It’s sleek, it’s simple, and it’s just downright pretty to look at. We’ve seen the pictures online; we’ve drooled over the thought of holding it in our hands. Yes, I’m talking about the brand new it-took-us-six-months-to-get-after-our-preorder Blackmagic Cinema Camera EF. Wanna talk about simplicity in design? Blackmagic could write the case study.

But how does that design intersect with functionality? If you want a simplistic answer, the answer is amazingly well.

The hardest part about using this camera was wrestling the neck strap into place. After accomplishing that, I loaded our 85mm f1.4 and our 18mm f3.5 Zeiss ZF lens with Duclos cine-modifications and headed off to the Goshen College Good Library to capture some b-roll.

The camera itself was awkward to free shoot without a tripod or dolly. There’s no instinctual place to hold the camera body while adjusting your lens. This issue is, of course, easily rectified by using a tripod, which should be a no-brainer for most things. However, if you’re looking to shoot by hand you might want to invest in a rig of some sort. This absence of hand-held capabilities from the out-of-the-box model is one of the sure signs that this not for news production cross-over. I’m used the Sony NX5 and JVC 250, both cinema/news cross-overs.  This isn’t a shoot-all camera. As the name suggests, it’s made for cinema and we can all be glad for that.

As it is a cinema camera, the use of post-production color correction is assumed and it shoots 2.5K RAW footage amazingly well. The RAW quality allows for greater control of shadows, textures, and general color. The background depth is easily accessible and the footage even has a grain to it. The background doesn’t pixelate, but looks smoother and softer than the traditionally harsh digital format that comes from the 1s and 0s of pixelated data.

Another feature I was excited to try was the direct, internal entry of metadata. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to title folders, bins and takes all without having to download your footage onto a computer? What about adding a description of your shot? Blackmagic lets you do that. Even though I was looking forward to checking out this function, it’s so extraordinarily different from my standard shooting process, that it took me a couple takes before I remembered to use it. Once I started using it, I found it to be fairly intuitive although like any touch screen keyboard, input was limited to single-fingered pecking. The screen is nice and large and the buttons are easy enough to use.

Back to color correction for RAW footage: our purchase of the camera included the full version of DaVinci Resolve software (minus the control surface), which in itself is worthwhile. The program was obviously designed specifically for color correction and touts a great workflow for post-production.

It’s a little cumbersome to edit simple clips together as I tried to do as I was correcting my test shots, but again it’s not made for editing purposes. Some things are slightly counter-intuitive for video work, such as being forced to take a screen shot in order to copy and apply one set of image color corrections to another video clip. This is confusing from a video standpoint, but make sense when you think instead about Blackmagic taking a folder full of sequenced, high-res photos in stead of seamless video.

If you’re looking to shoot cinema-style, get solid color correction software to boot and not totally break the bank, the Blackmagic may be your camera. Either that or you can crawl back to your DSLR and wish that it shot 2.5K RAW.