Leaderboard

This thread is a true camera school, my hat to this initiative : ) The most curious is some of my favs here two were shot on GH1, other two on Canon M (I still hold 3x GH1 I refuse to give away and 4x Canon M units : -) Ah and the G6 (proud owner of 4x G7 units) and GF5 as some other favs (I have 2x units and a couple of that 70-210mm as well), too funny to find out : D @heart0less you were the only another fav one outside of that range, kudos to you ; -)

At EOSHD we like to ask the important hard-hitting questions on glamorous Italian TV shows. Read the full article

One of the rumor sites had it at $1399

Earlier this week, I saw a 37-minute documentary that had been shot on an old Panasonic GM1 compact system camera. While the subject matter would not normally have interested me, this documentary was so well shot and cut that it drew me in. In fact, it was so well put together that it looked like it had been shot on a much larger and much more expensive camera. This is proof that you don't have to have the latest and greatest camera, but you do know have to use it, you have to have a compelling story to tell, and you have to know how to cut your footage properly so it supports the story you're trying to tell.

yes again: any 90D price info yet?

Why, after going with all these mediocre to bad Tiffen, Heliopan, Genus etc... VariND filters I finally found a good one. Tried B+W as well but didn't notice any big difference justifying its price tag nor lack of stronger ND steps.

John Carpenter - The Thing Vangelis - Blade Runner Eurythmics - 1984 And yeah, Ennio Morricone

That's unfortunate, I wonder if a filter could be installed to fix that issue. I am guessing they left that out for greater stills image quality. Hopefully it'll be different on the S1H

I seriously don't know if I'm being trolled or not. Cursed internet.

Their reason is obvious: they don't want filmmakers using these cameras. I'm not really sure what part of that is hard to understand. I'm sorry but your argument is quite asanine. Just a few posts ago you argued that Canon might have to pay extra license fees for 24p, which is ridiculous, and now you're acting like an expert? The mental gymnastics you're doing right now to argue what is blatantly obvious is insane. Seriously, you wrote all that man to excuse CANON, who has a history of handicapping their cameras! Please, think that last sentence over a bit. All that, like the reason Canon cripples their cameras, goes without saying. No one said otherwise.

Hi, congrats to all the participants. The reveal is really entertaining. My story: Based on recent improvement with Magic Lantern I purchased an EOS M to do some experiment a month ago, then the EOSHD challenge appeared (but with the Magic Lantern restriction 🙃). The EOS M was $150, still $50 left for the lens. The easy choice was a Canon FD, Minolta Rokkor, or the mighty soviet Helios or any vintage lens under $50. But I wanted to try something "different" to stay on the challenge track. A round trip to my treasure chest (my wife has a different name for that box) and I found something quite interesting, an enlarger lens : Beseler-HD 50mm 2.8 - I remember paying something around $30 max. but after checking the invoice and I actually payed $9 + $8 shipping - Then ordered an adapter in Russia - M42x1 to Canon EOS-M for $25. After 2 weeks, I received a snail mail with some nice Russian stamps and the adapter inside the letter. Added a 17-31 helicoid for focusing infinity and voila an unusual bokeh. Cheers.

MacX MediaTrans is the most iTunes like alternative to iTunes and has a couple of extra tricks. Its a paid app but has a free trial. https://www.macxdvd.com/mediatrans/

Turn this: Into this! I entered two terrible quality cameras in the $200 camera challenge and somehow didn't come last, so here's what I learned. In case it's useful to someone Shooting: Low quality cameras have poor codecs and low bitrates, which typically have trouble with a lot of movement. Therefore I used a tripod for every shot instead of hand-holding. This also gives you more options for temporal NR in post too. Go for the 180 shutter by either using an ND or by simply filming in low light. How can you tell if it's 180 shutter? Wave your hand in front of it and see how streaky it is. or alternatively, if your camera is very low resolution and subjects aren't moving too much, then the sheer size of the pixels will completely obscure whatever shutter angle you have! Win!! In post: Edit in your desired output resolution, not the one you shot in.. dodgy 4K image? Output in 8K today! Think about converting to black and white. This gives you 4 times the effective resolution!! Camera only shoots 30p? Excellent - conform to 24p in post and get slow motion for free!! Most NLEs can slow audio slightly too, so if it works for the vibe of your project then go with it. Digital compression is awful and a give-away you're not shooting RAW or film, so is over-sharpening that you can't turn off. Therefore, blur the image in post. You might want to consider blurring only the edges of things, and you should experiment with blur size and blur strength too. I typically find a sharp diagonal line and blur until it looks like a straight line instead of a jaggy digital mess. Use noise reduction, both spatial and temporal. It will make the image blurry, but that's also what you want because of above, so go nuts. The image might look smooth, but we'll add grain later, so don't worry about it. My footage had a bunch of compression artefacts that flickered on and off on each alternate frame and was very distracting (and awful). De-flicker plugins can work wonders. Just play with the types and presets until it's gone. Colour will probably be awful, so either make it black and white (which also gets around the awful coloured fringing) or desaturate heavily. You can also do heavy chroma NR to get rid of colour flickering. Also feel free to use advanced colour controls such as Hue vs Hue to get rid of nasty colours, or use masks to selectively desaturate colours you don't like. Get rid of digital looking clipped highlights by controlling and artificial highlight rolloff via curves. Someone complimented me on the highlight rolloff, which was totally created in post. Use music, pick your shots well, and try and distract from IQ by using content, composition, lighting, and other 'tricks' 😆😆😆 Can't afford a nice vintage lens or camera has a fixed lens? Add halation by masking only the brightest parts of the image, adding a big blur, then put over the top of the image at a low opacity. Add grain to finish it off. Film has grain and film is awesome, so therefore.... plus, YT kills grain and will put heavy bands on smooth areas so you really should add some. I recommend doing a grain test video with different strengths so you can see what YT does it various amounts of it. It takes more than you think to show up in YT, a LOT more. Here is the curve that gives that highlight rolloff and deep shadows.... Here's another before/after image. and here's my reveal post with the final and SOOC videos: Hopefully that's useful to someone! Feel free to ask questions and I still think I can make a P4K look like a BMMCC or BMPCCv1 so if you have both and can shoot something with both then let me know.....

I think you are way to critical, and I mean that in a good way. Watching without knowledge about what camera etc. was used for me was a good experience, kind of like looking mor freely at the videography... And yours looked nothing short of good to my eyes. So for me this competition was also a reminder that filming is a craft first. And that good craftsmen and -woman can work with every tool. 👍

That's genius!! You can, on this occasion keep a hold of your webcam I do love the fact you have fitted it to a rail mount, I say you build a shoulder rig for this! Extra points for rigging it up haha! Now I loved the image quality on this, for me it looked very filmic, granted its not terribly sharp but much sharper and better looking than I remember from EOS M footage. I guess that is down to a decently sharp lens which works wonders on the Canons. I was half thinking this was shot on a Sony of some kind but the skin tones and colours were just too good Had you said this was an EOS M from the start I wouldn't have believed you, there appears to be no aliasing and moire from what I can see, perhaps YouTube's compression is hiding some of that. Great job! Now for my reveal and I am really surprised to have won the vote for image quality! When I saw some of the entries I was sure I wasn't going to get anywhere near the top. Not that I was aiming to win, this after all was just a bit of fun! Now I will be honest, I nearly didn't enter. I saw the post on the blog and immediately took interest. I thought over it for a few days and done some research on what could be had for the £200 budget. Andrew- as a side note I did manage to find a large sensor, interchangeable lens 4K camera and nearly went down that route! At the time of Andrew announcing the competition it was peak wedding season for me (my full time job as a wedding and events filmmaker) and that had to take priority. When I checked back a few weeks later on the closing date for entries it was literally a week away! I took the plunge and bought something cheap in order to take part, paid for express shipping and bought a lens adapter via Amazon Prime. And here she is in all her glory! £69 body only from MPB photographic in the UK, and probably the ropiest one they had! It was pretty manky, didn't come with a body cap (omg that exposed sensor!! 😮) and the SD card door doesn't close properly but I was determined to make this work. The lenses I used were two m42 vintage lenses I had lying around, first up a Pentacon 50mm f1.8 which I actually use in my professional work from time to time - its surprisingly good! For some longer shots I used a Carl Zeiss Jena 135mm f3.5 with the aperture blades stuck wide open - again surprisingly good considering the aperture doesn't function and it has been sitting in a bag without any caps on for years. The eagle eyed amongst you will notice in the above photo there is a Speedbooster attached. This is where I hold my hands up to a little bit of cheating! I bought a Gobe dumb adapter from Amazon as mentioned but knew that for some shots I had in mind the 100mm equivalent FOV I would have would be bit too tight. So for a handful of shots I did run with this - this potentially aided in producing slightly sharper results in some shots. I also used an SLR Magic Variable ND, again not the cheapest of filters! So feel free to disqualify me for this technical infringement! Before shooting my sequence I done a few test shots in the garden the reviewed the footage on the computer. I knew the AVCHD codec would be a potential struggle but didnt realise how bad it was until looking back on these test shots - the footage was already falling apart before my eyes! 17 Mbps is a long way off the solid looking 100+ Mbps i'm used to off my GH5! Not to mention how much moire I saw in the footage! Despite this, I found the 720p mode better with it's Motion JPEG codec so considered using this in my film. I shot with the "Nostalgic" setting with Contrast and Sharpness all the way down. For me this looked to have slightly better dynamic range and better roll off between tones than the "Smooth" setting, although the over all colour wasn't as nice. So, on one of the hottest days of the year I went into my home town and done some people watching. The little GH1 was a fair challenge to use as one might expect with how lucky we are with modern cameras these days. No focus peaking, no zebras, low resolution screen and viewfinder. Despite this, I relied heavily on the histogram to check my highlights, made sure not to film anything with too much motion which would exploit the weaknesses in the codec. I also threw in some 720p shots and upscaled them in the final edit. My biggest mistake was not taking my proper video monopod out to film, instead relying on handheld or a basic photography monopod. It wasn't until I went out for some golden hour footage I took along a proper tripod. Good old Warp Stabiliser came in handy! The edit was a quick couple of hours piecing together the best shots, no real story part from the obvious changing of time and I graded using one of James Miller's DeLUTs as a starting point, tweaking to my own taste. For me this was a refreshing challenge. Normally I opt to do some photography or go a bike ride to escape from my normal work but this was a cheeky day out filming to keep my creativity going at the height of working season. Filmmaking should always be about the fun and not about the expensive gear and with that I think I will arm myself with the little GH1 and see what we can come up with in the future. I will be writing a more in depth blog post on my own website so when that is done I will link that back to here. Finally I just want to say well done to PannySVHS for winning the best cinematography, I love the home video feel about this! Thank you to Andrew for coming up with this challenge and getting this little community together to create. Looking forward to more like this soon! Dan

In all honesty: I would have paid off the winner of the competition the amount 60Ds go on Ebay right now rather than handing over mine if I lost. This is the first camera I bought with my own money so it has some emotional value for me and will remain on my shelf 😉

Congrats to @PannySVHS and @Framed_By_Dan and to all other participants as well! Some very exotic camera choices and lenses already revealed. Now I'm particularly curious to see what camera @TrueIndigo has used. I liked the colours of that one the most. And of course which lens created that unusual bokeh in the contribution of @Wronzoff. My choice was very boring and unspectacular, as I used what I already owned: Canon 60D and 60mm Macro with some cheap 0.9 ND (EOS standard colour profile without any grading).

Whoah...hang on there you two. You are doing forums wrong if you agree to agree. Splitting hairs, clinging on to a semantic rock and repelling all boarders...that is what it is all about. Now, lets get this back on course and start trading petty insults.

Yeah, I was careful not to add the "but you probably wouldn't want to" so that I could retain the technical win

A good story is key. We have all seen videos on YouTube that while shot on inferior cameras are nonetheless interesting. Have you ever seen a movie shot on fancy cameras, with a real budget that was still garbage? Story is king! Most are too caught up in gear.

Time to sell all you photo gear, haha

Which are likely made using existing technology and existing license agreements. If there was no reason to not include it, they would include it. In industry when you license in someone else's IP payment comes in two separate forms typically. Firstly, there is an upfront payment as agreed to which is based off milestones through the development process. So, when I start making the gadget, and I want to use your IP, we come to an agreement that allows me to do that. Right away I will pay you some small amount of cash. Then, as the gadget proceeds from testing to manufacturing to release, there will be a number of agreed to milestones that when met will trigger additional increasingly larger payments I have to make to you (sometimes milestones can happen even after the product is being sold, depending on what the agreement was). THEN, on top of that for every unit I sell I will have to pay you a royalty, also agreed to in advance. Now, how would that work with multiple products? Every product you make would be subject to those milestones. Moreover, such agreements typically will limit the number of products you can develop before you need to negotiate a new license. Maybe you have 10, then once those are done you need a new license for any future products using the IP. Once you use up your allotment of products you need to negotiate a new milestone/royalty structure which can be quite different from what you had before. Maybe you agree to other limitations in order to decrease the milestone costs. I am guessing that Canon are dealing with this sort of situation all the time. They are a manufacturer so it is reasonable to assume that they are dealing with the same business practices that every other manufacturer in the developed world has to deal with. The point I am making is that Canon having certain features in earlier models is not predictive of what will be in later models, because the license agreements in place for the respective models may be quite different. These carry cost burdens, and that figures into whether it is worth your while to include them or not. Not necessarily true. There is supporting hardware as well, and if that is not implemented or some part is not capable, then you can unlock all you want and nothing is going to happen. It is not just one thing.