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Blackmagic Production Camera for Video Conference/webinar
Someone is selling me his used Production Camera for a very attractive price. I’m planning to use it for video conferences and live webinars.
Our basic setup is usually to connect a Panasonic HMC-150 to our computer with an HDMI cable. My idea is to replace the Panasonic with the BMPC 4k connected to our computer via SDI cable. Now my questions are:
1) the light sensitivity of the HMC-150 is good enough for us for this type of project. We use just a few lights for these projects since the ambient room lights are bright enough. Is the BMPC 4K better or worse than HMC-150’s light sensitivity?
2) Our video conferences last about 3 hours. Will the BMPC overheat when shooting that long? We do our conferences in air-conditioned hotel rooms.
Thank you very much in advance. God bless!
ut in omnibus glorificetur Deus
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2 Replies
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1. I would expect that if you are using lights and there is ambient room light, you will get an image you will be happy with without having to open up your iris more than you’d like.
2. I find what gets hottest is the SSD drive when recording, since you are using this as just a camera you won’t have that heat source. Even recording to SSD while using the SDI output, heat won’t be an issue. Make sure to not cover up the fan port on the bottom, it is close to where you would screw in your tripod plate.
The biggest issue I would think is that the video from the camera-live from the SDI or recorded to the drive in ProRes or Avid is rather unsaturated. Even shooting in its Rec. 709 based video mode, I added a lot of saturation when color correcting my footage. It has a “film mode” when shooting video that even flatter and less contrasty, like a LOG mode. If you can adjust the color of the camera in your streaming set up you’ll be fine, if not, you may not like the look.
Erik Cantu
Video Producer
RadioU TV & Animal Basement
14 years experience as a fulltime broadcast shooter, editor & broadcast designer. -
Thank you very much, Erik. We use just a few lights because that’s what the organizers want. But since we can get by with the HMC-150 (which I think is not good in low light), I think we can also get by with the Blackmagic.
It’s great that you pointed out the issue about the unsaturated look. I am more bothered by it than the light sensitivity issue. I’ll be using Adobe Connect for this and it looks like Adobe Connect doesn’t have any color controls so I’ll be stuck with the unsaturated look.
ut in omnibus glorificetur Deus
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