The Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K Pro Is Worth the Weight

Intuitive controls. 6K RAW footage. Built-in ND filters. Two mini-XLR inputs. $2,500 is cheap for a 6K cinema camera.

Heavy, irregularly shaped body. Middling battery life. You can extend it with an attachment that adds even more heft.

There’s not much to criticize about the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera Pro 6K—besides its cumbersome name. An array of thoughtful features and a focus on video first make it the perfect stepping stone between traditional mirrorless shooters and high-end movie cameras, if you can get past its hefty weight and middling battery life.

An Affordable Pro Package

The BMPCC 6K Pro utilizes a Super 35-mm sensor which has been one of the most popular sensor formats for filmmakers for decades. While it’s technically smaller than full-frame sensors, it’s comparable to the APS-C sensors you’ll find in many photography cameras (though it’s a bit wider). The camera also uses an EF lens mount, which means it has access to a pretty wide range of popular lenses.

Most notably–so notable they put it in the name–this camera can shoot up to 6K footage, which is hard to find at this price point. Why might you want 6K footage, you ask? Well, if your editing rig can handle it, you get a lot more flexibility to crop, zoom, and motion-track footage in postproduction, without sacrificing picture quality. For low-to-no budget productions, a common way to get this flexibility is to shoot in 4K and distribute in 1080p, but 6K allows you to keep that power while still outputting the highest resolution most people can watch right now.

The camera also supports shooting in both Blackmagic RAW and Apple’s ProRes RAW formats (the latter is only supported up to 4K, though). Both formats are great for capturing as much detail as possible while shooting and adjusting your color grade later. Blackmagic also makes DaVinci Resolve, which started as top-tier color grading software and has since evolved into an entire video editing package that can sometimes give Adobe a run for its money. So naturally, the camera  comes with a free copy of the $300 Studio version of the app.

DaVinci Resolve’s free version is already incredibly powerful, and most cinema cameras that push into the 6K range are quite a bit pricier than the BMPCC 6K Pro. If you’re looking to get your foot in the door on pro-level filmmaking, it’s hard to find a cheaper entry point. 

Chonky Bod

The 6K Pro felt incredible when I first pulled it out of the box. It’s smooth but grippy, and the crisp LCD screen dominates the camera. Unlike most competing cameras, physical buttons are fairly sparse here, and the ones that are on the body have all earned their place. A few physical buttons and a dial on the right side let you adjust settings like ISO and white balance without digging through the interface.

On the rear of the camera, buttons to adjust the aperture and focus automatically (if your lens supports these features) are handily right next to your right thumb. Finally, there are three programmable buttons along the top, which by default are mapped to the False Color feature, a default LUT, and frame guides. However, you can change these to whatever function you find most useful while shooting.

And aside from a few other requisites like a menu button and a recording/image-capture button, that’s largely it. Most controls are handled by the touchscreen interface, where they’re intuitively laid out (more on that below). Rather than bombard the user with every physical button they could possibly need, the 6K Pro keeps things minimal.

The only downside to the body of this camera is that it. Is. Hefty. It’s weighs 4.6 pounds, and holding it in one hand could strain your wrist. That’s without any attachments. If you plan to put this in a cage or start attaching microphones, it could easily get difficult to work with. And gimbals? Well, make sure to check the weight limits on yours if you have one.

Intuitive Interface

The touchscreen interface is so convenient that I feel it’s worth its own section. Many cameras—especially those that are designed for photography first, with video added as an afterthought—bury key settings behind layers of menus or in one of the many arcane buttons with impenetrable hieroglyphics that litter their bodies.

The display on the BMPCC 6K Pro, on the other hand, puts every facet of the camera on screen and lets you adjust them with a tap. Frame rate, shutter speed, f-stop, ISO, and white balance are all visible along the top, and they show their current settings if they automatically change for any reason.

The frame rate setting in particular is neat. By default, it cycles through a selection of standard rates (e.g., 24, 30, 60 feet per second). However, you can flip a toggle to enable off-speed frame rates. After that, the HFR button will let you hop back and forth between your off-speed rate and the standard one. This is handy if you mainly want your project in, say, 30 fps but occasionally want to play around in 60 or 120 fps to get slo-mo video, or drop it down to 5 fps to get some killer smearing effects.

Along the bottom, the screen has another incredibly useful feature: an RGB histogram. This live readout shows the distribution of all your RGB color values, letting you see not only when you’re clipping blacks or whites, but even when you’re clipping on one specific color channel. When a color channel starts clipping, an indicator for that channel on the right side of the histogram will light up.

The LCD screen itself provides a surprisingly accurate indication of what your footage is going to look like, even when handling very high or very low frame rates. While this isn’t especially unique, it’s welcome, especially when compared to photography-minded cameras that sometimes aren’t capable of showing the difference between high- and low-frame-rate video.

Extra Extra

The growth of DSLR/mirrorless cameras—and their video capabilities—led to something of a slow obsolescence for the camcorder genre. They’re not dead, necessarily, but most are relegated to specific professional uses or the video equivalent of point-and-shoots. However, several features on the BMPCC 6K Pro make a strong case for cameras that are designed for video first.

One of the headliner features here is the three built-in ND filters. Two buttons on the rear of the camera cycle between filters that offer 2, 4, and 6 stops of filtering (or none at all). If you’re on a chaotic outdoor set, being able to adjust filters with a press of a button can be a lifesaver.

On the side of the camera, the 6K Pro features two mini-XLR inputs—each of which provide 48 volts of phantom power—which let you pipe in higher-quality audio than you might be able to get from most photography cameras. It also has CFast and SD UHS-II card slots, which are necessary for getting the absurdly high recording speeds necessary to capture high-bitrate 6K footage. Or you can record directly to an external SSD (provided it’s fast enough, which you should definitely check before buying).

The camera’s software also lets you upload custom LUTs, which you can use to preview how your footage will look when you start grading. This can be especially handy if you work on recurring sets and perform the same custom tweaks to your footage with each project. Since you’re recording in Log footage, you’ll still have all the flexibility you need to tweak the shots later, but being able to apply your own custom LUTs in-camera is the kind of feature that you just don’t expect to get on cameras that aren’t built around a video workflow.

Dreaded Dead Battery

With all those perks, and in such an inexpensive package, there has to be a downside, right? Well, aside from the weight, there’s a pretty major one: the battery life. This camera uses the common NP-F style batteries, which might help cut down on needing extra accessories if you use other gear like lights that share the same battery type. But even the 3,500-mAh battery that comes with the camera doesn’t last very long.

On a full charge, a single battery might last about an hour, and that can be optimistic at times. To help offset this, Blackmagic sells a battery grip ($145) that can house two extra NP-F batteries for up to around three hours of battery life. (You need to buy the batteries separately.) Conveniently, the batteries can also be charged while still in the grip, by using the camera’s 12-V DC charger.

Less conveniently, the grip adds even more heft to an already chonky body. It’s not an insurmountable problem for studio shoots, but between the weight and the short battery life, this might not be the best run-and-gun camera. Nevertheless, given its shockingly low price for the bevy of professional cinema features you get, budget and indie filmmakers should give it a serious look.