Tips to Better Exposure with a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema 6K Pro Camera

Larry’s Note: The following description was written by Ken Paul Rosenthal. I found it very helpful and, with his permission, am sharing it with you.

Ken writes: I film primarily outdoors in urban and natural landscapes. My first digital camera was a Canon 5D Mark 3. And the exposure scale at the bottom of the screen was indispensable as the hash marks clearly indicated how many stops I was over or under middle gray. I had no need for an external color calibrated monitor for exposure and I didn’t want to be encumbered with the extra weight.

When I began working with my current camera, a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema 6K Pro, I was despondent without the 5D’s exposure scale and immediately detested the false colors option for setting exposure. I never film the human face with this camera—my b-roll footage is essentially my a-roll, i.e. my primary subject. As a reformed analog purist who has nevertheless remained steadfast in my desire to see the same image through my camera as with my naked eye, I decried the way false colors turned the intrinsically animate world into an acid flash back.

When my colorist referred me to the RGB scale in the lower left-hand corner of the 6K Pro’s screen as a reference for setting exposure, it was a revelation. All I had to do was turn the exposure dial until the red, green, and blue lines were as closely stacked and centered as possible between either end of the scale. Another critical tweak for achieving optimum exposure with the 6K Pro without the aid of an external color calibrated monitor is reducing the brightness of the camera screen to 50%. Lastly, multiple cinematographers who are familiar with this camera have advised me to slightly overexpose the image, i.e. shift the RGB waveform slightly to the right of center. After four years of using this camera, I’ve yet to screw up an exposure.

I’m well aware that more conventional productions privilege more standardized technical procedures and principles as modeled by the film and broadcast industries. I’m not immune to those practices, having hired a cinematographer with a Red Gemini camera to film talking head interviews for my current documentary production. However, all the rest of my footage was gleaned from the field with a crew of one and my Black Magic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K Pro and tripod stowed in the rear basket of my bicycle.

With respect to all the high end camera and exposure gear out there, please consider filmmaker Maya Deren’s dictum, “Cameras don’t make films. Filmmakers make films.”