Award of Merit:

Blackmagic Design for Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K Pro

For 35 years, Blackmagic Design has created the world’s highest quality video editing products, digital film cameras, live production switchers and real-time film scanners for the feature film, post-production and television broadcast industries. Their products have been used to produce a multitude of feature films including Rocketman, Deadpool, Jurassic World, and major television shows including Ozark, Game of Thrones and The Big Bang Theory. 

In 2016, with over 150 international design awards to their credit, Blackmagic Design became the first Australian company to be recognised as Red Dot: Design Team of the Year, joining the likes of Apple, Porsche, Bosch and Ferrari with an honour widely acknowledged as the most prestigious design award in the world. More recently, they were honoured with the 2021 Good Design Team of the Year by Good Design Australia. 

Ethos
Blackmagic Design is dedicated to making the highest quality video technology affordable to everyone. Their products combine a user focus and innovative technology with a design-led ethos that resonates with professionals and consumers alike. 

Design is integrated throughout Blackmagic’s entire development cycle, leveraged at every stage of the creation process, collaboratively and fluidly across disciplines to deliver more carefully considered final solutions. Hardware and software are developed in unison, informing each other in a dynamic fashion to create consistent, memorable experiences across a wide range of categories. This process has enabled them to drive product cycles with far greater speed, flexibility and efficiency than many other brands in the space. 

A User-centric Approach
Blackmagic products are made for a highly technical industry, with professional customers that demand high levels of performance, reliability and value. Not only are they well designed, of great quality and durability, they specifically cater to the user’s workflow. To achieve this, much time is spent studying the way users work and the environments they operate in. 

Design DNA
Blackmagic products cover many different segments of the video production industry, designed for a multitude of functions, users and contexts. Rather than attempting to create a singular visual narrative, products are instead united through their inherent qualities, reflecting the brand through physical traits like materials, finishes and internal structures, along with key touch points like latches, buttons and connections. 

The ID Team
The Blackmagic industrial design team is made up of diversely skilled, like-minded people, each with a common empathy for aspects of the process outside of their core strength. Understanding how design decisions affect engineering, manufacturing and even quality control at an early stage is incredibly important in ensuring products are not only delivered at an appropriate price point, but that they exceed the expectations of the end-user with each and every interaction with the product.

About the Project

The Pocket Cinema Camera 6K Pro is a revolutionary digital film camera combining a suite of professional filmmaking features in an ultra-compact, lightweight DSLR form factor. Costing just $3245 it is a fully self-contained solution that pairs Hollywood image quality and unmatched flexibility for indie filmmakers, television and web broadcasters. 

Challenge
A cinematographer or live broadcast camera operator moves dynamically and discretely with the action in a scene or event. Constantly monitoring and adjusting focus, composition and audio quality throughout, they must simultaneously adapt to changing lighting conditions to ensure consistent, professional quality video footage. 

For many independent creators, the primary advantages of DSLR cameras for video production are price, familiarity and portability. Designed primarily for stills capture, they are ill-equipped to deal with the practical and technical issues common to filmmaking and live broadcasting without the addition of expensive, bulky peripherals that invariably negate the key benefits the format offers. 

Solution
The Pocket Cinema Camera 6K Pro is an affordable, versatile, all-in-one solution equipped specifically for cinematography and broadcasting: 

• Built-in, motorized ND filters allow spontaneous adaption to changing light conditions.

• Four integrated professional microphones provide high fidelity audio recording.

• A flexible architecture featuring adjustable OLED viewfinder and high brightness, tilting HDR LCD enables various shooting positions.

• Natural ergonomics offer responsive control and setting adjustment.

• Lightweight, durable construction and advanced thermal management ensure on-going performance and reliability despite the processing demands of high-frame rate, 6K video.

• Proprietary Blackmagic RAW codec generates efficient, lossless video files optimised for quality, speed and storage.

Innovation
The Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K Pro features high quality, motorized IR ND filters that quickly reduce the amount of light entering the camera. Designed to match the colorimetry and color science of the camera, the 2, 4 and 6 stop filters provide additional latitude even under harsh lighting. Using high quality coatings for extremely consistent light transmission across the visible spectrum, the IR filters are designed to filter both optical and infra-red wavelengths evenly, avoiding colour-shift and eliminating IR contamination in images. 

Impact
The Pocket Cinema Camera 6K Pro is a timely response to the needs of filmmakers, networks and independent web creators impacted by social distancing measures associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Costing just $3245 it requires nothing but a lens and storage media to start shooting, offering broadcasters, small businesses and educational institutions a self-contained solution to quickly and affordably establish home studios for remote presenters.

Category: Use

Designers and Projet Team:
Blackmagic Industrial Design Team, led by Simon Kidd