The Nexus G1 Turns Your Blackmagic Pocket 6K into a Box Camera

Introducing the Nexus G1

Developed by the Nexus Project, an endeavor run by brothers Thomas and Timothy Boland and with support from their industrial designer Brian Boland, this new redesign of the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K promises to help transform the feature-rich BMPC6K from an everyday run-and-gun shooter camera into a more professional-friendly, high-end cinema camera that will be ready for your big productions.

While admittedly in the early stages, the Nexus G1 looks like it should help give video professionals a more optimized version of the Pocket Cinema 6K that will leave much less technical guesswork and be better suited for high-paced productions.

The planned features for the Nexus G1 include a new body design made of composite material, a rear-mounted V-mount battery, an updated monitor setup using the original touchscreen display, an additional control panel, and more built-in ND filter and SDI options.

The Benefits of a Box Camera Design

So, if you aren’t too familiar with box-style cameras (or, more specifically, why you would want to use this type of setup), let’s go over a bit of history. Blackmagic has made box cameras in the past. For example, their Blackmagic Micro Studio Camera 4K is a box camera that they currently offer. However, as the industry shifted towards the handheld DSLR and mirrorless body types over the past decade, it’s been a battle between two use cases: the easy, run-and-gun style vs. the more professional-friendly modular design.

“The more we rigged the Blackmagic Pocket 6k to fix the problems it had, the more problems the rigging and external accessories caused, which limited creativity in other ways. Such as the need to constantly break down and modify rigs for different movement setups, problems with controlling the camera via the screen blocked by a battery, the weight which makes gimbals impossible to use for long periods without cumbersome support equipment, and the extremely wide body which made the camera hard to mount in tight spaces or on gimbals, to name a few.” — Thomas Boland, Avid Nexus.

This box camera design can give users so many more options for how they’d like to set the camera up in their own unique rigs, which can be tailored for all different shoots and projects. These different attachments, like monitors, batteries, and wireless transmitters, all usually need to be in specific spots, however, with a box design, the camera crew can trick out their camera exactly as they see fit.

Price and Availability

While the project has just been announced, there is hope that the Nexus G1 will be done in time to launch sometime later in 2024. However, there’s still plenty of research and development to go through with the project. According to some posts (and Reddit threads) online, a price point of around $3,000 was floated, which does include the price of the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema 6K in the investment.