800 ISO native + SpeedBooster seems like a winning combo compared to RED, no? I'm working with some 1000-1200 ISO Epic footage that's surprisingly noisy, and not in a pleasing "film grain" sort of way.

The BMPCC/BMCC could beat the stop of any lense you cared to pair with a RED once you've got the Metabones in the mix so it comes down to ISO performance.

In midtones the texture with the Epic can reasonably pass for grain at speed. Not on a still. It's 100% digital looking, especially when you lift up the blacks checking the edges of mattes, etc., it's pure digital, regular and horizontally biased, and looks very close to GH2 footage in this respect. Of course the GH2 gets uglier faster to be sure.

This is 4K 7.5:1 (REDcode 42). What's curious is the digital noise look is fully maintained through to 2K linearized footage where I would have expected some of it to be filtered away. It must be an order-of-operations thing with Redcine-X or perhaps their scaling method just needs to be improved.

@cantsin Pardon my ignorance but could you expound on that? Say, for example, I am filming someone sitting in an armchair in a livingroom, the scene is lit, and I take an incident reading with a light meter which tells me that at ISO800 at 180° shutter the aperture should be set at f/4. Why, with the bmpcc, do I have to open up to f/2.8 or 2 if I'm shooting in RAW?

And this would also be true for 800 ISO native digital raw cameras like RED and Alexa. Those factors being equal you're not going to be optically faster on either camera compared with what's easily attainable (though not always practical in every instance) with a speed-boosted Blackmagic. Like I said. Not even other speed-boosted MFT cameras are as optically fast as the same lenses on the Blackmagic cameras with the Blackmagic model Speedboosters.

And all of this is still significantly advantageous versus film and 500 speed being the most common for "low light" photography in motion pictures and lenses topping out at T1.2 or so, but you'll have to borrow an AC from Fincher to pull focus at even that speed, which is "stopped down" in the Speedbooster paradigm.

My issue with smaller aperture is the loss of DOF. I know this is celebrated with the DLSR crowd but I feel 90% of their videos are out of focus. Somehow, due to earlier video cam's lack of DOF, it has become anathema to have any kind of deep focus even though most movies that were shot pre-millennium have no instance of this unless it is a close-up shot, and even then it is not always the case. That's not to say it never happened but when it did it seemed to be a deliberate choice that contributed to the story.

Now if you take a lens that is f/2 and you slap a speed-booster in front of it you get this ridiculously razor thin DOF that for some reason is considered "cinematic". OK, well, please, can someone post examples of all these classic movies that have such a shallow DOF? I have not seen them.

Nieuw November 2013 @markr041 I cannot properly run Resolve light on my current computer and will first have to invest in a new one...

Yup. Here's RAW 4 PRO vs Resolve comparison: http://raw4pro.com/resolve/

In short, RAW 4 PRO runs on any computer, not much in terms of system requirements.

It's much worse than on the GH2 if you have a modern, sharp lens on the camera, but not as bad as with APS-C Canon DSLRs.

Both BMCC and BMPCC exhibit moire. To me, it's a very small price to pay for the tremendous resolution these cameras provide.

Fix: in post, selectively apply slight blur just to the area of the moire in the frame. (I much prefer this to the permanently installed OLPF in-camera, which cannot be undone...)

Voila - the best of both worlds; sharp image, yet no more moire.

Chromo NR.

In Resolve you can easily separate luma and chroma and apply blur to the chroma only.

@mo7ies thank you for pointing me to Alex's work, I was one of the sponsors of his project so I meanwhile received his amazing Raw 4 Pro software, unfortunately I still have to find the time to start using it........ but my old computer is no longer any issue in relation to using the BMPCC and I am quite happy about that....

@nomad Thanks for additional clarification. I will do tests once I get a hold of a Pocket to check moire levels.

So I'm contemplating either purchasing a Tilta BMPCC cage then adding an offset should pad to the back and lanparte handles to the front but am also considering the Zacuto Marauder. Both would be used with the zacuto z-finder for the bmpcc. I have a budget of around $700. I am looking for something that I can easily use for narrative and documentary filmmaking. I'd like it to be stable enough to walk with. Is there a benefit of having the support system sit on my shoulder as opposed to being pressed up against it? Also if anybody has experience with either of these set ups with the BMPCC I'd like your opinion. Thanks