Digital Bolex starts to ship, first footage begins to arrive (VIDEO)

 

 

The massively succesful, Kickstarter-funded, Digital Bolex is finally starting to head out to backers, supplying them with a retro-looking 2K, Raw shooting video camera. And now that it's actually getting into people's hands, we're starting to see some more real-world footage shot with the device, and getting a feel for just how good it actually is.

It will, of course, take quite some time for the cinematographic community to really figure out the strengths and the weaknesses of the Digital Bolex D16. But the folks at RedShark took one for a spin at the Peter Pan Bakery and Pastry Shop in Brooklyn, and have uploaded the footage to Vimeo. According to Peter Haas, he was impressed how it handled the tricky conditions of the shoot. It was a small space, with no use of filters, and all the light either coming from the blizzard outside or the lighting fixtures. He said:

Taking the dailies back to our edit bay, we were very pleased with the images we got out of the camera. I was impressed at the latitude we were able to capture, as the lighting conditions were (literally) all over spectrum and we were commonly working with pools of light that had a 5-7 stop difference!
The location is incredibly small so we won't be able to do much in the way of tripod shooting, and we didn't have a shoulder rig handy for the location scout. The form factor of the D16 with its pistol grip felt great ergonomically and provided enough stabilization to get what we needed

Haas also put up the Raw files, for anyone who wanted to see them in their base state.

Hopefully, as the D16 gets into more people's hands, we'll see a lot more from this interesting little camera. Meanwhile, a thread on the Digital Bolex forum has even more.