ntblowz

Ignition on.
If you'd like one, you can order it here
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/pbc-blackmagic-pocket-cinema-camera-controller/x/22750367#/
 

Didn't wanna make a new thread for just memes.. 
??

Well, its been a while and its changed quite a bit....
But this is your official 7 day countdown for pre-orders opening on 12/12/19.
As the festive season is approaching then in true advent calendar style, open this thread every day for more stuff.

PBC Tease 1.mp4  
 

Really dig this adapter. Fixes the EOS R in my book. Here is my video test first look
 

In light of the recent arguments on EOSHD I thought it'd be cool to think about how awesome it is to be a filmmaker/videographer in 2019 going into 2020.
We don't have to settle for crappy 8 bit anymore on anything less than $5000, we even have multiple cameras that shoot compressed raw and/or ProRes for less than $2.5K! We have lenses from 3rd party makers that not only don't suck but are better in some cases. Wireless monitoring and follow focuses are affordable now!? What!?  Our options for post are incredible, too - We have Final Cut and Resolve that are rock solid and Adobe... Adobe sometimes doesn't crash now! ? Frame.io and Vimeo review help make working remotely way less frustrating We get to bash Canon while shooting on Fuji/Sony/Nikon/Blackmagic instead of bashing them because we have no other choice And on top of that all we have places like here where we get to talk about it all and get help and share our sometimes very strong opinions ?
I hope you guys see my sarcasm where I sprinkled it in. I encourage you to go ahead and post what you're grateful for:

Just arrived and testing.
 

Glad to see AMD back in the performance game with the same low price strategy.
I still think the future (at least in the mac world) will be fast but extremely efficient ARM cpus with dedicated hardware acceleration chips (like  Apples T2, Afterburner, Neural chips) that will accelerate things like H.265 decoding/encoding, ProRes encoding/decoding, and Neural net algorithms they are starting to use for things like object removal, stabilization, and 3D tracking.
A MBP with the T2 chip just chews through 5K 200Mbit/s HEVC footage from a GH5. Future cameras, I think, will be replacing H.264 with HEVC for a multitude of reasons. You almost need hardware accelerating encoding/decoding to play back that footage and edit it in real time. 

Been testing the S1H for a few days and thought I'd share a few thoughts.
First impression was that this is a large, heavy camera! A couple of other colleagues were taken aback by the size too. However one colleague who is used to shooting stills with a Canon 1DX mkII thought it was fine and fit nicely in the hand, so I guess it depends what you're used to.
The menus are quite similar to what I remember from the GH5, although I sold mine about a year ago so it's not that fresh in my memory. At the moment I use a Canon C200 and have a Fuji X-T3 as my personal camera so it was a bit of an adjustment, and the S1H certainly lacks the tactile retro pleasure of the Fuji, and also lacks the video specific buttons of the C200.
I was pleased by the look and feel of the 24-105 F4 lens, which gives nice shallow DOF when required. It was silent and well made, although coming from Fuji lenses recently my first impression was that it's massive! Again, it's just because I'm not used to it.
Now for my worst thing about the camera - the autofocus is really a drag. I was so excited about this camera and initially the weird pulsing and searching autofocus took the wind out of my sails and gave me a very bad first impression. Even in stills it doesn't seem very precise or reliable, particularly in lower light. The face and person recognition sometimes works great, but is never reliable. You just never know when it's going to decide to defocus and start searching. Compared to Canon, Sony, and even Fuji AF, this feels like a massive step back. I hate the way it defocuses past the subject before snapping back, even in stills mode it really irritates me. I've learned to adjust to it a bit in the short time I've had with the camera (only a couple of days) and I'm sure I would learn to work around it, but it's a massive drawback, and I was really disappointed by the still performance, which is usable but just not at the level I'm used to.
And finally my favourite thing about this camera...
The image quality and colour is fantastic. Beautiful. Perfect 4k. I did try the 6k modes but only a little as it's not a big deal for me right now and also my Mac Pro choked on it! The colour in this new generation of Panasonics is strikingly good. I prefer it to Canon even. it's more realistic yet beautiful. Arri-like. And such crisp, beautiful unsharpened image quality. While I would say it still lacks the purely cinematic look of the old-school blackmagics or Arri, it's a wonderful modern image. I'd put it 2 leagues ahead of the GH5, Z-Cam E2 (which I owned for a short while) and way ahead of the Sonys. I don't know which I prefer between the S1H and C200 purely in image quality, but I think it might be the Panasonic. It's close, and I vastly prefer working with the S1H for it's form factor when run-and-gunning.
The V-log is just gorgeous. It's making me consider buying a S1 just for personal use, just when I'd vowed to get over my GAS!
So those are just a few quick thoughts. My bottom line is, if the autofocus was good this would be an essential camera. As it is, it puts this camera in a really tough spot. Yes the image is fantastic, and yes 'real filmmakers don't use autofocus', but most of us want and would use good autofocus. Once you've gotten used to it, it's very hard to go back! Especially for one man band operators like myself. It's so close to being perfect that I'm left quite frustrated. I guess the next generation is probably worth waiting for. But at the same time I'm haunted by how good that image is... It reminds me of how I used to feel when I looked at rushes from my Ursa Mini 4.6k. it's just pleasing and cinematic somehow. Satisfying for the IQ geek in me.
I just wish that the AF was better. Hoping for a firmware improvement, but it's pretty clear it will never be up there with the best in the class unfortunately, and when the new 1DX miii comes out, I would expect a big price drop on this camera.
EDIT
I forgot to mention the slow motion. The 120-180fps isn't great to be honest, very soft compared to what I'm used to with the Fuji X-T3, which was another disappointment. Again, hoping for improvements in firmware, but not holding my breath. I think good crisp 120fps should be pretty much standard on a top level pro-sumer camera these days.

Nice to see 24p. Hopefully we see better examples of its quality, because I’m not a fan of Potato jet’s footage he took with it. 

This is our reel for 2019... It's only a minute long and we were trying to highlight all the different types of projects that we worked on this year.
 

The biggest surprise for me with this camera is the outstanding color reproduction. Skin tones are spot on. This matches up much better with my Red Dragon than the BMPCC4k. Would love to see some kind of 12 bit raw implemented.
5.8K - 4000 ISO - 24p frame grab:
 
 

Here's a little video that I put together for those green chair shots.
 

Of course! Sounds ridiculous right?
 Just swap “car” with “camera” and “engine cylinders” with “resolution” and “speed” with “frames per second” and you have essential what the RED patent is.
Bayer sensors existed before RED
Bayer data existed before RED.
The jpeg2000 Compression existed before RED.
Hence adding “two more cylinders” is the same as RED adding “Bayer compression” to existing technology and then essentially getting a patent for “cars with certain sized engine going faster than X speed (a camera recording at 4K Bayer resolution at least 23 fps).
All that shit existed before except the jpeg2000 compression to Bayer data. I have no problem with that part.
Putting OBVIOUS things like FPS and resolution gives RED a blanket patent on compressed BAYER data 4K and up at 23 FPS and up. Which is absolutely ridiculous.
If the patent instead said 4K and up at least 23FPS using X unique algorithm implementation then that’s fine.
REDs patent is a blanket patent on ANY implementation. What if I have a better algorithm that improves on jpeg2000. Nope, RED by defaults owns that space from 4K to infinity and 23 FPS to infinity. It’s complete bullshit.
Ans what about stills cameras? That have been shooting compressed RAW for years before RED was even a twinkle in Jim’s eye?
Suddenly they can’t shoot more than 23 FPS because they will be infringing on REDs patent NOT because they are using the same compression technology as RED but simply because they hit a arbitrary number that RED claims an patent over. It’s moronic.

The RED patent is for compressed RAW video with at least 24 FPS.

Well I received it 2 days ago (3 days before the estimate) ? Years ago my main casual camera was the Panasonic GX7 + Olympus 17mm f1.8. This camera actually achieves everything that I wanted in an upgrade to it. Maintains the same body size but has a better grip. Better sensor. Better colour out of camera. An even smaller 35mm equivalent lens. And has video stabilisation,
I've been comparing the Canon to my Fuji XT30 ?

Something that surprised me is that there's actually a setting called "Highlight Tone Priority" that's not too dissimilar to Fuji's DR setting. 
Disabled:

Enabled:

 
And so the result is that you can actually get quite similar dynamic range to the Fuji with Eterna on DR400.
Fuji:

Canon:

Fuji:

Canon:

One thing that disappoints me is that bokeh of the 22mm is noticeably smaller than the Fuji's 23mm.
Fuji 23mm f1.4 @ f2.2:

Canon 22mm @ f2:

Another thing I noticed is that Canon's whitebalance usually does a better job than Fuji. Prior to the X-T30 I've also owned the X-t2, which also struggled with finding the right WB.
 

Yep.
Or Ferrari had the genius idea to add two more cylinders to a 6 cylinder engine and was granted a patent for “internal combustion engine with no less than 8 cylinders and a speed of at least 80kph”
No other car could now go as fast as 80kph unless they had an engine with less than 8 cylinders.
Its madness 
 

https://www.kandaovr.com/qoocam-8k/

This could be it. 
 
8K.
1/1.7-inch sensor
10-bit video.
12-bit stills. 

The thread is sleeping, so I thought about sharing updates after having used the S1 for a month (and the newly announced firmware updates are a good occasion for that !).
So I used the S1 during a 1 month arctic journey across northern Swedish mountains and Norway in last September/October. I only took the S1, for photo and video, and brought with me the 24-105 f4 kit lens and the Sigma 14-24 2.8 dg dn (the new one, designed for mirrorless) which I brought 3 weeks before I left home.
I wanted to film (not doing time lapse) the northern lights, but we were not very lucky with the intensity of lady aurora, despite one or two explosions in the sky, and the f2.8 aperture of the sigma was not enough. I will soon sell the Sigma and buy a 20 1.4 Sigma art, and maybe wait for the newly announced pana 16-35 f4... (or a used canon 16-35 f4).
I was a bit frustrated with longer reach need, because, when I bought the S1, I thought the ex.tele converter worked the same as on Sony (clear zoom if I remember) and on the GH5 and G9. So I did not bring any tele for this trip (despite still having at home a Canon 200 f2.8 L ii prime at that time), hoping to film with the 24-105 at 105mm in apsc mode + exteleconv. Some days before leaving home, I discovered that it does not work in 4k… So on 1 or 2 occasions, to film wildlife or distant landscape, I used 1080, and pixel/pixel mode. I checked the results at home on my computer, and the results are really really awful eheh ! APSC mode is, on the other hand, really good ; so, in the end, I had a little reach on some occasions.
I really love the range of the 24-105, and find it very useful. Fot this kind of trip, it is perfect ; maybe the newly announced (yeah, so much "newly announced" today !) Sigma art 24-70 f2.8 dg dn will be better, I'll keep a close eye on it. The Sigma 14-24 f28 dg dn is a wonderful lens for photos, sharp enough for me in the corner, light etc. But the inability to put a vari nd on it was useless for video. I bought it for nighttime auroras filming, but a 20 1.4 + a wide zoom that takes filters will serve me better.
I encountered minor bugs  : occasionally, when I pressed the review button to check my images, it said "no valid pictures on card". Had to turn off the camera and I could access again my images. I had 1 or 2 freezes (really less than my fujis that used to freeze very very often) too. Ah, and the camera is slooooooooow to operate. Drives me crazy when in a rush !
All in all, it worked very well, even during snow storms and -10°C temperatures, and was covered with ice and used under rain with no problems. The handling and controls are phenomenal, especially in shitty conditions.
So far, I only reviewed my footage on my computer since I came back home, and I barely touched the camera again (little time) but I managed to play with some clips. The Vlog shots are gorgeous... really ! I tried to play with them with filmconvert nitrate and varicam profile (I need to try the """newly announced""" ? S1 profiles), and with the varicam luts supplied by panasonic, and I love everything about it : colors, look... I think i prefer the result I obtain by applying Resolve's color space transform to the vlog clip, and then tweaking it to taste. I am still learning and, thus, is a horrible color corrector, but with minor stuff applied, I obtain a really pleasing result.  I also filmed a lot with Cine-d and HLG. The former seems to be very good, and the latter... I still did not figure out how to treat it in Resolve eheh. I wish I had more time to learn the camera prior to departure, because I played with the flat profile last week-end, and I really like it too. One thing I instantly noticed is the iso capabilities : amazing !
I sadly found some missed focus shots while reviewing my clips. More than I wanted... I mainly used MF, but with a lot of "AF first then switch to MF", and maybe the struggling AF in low contrast scene + not always easy to check the focus peaking in bad weather conditions + my poor fillmmaking skills are to blame.
On the still side, not a lot of things to say : wonderful high iso performance, very flexible files... everything you want from a modern 24mp sensor. A great machine for my use : landscape, documentary, astro photo...

Sorry for the very unprofessional review ahah, hope some of you will find something useful. I attach just for the fun an image I took inside the tent, after a short night (I still have to post process my photos). Don't pay attention to the "clean" appearance of the camera... I was always wiping it, as it was often covered with snow and rain ? 

I will sell my Sigma 14-24 2.8 and, in the future, I will slowly build  a kit with a wide angle prime, lenses like the samyang 135 f2, takumar 50 1.4, and maybe the coming panasonic S lenses...
But for now, I will add the smallrig cage for the S1 + a cheap 5.5" monitor, and I think about buying a Panasonic G9 + pana leica 200 f2.8 + tc (unbelievable sales + cashback right now) . It will allow me to "deport" the long reach video and photo use to this setup.

@omega1978 sorry, I promised you to take sample images with the sigma 14-24, but I did not find time to do it before leaving. Did you put your hands on it ??

I’m excited!

Hey guys I've ordered this camera and it should be with me next week :)
I also have the X-T30 so I could do some comparison shots before I sell it on if any of you are interested.
Reasons for switching are very specific to my needs as a hobbyist. 
Paired with the 22mm lens it becomes one of the smallest 35mm equivalent cameras. I can take it anywhere in my jacket pocket. Video features: object tracking (Fuji can only track faces), digital stabilization. From DPreview's charts, the 1080p looks excellent. Decent at 120fps too. I'm not a big 4k guy. Canon colours are about as good as Fuji. Ergonomics: Much better grip (I have an add-on grip for the Fuji but it adds weight and still doesnt feel great). Built in tiltable flash. Flip up screen (not that id use it much).  Can adapt the Sigma 17-50mm f2.8 with native AF support. One thing I really hope Canon makes is something like Sony's new 16-55mm f2.8. Its small, light and stabilised.
 

More like others are still trying to catch up while Sony is in a very comfortable lead with high profit margin on their cameras, 4K60P is not important for majority (99%?) of user tbh, sales have proven that 4K30p is enough for most user, no point to add extra cost (R&D, material, size) for heat related stuff on 4K60P.
Anyway I do miss Samsung, they definitely give Japanese manufacturer some whoop ass.
 
@androidlad  You can probably start your own Sony alpha rumor site, the current SAR is a fucking joke