Candlemass Procession
The Candlemass Procession (Sunday 29th Jan 2023) was the first thing filmed with the new (used) Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K. Shooting in raw produced beautiful imagery (with a Laowa 9mm lens and Tiffen ProMist 1/4 diffusion filter), but a snag came to light when editing in Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve…
…it turned out that the video was running way slower than the audio track. You can see in the screen shot below where the audio ends.
What had happened was that the camera was shooting at a “high frame rate”, 60fps in this case, because the HFR button had been accidentally pressed.
If this button is pressed when recording, nothing happens, but if it’s pressed before recording, the subsequent footage will be shot at whatever the High Frame Rate is set to in the menu
Fortunately, the audio is still recorded when using a High Frame Rate, so it was a simple fix in Resolve. But, despite having set the Off Speed Recording option to OFF in the menu (which controls the High Frame Rate button), it turns out that this menu setting doesn’t disable it – this is a poor bit of design by Blackmagic, so hopefully it’ll be improved in some future firmware update. In the meantime, setting the Off Speed Recording to 24fps, the same as the normal frame rate, should mitigate the problem if the button is accidentally pressed before recording (and it’s an easy button to press, being right next to the screen zoom button!) At a High Frame Rate, the audio isn’t synced, so even at 24fps it would need syncing, but that would be straight forward to fix in Resolve.
