Andrew Reid

OK back from my small 'trial' with the Nikon.   Virtually everything I said about the D5200 is valid for this camera http://www.eoshd.com/content/9653   It really isn't very different. The image is the same, I didn't notice it being any more detailed. Still pretty good, but not quite GH2 level. It does have great low light performance though, just like the old model.   What was a shame was how there's still no proper 16:9 aspect ratio display mode or dedicated movie mode on the dial. When you remove all the distracting crap from the screen it also removes the faint 16:9 guide mask and gives you a full 3:2 image, which genuinely looks lovely but is as genuinely useless for video as it is lovely looking and the crop only comes in after you hit record. So better get some masking tape out if you want 16:9 AND an uncluttered display.   Didn't check the banding with flat picture profile settings or rolling shutter but probably similar to the D5200. I checked bitrate and Quicktime reports varying figures for the clips I shot. Highest I got was 36Mbit in 50p, but some of my 50p clips were 24Mbit! Go figure! The lowest I had reported was 17Mbit. Probably VBR (variable bitrate) and Quicktime is reporting it based on first frame or something.   The new manual focus magnification beyond the first step of zoom is laggy and jerky but it is actually useful for fine tuning your focus whilst not recording. On the D5200 beyond the first step of zoom you didn't really get any more detail just more pixilation and softness, it was entirely useless.   Couldn't see any crop mode this time out. The camera is rather basic when it comes to bells & whistles in video mode. 1080/50p did look fine and it is PAL / NTSC switchable for either 60/50p and 25/24p.   Overall I do think it's a great option but...   A) No significant difference to D5200 unless you count 1080/60p for slow-mo   B) Panasonic GH2 gives better daylight image and way more features for less money   C) Nikon lens mount is not my cup of tea, can only put Nikon on it and none of my other stuff   D) It's 820 euro body only and last year's model is now just 450 on eBay. Hmm.   So I won't be getting one but I do recommend it for those whom feel it would make sense for them - i.e. if you want the low light performance, 1080/60p and have lots of nice Nikon lenses to put on it.

Just tried one, first impressions...   Screen is very nice. Biggest on any camera and very good quality.   There's a new manual focus assist - ultra detailed but slow frame rate.   I'm picking up some SD cards and going back to get some footage. Nothing special just in-store test. If it really is a step forward from the D5300 aside from 60p I'll buy one and review it :)

I think H.265 support is going to take time, probably 2 years in case of consumer cameras, external recorders and smartphones.   Magic Lantern support - a resounding NO I'm afraid. The hardware isn't capable of that kind of processing complexity and anyway you'd need a dedicated chip on the circuit board for it. It would be like trying to put Resolve 10 on a Commodore Amiga! At some point Canon will be able to buy a H.265 chip off the shelf cheaply and put it in a camera. Like in case of C300... almost all off the shelf components, apart from the sensor. Until this happens H.265 isn't something we'll see appear even in an official firmware update because it's not what you should be running on a general purpose CPU. Too much of an overhead even if the CPU is very fast.   I mean if your powerful desktop PC takes X number of minutes to encode H.265, work out how much slower the mobile processors are and there's your answer. It needs to encode at upwards of 24fps minimum.   GPGPU is coming to mobile and portable consumer electronics. Tegra chip from Nvidia already on the market. That will get us there quicker but I'd still say 1-2 years off yet. Be good when it does get here though. The internet sets to benefit most from it.

The D5300 hasn't started shipping yet and Nikon's marketing people are off the ball when it comes to the video community so nobody has got one early.   It does look interesting, because we know the sensor is already pretty capable for video and it seems with the new image processor they have taken a step forward in extracting more resolution in the debayer and keeping hold of more of it in the encoding, which would be a logical progression.   Would it be better than a GH3 around though? I don't know. And that Nikon lens mount is very restrictive if you have anything but a lot of Nikon glass.   If it ends up giving a nicer image than a G6 it will be a good budget option but right now the image quality is more exciting on the ProRes and raw shooting cameras, and the D5300 doesn't really have much unique about it in terms of features.   My focus this week will be on the Sony A7R which is not a raw or ProRes shooting camera. Happy now? :)

  When you stepped out of the wrong side of bed this morning, did you also stand on a lego brick?   It doesn't so much matter if H.265 isn't destined for DSLRs immediately, I am sure Atomos will put it in an external recorder way before then and allow us to get very nice looking 4K from an HDMI and HD-SDI output on future cameras.

  That basic problem will be solved by H.265.

Forum is back. Don't see anything at first glance. What is the link to the FB post? http://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewforum.php?f=2&sid=718cce8e618027c747f93de62ff55fa9

CineMartin are the first company I know of to give us H.265 HEVC (High Efficiency Video Encoding) conversion with the just-announced CINEC v2.7. It supports up to 4K resolution and you can try it today. In case you live at 12 Under Rock Drive, the H.265 standard is the biggest codec of the decade. It supersedes today's most common codec for encoding and internet delivery of video (H.264) and makes 4K recording to SD cards possible on DSLRs. Read the full article here

It's not at all a taboo on here to talk about non raw / ProRes cameras Matt.

Is auto-focus in video mode important to you? For me that's the only advantage of the 70D in terms of video. If you own a lot of Canon glass that's also an advantage to having the 70D.   Stills a different matter. For my own street photography I tend to use a Sony RX1 or X100S with silent shutter, and because they're small and jacket pocketable. OM-D E-M1 also worth a look for that. 70D is OK for this too.

Yes, I am using one for the 7D. Highly recommend it. I don't however recommend the 70D. Why are you shooting with that over, say, a Panasonic GH3 when the latter is so much more video orientated?

  Yeah... Like that will happen.   Can you honestly see any C300 users who have made their money back 10x over in as many weeks want to go back to a DSLR without HD-SDI or XLR? Purely for the image? I doubt it.

3x crop mode magnifies the noise whereas with the full sensor mode, a lot of the noise is thrown away with the binning process.   Look at GH2 crop mode as further example, or look at a still photo at 100% (1:1) then scale it down to 800x600 to see what I mean about the noise.

  Who are they protecting the high end FROM exactly? Those consumers who can only afford £1000?

  I think he means DSLR in the sense of the current shoddy factory provided form for video. That's what I meant anyway. Because of Magic Lantern the 5D Mark III is very much alive. I wouldn't still have mine if it wasn't for that. FS100 was fast eclipsing it. A7R would have been final straw.

  Good maths sir.   Maybe I will badger Panasonic for a 4:3 crop of the sides in 4K. Easy to implement with firmware. Currently for 4:3 or 3:2 the 5D Mark III with Magic Lantern raw video is the best if you want that for anamorphic.

  Recommended for our Japanese readers :)

Standard DSLR is dead for video. Who the hell wants to get a 7D Mk 2 over a 4K shooting 10bit GH4, or a mirrorless full frame A7R?

For your Photoshop grading pleasure here are some original Cinema DNG frames hot off the newly updated Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera. "A raw video monster in your pocket". Read the full article here

  If you already have 9, which came with a license dongle in the box of the Blackmagic Cinema Camera, the update to 10 is free.   The stand alone paid version of 10 is only useful for pros. You can do pretty much anything in the free 'Lite' version aside from render on multiple GPUs (SLI) and a few other things.

No the most important spec is 4K.   Not losing half the data from the sensor in the pixel binning process to 1080p, has a great affect on the image.   Even if you record 4K and downsample in post to 2K you are dealing with a full pixel readout... all the dynamic range, colour and detail that the sensor can see goes into producing that image.   Hopefully 4K will be 10bit 4:2:2 on it but if not and the debayer is 8bit 4:2:0, it will still look spectacular but you won't be able to push it as far in terms of grading, and you might notice some pixelation around bright red specular highlights.

NAB in April seems likely.   Atomos guy said there would be no less than twenty 4K cameras announced by then. We've already had some of them. But the majority are to come. Remember the Sony prototype 4K DSLR for instance?

  That's just a user preference, with the tint setting. The split screen makes it look like magenta vs green as if you can't get rid of the tint. Nope. It's balanced, but with my LUT I take a different approach to grey. You can have greys which are more purple, more reddish in tint. For me they are more attractive.   By default, in rec.709 you get greys which are more green in hue, and I don't like those at all.

  The first rule of Flight Club is that you don't talk about feature making on the EOSHD forum ;)   My future plans involve returning to shoot in Asia. But it won't be a feature, instead it will be pieces of cinematography, portraits of the place and people, with a message behind that. And I will try and make it as innovative as possible, through the visual techniques, the message and the audio. Berlin for me is like a base to refine and hone my technique. When I go back to Asia I'll be a better cinematographer and actually have something meaningful to film. That said, I am still working on music videos & trailers here in Berlin with a cast, and some more to come out in the winter. Here were the last 3:         The problem with making a feature is that it would be the end of EOSHD. I'd have to commit 100% of my time to the feature and they are years in the planning & making & promotion. A short narrative piece would be more doable.   I don't think people should see 'feature' as the main event anyway.   People tend to think of features as the ultimate goal of a filmmaker. Why? It's just one genre. Like pop is of music. An animated short is just as big of an achievement, and can take years to make. Cinematography on it's own is as much of an art form. A sensitivity to the material and personal take on the world has as much meaning as a fictional narrative from the best writers. Then there's the documentary area of filmmaking. For me those are the ultimate goal for me as a filmmaker. To make something like Koyanisquatsi which is basically a documentary told purely with images. A mixture of the art of photography and filmmmaking. Great sound track too, very important.   Feature film is just one sub-genre of filmmaking and no more of an achievement, often in fact much less of an achievement if you look at 99% of them!!!   Some of my shoots I enjoyed the most creatively and not just technically, were not actually tests although in the context of EOSHD they were presented that way...   This one is about the struggle of Taiwanese people to maintain independence from China...And it had a subtext about war...   https://vimeo.com/12472000   This one was about the disappearance of history from Chinese culture, with the new tower blocks looming over one of the last remaining temples in Shanghai...     This was a play on the themes in The Machine by Pink Floyd.... the people obsessing over mobiles, stuck behind a black mirror, trapped in a transport system, the drunk on the U-bahn, a study of Berlin....   https://vimeo.com/72605257   And this is about the modernisation of a small island in the Philippines (which thankfully survived the recent typhoon intact)...   https://vimeo.com/9853081   And this is about love lost... but living on in memories... That's what the padlocks represented for me, at that time in my life...     And my very earliest stuff, shot on the GH1 and 5D Mark II...   https://vimeo.com/14534844   https://vimeo.com/11349060   So if you have only followed my shootouts and tests, hopefully that puts it all in perspective a bit.

Yellow you're clearly very technical, but in danger of completely confusing people and overstating problems. Can we pick up more on the stuff that actually matters from now on? This isn't supposed to be an all out laboratory. There's no green shadows of magenta highlight problem with 5D Mark III raw DNG in Resolve 10.