MV Production Blog - Why Blackmagic Camera?
Recall from the planning blog that I had listed the use of a certain camera in the production. The main camera for this project is an iPhone 13. Phone cameras have been rising in video quality in recent years, and while I may not be filming with the most recent phone, the camera in the iPhone 13 still outputs good-quality video to use for production.
I listed that I would use the Blackmagic Camera software to film the video. But what exactly is Blackmagic Camera, and why use it to film the video over the stock iOS camera app?
What's special about Blackmagic Camera?
Blackmagic Camera is a third-party camera application developed by Blackmagic Design for iPhones as an alternative to the stock iOS camera app.
Compared to the stock iOS camera app, Blackmagic Camera allows for expanded manual control of the iPhone camera. You can manually control standard aspects of the camera that one would expect to gain control of in a professional camera, such as focus, exposure, white balance, shutter speed, and stabilization. In addition to granting control to aspects of the camera that the iOS camera app would lack control of, Blackmagic Camera allows you to select from 3 color spaces to record your video on the iPhone 13, which include Rec. 709, Rec. 2020 (HDR), and P3-D65. Additionally, you are also able to record video on an external SSD at the same time. However, since I do not have an SSD that will work well with my phone, for this production, all iPhones will be recording to their internal storage.
Use of Blackmagic Camera in the production
Blackmagic Camera will be the sole video recording app for any iPhone used in this production. For each filming blog, I intend to list the settings set on Blackmagic Camera when on set. For the most part, some of the standard settings will be set as follows:
- Resolution: 1920x1080
- Framerate: 60fps
- Aspect ratio: 16:9
- Lens: 26mm Main Camera
- Codec: HEVC (H.265)
Blackmagic Camera also has support for displaying LUTs in real-time, so while in production, I could apply an LUT to Blackmagic Camera and preview it while recording. I could even have the LUT recorded onto the actual file if desired. The use of LUTs in this production will be discussed in a later production blog.
Transferring footage
I use a custom-built Windows PC with Premiere Pro installed to edit my videos. However, in my experience, the file system of iOS does not work well with file transferring to a Windows PC through the wired connection from the iPhone's lightning port.
To transfer files in this case, I use an app called "Owlfiles" to establish an FTP connection with my computer and transfer the files over my home's network from my phone's SSD to my computer's SSD. The file is then imported into the Premiere Pro project.
Blackmagic Camera will be used to produce this video as this utilitarian app can ultimately provide many benefits for the filming and editing of the music video.
