Rig Advice - Black Magic Micro Cameras

The Pentax 3.2mm fisheye for Pentax Q cameras can be quite sharp looking sometimes eg. https://www.flickr.com/photos/ndjedinak/8075640954/
and should have full circle coverage on the Micro format

Nice find, I suspect the optics aren't brilliant, but for that price its well worth a test. I think the Sigma or lensbaby with the Speedboost is the only real viable option at the moment unless anyone has found a different option.

Incidentally, I tried the new Fuji 4K machine vision lens on monday on a minicam, pretty damn impressive for such a small lens. $2,500 though so not cheap. The 4K minicam is good but not going to be in the class of Micro quality and costs $14k.


Does anyone know what the breakout cable is going to look like? Will it be a connector with 12 different leads on the end for all the requirements? (power, lanc, s/bus etc)

I'll be at the Blackmagic NYC event next week, I'll post pics and size comparisons of their upcoming products if they have them available for inspection. Any questions you may have please let me know and I'll do my best to get answers or at least responses.

In case you guys haven't seen this camera, it's a Kickstarter so backer beware but satisfies my 4K requirement in a small package.

http://www.engadget.com/2015/07/20/dron ... 4k-camera/

This company, Shanghai Optics, has "pre-engineered" c mount fisheyes in the focal lengths required:
http://www.shanghai-optics.com/wp-conte ... isheye.pdf

The Kickerstarter cameras doesn't offer 4:3 video coverage so will require more cameras.
Also questionable budget for the project.

The Micro Camera is a 16:9 sensor so there isn't much difference there. Its mainly the genlock sync and the presumably excellent sensor (imo) that make the cinema micro worthwhile.

Those lenses look bang on MediaVR, definitely going to investigate. The specs are right, but would be interesting to know how they actually hold up at the edges and what 'mp' they rate them at (or sharpness etc). Anyone know what a 165degrees 1" fisheye has in terms of FOV a S16mm sensor vertically? Is it north of 90degrees?

Here is another one:
http://www.jenoptik-inc.com/coastalopt- ... sheye.html

this is part of their Coastal lens series which have an excellent reputation (at least their larger fisheyes for DSLRs) .. but this one is "special order" which means expensive I guess

Hi John, not sure how you made out with your rig in the end, but there's some great replies here, and I'd just like to add to what's been said already in developing our own professional BMMCC based VR rig.

We're still waiting on the cameras, like everyone else - so please treat all this as 'untested'.

The Blackmagic Micro Cinema Camera has a lot going for it for a VR/360 camera rig, although the 16:9, lack of 4k, and only 30fps global shutter detract from this. We still feel it's a much better option than GoPro's for VR, for the genlock, larger sensor size, full size SD card, raw recording, dynamic range, removable lenses, and (hopefully - most important of all) reliability reasons. Keeping even two GoPro's recording reliably is a pain, let alone 6, or 16.

What is important to consider with designing 360 rigs at the moment, is thinking how your rig will be stitched. Traditional stitching is about to give way to computational photography stitching, from the likes of Google and others, and this is a very different beast, requiring a new layout of the cameras in a rig.

For example, you don't use left and right pairs in computational photography for 3D. This is instead computationally calculated from multiple camera viewpoints (similar to 'Bullet Time') and any (left/right) eye position can be interpolated and generated. The GoPro Odyssey for example, designed to work with Google's stitcher, features 16 cameras in a ring. There are no left and right pairs, but it can do 3D, albeit in its one horizontal plane. The good news with CP stitching is that parallax issues should be virtually eliminated.

For computational photography, the level of detail (pixels per degree) is important, and lenses are typically wider, so that each point in a scene is captured from multiple viewpoints. Using the BMMCC for example, with its 2k resolution, and the Rokinon 7.5mm (which is heavily cropped on the BMMCC's Super 16 sensor), we worked out that 16 cameras per axis is about the minimum needed for computational photography to work in theory.

If you'd like to take a look at our 42 camera rig (for 3-axis 3D capture) please head over to http://360designs.io. We have a growing list of resource materials on our blog too, about this subject.

Hi, i am part of a group who's thinking about building a 360 3D Blackmagic cinema rig. I stumbled upon this thread but it's quite old, is there anyone who went through with this and actually build a rig? Thanks in advance, people.