system. The only reason companies use Windows at all, is cost. They can buy crappy all-in-one computers for $299 or less on package deals and if they fail, they've got 10 more in the wings waiting. Windows server also has some great home directory back end functions which store user data on the server, mac has the same thing, but the windows solution does work a bit smoother plus you have more control over it. This way a client can sit down at any computer and be online with all their settings. So it's all a cost thing and Apple tried to infiltrate that low-cost market, but they were never successful, they just didn't know how to make a $299 mac. In all my years of working in IT, I have yet to see a business with fully decked client computers outside of VFX. Same goes for the mac infrastructure, they usually buy iMac's, which is unfortunate. At the end of 2009, Apple made a strategic decision to drop the professional product lines over the course of 2010. This was very infuriating for system admins like myself, it left us not knowing where to go. Just keep what we had and buy some spare parts to keep them running or switch to a different non-supported hardware/software combo. During the last 6 years, many companies have made the switch to PC's and it's unfortunate because Apple has been listening and responding to these issues. Yet I agree wholeheartedly, they are absolutely going for the consumer market and it shows. They're still more interested in growing the brand and that's on the consumer level. If all the people editing films in the world used Mac's, those sales would probably equate to how many iPhones are sold every day in the world. So for them, they don't see the R&D effort to create those products as a necessity. It's not something they care about and as a consequence, that market has slipped away from them.

Hey Phil, I'm like 3 blocks from there. :)

Riverside and Coldwater canyon. :)

Ohh components like that have been gone for 15 years or more. Almost all components are made in china today, mainly due to pollution and cost associated with PCB manufacturing. It's far more complex then the old days when you'd make a PCB local, push components through them by hand and solder them when done. Everything today is surface mount, every component has wicked small pins and the Chinese labor is cheap! In the states we use to have complex robots that placed parts onto PCB's and roll through the wave soldering machine. In China, they have people push components on by hand, which saves a lot of money. Even Apple stopped producing stuff in the US in the early 2000's. They're back at it with the new Mac Pro and vow to bring ALL manufacturing back to the states in the next 10 years. I'm pretty certain, none of the other manufacturers build anything in the states outside of components like processors, power supplies and some chassis/cases. Because when you sit at a coffee shop in LA, you're most likely right next to someone who knows what they're doing and has been successful. If you're an outgoing individual, passionate about filmmaking and are very talented, you can work your way up very fast, just by being at the right place at the right time. There is no other place like it for that exact reason. If you can't prove that you've worked on bigger, higher budget shows, you will never get the opportunity to work on bigger, higher budget shows. If all you do is make your own stuff, then all you'll ever be doing is making your own stuff. This is the catch 22 that has plagued people who don't work here forever. If you don't live here, if you don't build a network of people who can place you on those bigger shows, then you won't work up the food chain. It has nothing to do with working in the studio system, it has everything to do with making the connections necessary to move up the ladder. The problem with this industry is that, if you aren't "on call" 24/7, it's hard to get work and you need that work in order to prove yourself to future investors. You need that laundry list of IMDB credits of movies the investors have heard of. You need that resume of working on productions that prove you can do the job. You need that killer demo reel, they will probably never watch, and most importantly, you've gotta be a 30 minute drive away from a face to face meeting. Nothing stops anyone from putting stuff on the internet and preying someone may watch it. If you do a good job, you may actually be able to earn some money as well. However, if you have stories to tell which are beyond your means financially, then the only real way to make them happen is to get into the industry, step one of that is to live in a media-rich city like Los Angeles or New York. Yes, Los Angeles does suck to outsiders, no doubt. I also wouldn't even contemplate having a family or raising kids here. However, as a seemingly perpetually single person, I've built a strong foundation and I can't imagine living anywhere else, until I've either given up OR have lots of money to live anywhere I want. Yes I know how awesome the bay area is, been there quite a bit, but I couldn't live there with the kind of money I make. I refuse to get a normal job, been there, done that, now I only work freelance, which is something FAR more difficult to do up there.

Also, it's rare I deal with one or two computers at someone's house. I always deal with more than one computer on a bound network like active or open directory. It's true that Windows 8 and up is more "user" friendly but for business use, they are horrible. They make it nearly impossible to use on a network, hiding all of the functionality necessary to bind computers AND making permissions more strict. As you stated above, if you know how to fix windows, it's not a problem. However, one shouldn't NEED to know how to fix anything, which is my point. Imagine I've got a client over and all of a sudden I need to do diagnostic work because some service stopped working. I've been at clients places where that exact scenario has happened and yes, it was windows 10. Services like network, bluetooth/USB and even audio, have just shut down on their own and when you can't click on "save" before you reboot, that's a huge problem. I've literally had to drive across the city in rush hour traffic, with clients pacing around waiting for someone to fix it. I just SSH in on the network and restart the USB service. But why should that ever be a problem? What humors me even more is that the HP and Dell workstations, which are pre-built by them for delivery, are absolutely the best. All of the clients I know with homemade systems, they are the ones which suffer the most. We had a situation recently at my biggest PC client (does VFX work), where all of a sudden the computers wouldn't let anyone login. I spent a whole day trying to figure it out and actually had to call in an "expert" to tell me there was nothing we could do without resetting the entire user profile via SSH. Even after trying several times he couldn't make it work. I have to leave it in his hands, and he spent all night trying to crack into one of them and eventually did. So they were down for a whole day, not because anyone did anything, but because the PC's just didn't want to work that day. No directory services, nothing. 4 of the same machine! We wound up figuring out, an automatic software update from Microsoft caused the problems. These are the kind of issues I deal with and I must say, I have probably lost thousands of dollars on solving PC problems, which is why I don't really support windows anymore. I just want a computer to sit on my desk and work until it needs a new hardware component. I will replace it and continue working. I don't want to diagnose anything, I don't want to have fun building a computer, I want to have ONE LIST of replacement parts, not 20. For me, a Mac is like buying anything else in our life. We don't buy car's in pieces do we? Car's are highly tuned machines and like Mac's, you don't go to Bosch to replace that bad alternator, you go to a parts distributor who can source you the OEM component, which by the way, always works better then the "aftermarket" ones. Now... that's just my experience. My first computer was an 8088 Compaq portable, with a CRT green screen. I've had several PC's during my youth because we couldn't afford anything else. I built my own 286 from scratch with a real B&W monitor, none of that green nonsense. We found an IBM 386 portable at the dump and I have fond memories of that one, with it's orange display. I wound up getting my first mac in 1992, it was a hand-me-down Mac SE from my aunt. I got it because my school was all mac and my big old 5" floppy disks wouldn't work there. So I had to be compatible and it worked great. Sure, I couldn't play my old PC games anymore, but in the early 90's everything was made for Mac's, so it wasn't a big deal. It wasn't until the mid to late 90's that things started slipping away from apple and the PC market started to grow. So by the time you got a computer, you had missed out on the mac generation. It's unfortunate as well because, the story you talked about earlier with that Film Riot guy moving from mac to pc, he's just one of those guys with limited experience, making a change because he didn't know any better.

Lets say A LOT has changed. :)

Nobody else has stepped up to the plate. All the other high-quality methods of storage are either extremely proprietary; RED code, Arri Raw, Cinema DNG, etc... or not high quality enough; Intraframe MPEG 2 and .H265. Pro Res has some huge benefits. The biggest one is not using the GPU for decode. Pro Res is actually multi-threaded, so it uses the CPU for decoding. This allows the load to be spread across multiple cores and keeps the GPU available for real-time effects and of course, the GUI of your editing workstation. Pro Res is also an intraframe codec, based on wavelet technology, more similar to J2k then MPEG. It's also an old codec, it's been around since the late 90's and it's only gotten better over the years. It's not very efficient, but efficiency isn't necessarily important in filmmaking. The most important thing is quality and Pro Res has offerings from 8 bit proxy all the way up to 12 bit 444 RGB. No other codec has those offerings. Image sequences can't be played back on your clients laptop. They can't be edited on standard editing software without transcode either. Plus, image sequences which are in folders cause another problem, which relates to how many individual files your drive can deal with. Once you get over a certain threshold, drives get SLOWER when they're constantly having to access small individual files. So if everyone worked in image sequences which were in folders for instance, it would be a problem for most people who don't have fast storage solutions which may not suffer from speed degrade. I've done extensive research and testing for the companies I do post production support for and it's clear to them and to me, single files are better then multiple in a sequence. The solution however is to compact those frames into a single file. That's kinda what Pro Res does since it's an intraframe codec. The down side is if one or more of the frames are damaged, the whole file is corrupt. This COULD be fixed however, there are open wrapper versions of Pro Res available, I've used them in the past and they work great for fixing corrupt files. However, the normal one we all use is closed wrapper, which is unfortunate.