Blackmagic revealed the Micro Cinema Camera today, a lightweight professional-grade action camera with a Micro Four Thirds lens mount. GoPros may be good enough for your extreme family vacation and your cousin Jeremy’s POV skateboard videos, but Blackmagic is counting on pro filmmakers needing more.
The Black Magic Cinema Camera borrows bits of technology from many different manufacturers to make for an incredibly versatile unit. At its core is a Super 16 sensor, about a third smaller than a conventional Micro Four Thirds sensor, but substantially larger than the sensors found in most action cams, the GoPro included. It can output Raw video with 13-stops of dynamic range (same quality we saw on the Pocket Cinema Camera).
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The MCC offers both a rolling and a global shutter, the latter of which exposes the sensor all at once, eliminating the jello effect commonly found when using a rolling shutter for fast action shots. Recording is limited to 1080p 30fps when using the global shutter; when using the rolling shutter, users can capture 1080p 60fps in 12-bit Raw or ProRes.
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The camera weighs in at 300 grams or 10.65 ounces; that’s about three times the weight of GoPro Hero4 Black, though press materials indicate it is still light enough to affix to a DJI Phantom 2 (one of the more affordable Phantom drone models available). In terms of size, the MCC is 82.5 x 69.5 x 65.4mm (3.25 x 2.74 x 2.57 inches).
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On the back of the camera, where you might expect a screen (hint: there is none), you will instead find a mount for a Canon LP-E6 battery. The camera is quoted as being able to record for up to 90 minutes on a single charge.
The Blackmagic Micro Cinema Camera features an active Micro Four Thirds lens mount so you can use high performance photographic lenses including wide angle, primes, standard zooms, telephotos and more.
Unlike the touchscreen-centric controls of other Blackmagic products, the MCC instead has only physical buttons, 6 in total, located to the left of the lens mount. Also on the left is a full-sized HDMI output and a DB-HD15 expansion port. The expansion port can be used for any number of things, including wirelessly controlling the camera’s functionality via a model airplane remote control, or hooking up a wireless video transmitter. You can read more about the expansion port, and the vast number of possibilities it offers here.
On the other side of the lens mount you’ll find an SD card slot (SDXC- and SDHC- compatible), as well as a 3.5mm audio input. The unit also has a 1/4″ thread mount on both the top and bottom of the camera body. The body and lens mount, by the way, are made of magnesium alloy, so the unit should be able to survive encounters that plastic-bodied action cams would not.