Do I need all of it? Not necessarily, but I’ll be choosing to use the BMPCC only on shoots where I know I want to achieve the best-looking footage and that taking the additional hardware will help me achieve that.
It also means I won’t be using the camera for hand-held vlogging style shots where I hold the camera up and talk into it while I walk. The stabilisation and focus and sheer size of it means it definitely isn’t feasible. However, those shots, while quite classic of quick YouTube vlogs, aren’t exactly the sort of cinematic footage I’m hoping to achieve so I’m happy to exclude those from my shot lists, instead finding more ways to appear within the scenes I’m shooting as I’ve done in the above video.
Battery life is short
In shooting a 15 minute YouTube video I burned through five fully-charged NP F550 batteries, which was all of the ones I took with me and I was concerned I wasn’t going to get all the footage I needed. I was hitting them hard, shooting raw and using the LCD display on full brightness but even so I was surprised at quite how power hungry it is.
I’ve got a Smallrig V-mount battery and have bought a D-Tap power cable to run the camera which will hopefully give me more peace of mind when working on location, but it does mean carrying yet more things around with me.
DaVinci Resolve has taken some getting used to but I’m excited to learn more
I’ve spent the last few years trying to learn everything I can about Adobe Premiere and have only just gotten to a point where I’m happy with the speeds at which I can turn round an edit. So moving over to an entirely different piece of software was a big step.
Resolve seemed quite daunting at first, especially the colour editing and nodes section. The company does have some useful video resources, but I also spent a number of hours on various YouTube tutorials trying to understand the basics and how to replicate my workflow (and keyboard shortcuts) that I’m used to from Premiere.
Once I’d spent some time in the colour editor it did start to make a lot more sense and I quickly found myself enjoying playing around with the colour wheels, creating looks exactly like I’m used to in Lightroom with still images. I’m not quick and I keep making a lot of basic errors I need to fix but I’m looking forward to spending more time with it.