hmcindie

Well it depends on a couple of factors. 1. Who is your cinematographer? If its yourself, then what camera do you want to use? If it's someone else, you can't necessarily force them to use a certain camera. 2. How low a budget? Do you wanna fiddle with RAW? How much will you do post production? 3. What is the style of the film?

​I have the 5D Mark III and it blows the A7s out of the water. I shot a shortfilm with the 5d raw with a7s as b-cam and the 5d is just about 10x better than what the A7s brings out. Colors are about 100 000x better (no exaggeration!) Also usability of the A7s is piss poor. The only things the A7s does better is cropmode and h264 quality. Also shadows with stills are cleaner in ISO 100. Whooptydoo. Magic Lantern sharpening peaking feature is better than the peaking on the a7s which peaks before being in focus. And yes, Shogun is an absolute burden. I shot an intro for a tv-series with the a7s and my god the highlights were horrible with white outlines everywhere where there was contrast.

Offtopic but how do you cut a 25 track music video on fcpx? Is fcpx workable when doing something complex?

​Dynamic link seems to be 8-bits only. It will do the processing in AE in whatever bits you choose but when it comes to Premiere through Dynamic link, AE converts it to 8-bits after all the processing is done. I don't know if this has been updated. Adobe has improved their listening capability a lot so people should file this as a bug in their bug/feature reporting site.

Ewww FCPX.

About the commlite adapter, it works well except for losing stabilization. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Autofocus is so slow it's practically unusable. I can focus manually faster. Forget anything that moves. So be careful. I've shot f1.4 on the a7s and still wanted a bit more light but I do live in a very cold and dark country

​They are not easy to match if you don't grade. You can't just apply a Canon LUT, you apply an s-log lut and after that you can try matching them. It all depends on how closely you want them to match.

​I've heard that from some experienced DoP's but I don't think it makes sense and I've never actually seen it. For example, the 5d h264 and RAW have the exact same motion characteristics. Mostly it boils down to different looks and grades seemingly moving differently. It's because our eyes sees contrast differently. A more contrasty image = more stutter, even though the motion would be exactly the same. The only exception being the Red Motion Mount that has a trailing motion blur edge. Have you ever heard of CGI guys doing different motion blurs for different cameras? They don't because cameras inherently work the same way motion blur wise.

​You still need to mask those windows with a powermask in your grading suite, can you afford that?

Shot this with the Sony a7s. Helishots with the nex7.

​Depends on the picture profile. The 16-235 level cinegammas will go to the right but stop at 235, the 0-255 cinegammas go all the way to 255 but they won't let you go under ISO 200.

I have to agree with Andrew here, the 1DC does make a better usable picture than the A7s. The a7s has a lot of features that the 1DC lacks but the 1DC is a powerhouse in those things it does do. The only real problem with the 1DC was always the ridiculous price (and soft HD) It is also beautifully built. It's a tank. I'm gonna try to get a loaner again just to shoot something with it and compare more to my a7s.

How many here praising the A7s + shogun are actually shooting with that combo?

​Don't. I bought the A7s and it's not as nice a camera as the 5D III is (for me). Though I use ML RAW now almost exclusively as I've gotten the workflow down. The cost of Shogun buys a lot of 1000x cards and hard drive space for some real improvement. 5d with ML is like having best of all worlds. Low light is really good (not as good as the a7s but not that far off, in RAW. RAW gives the lowlight a lot of cleaning potential with neatvideo), colors are astounding and the image is really organic and robust. It has the RAW capability of blackmagic without any aliasing and the usability and color of Canon cameras. I just shot a little short with the 5d III as main camera and the A7s as B-cam and I really hate cutting back to the a7s material. That's not to say the A7s is bad. It isn't, a7s is a great little cam. But the 5d RAW is just something else. Workflow is now pretty fast too, mlrawviewer to make the .dng files and Resolve goes through them really fast.

​They are not mutually exclusive. You can sell products to the prosumers and amateurs without taking away the pro-software. As a "professional" I don't care how much software Apple sells if I don't want to use that same software.

I'm gonna have to back douglaurent here slightly. The A7s is not much if any better in lowlight in 4k mode than the 1DC. Andrew is talking about stills where the a7s might be better but in video the 1DC does look sharper and less noise reduced mess than the a7s. In HD mode the A7s is way better, but in 4k, nope and nope. Everything Andrew says is going around the bush. He isn't actually even comparing 4k shots from both, just stills from DXOMark. Like that makes a difference in video? But what doug misses is that yes, the 1DC is not exactly "low" in rolling shutter either. I'd love to go over those "trumps 1DC" points one by one, but I don't think thats appropriate for this thread.

Like Final Cut X? That worked out well for them. I'd love to see a camera created by Apple. It'll probably look good with great performance but won't fit in any existing workflow. Actually... aren't those the blackmagic cams? So what are you people complaining, go buy them!

I used this in a shoot. It was surprisingly good quality! The resolution loss was only visible on the darkest and brightest parts making most of the image look very, very good. Biggest problem was the very, very slow conversion of dual-iso movies. Though now I'm getting good results just shooting ISO 100 and boosting up the shadows. You can get them clean with a bit of NR. Newest mlrawviewer can get rid of the stripes and dead pixels too. p.s Your sun went black? dafuq?

That won't happen with cameras as they record straight to 235. You were doing two compresses, first 255->235 then back. That's in no way realistic. Also I challenge you to come up with an example with an actual camera that records both and then show the difference. A7s record both 0-255 and 16-235 with different profiles. You will NEVER - in real life situations - see a difference in gradation between them. Photoshop examples are not real life tests. In addition, TV's don't remap. They display 16-235 with 16 being black. There is no compressing of values.

As someone who has assistant edited a feature film shot with AlexaRAW, I can say that the 5d RAW is not that far off. I actually think it's absolutely amazing that 5d RAW is available for people (and that it gets so close to AlexaRAW) for the price it is. AlexaRAW takes a humongous amount of space and needs separate capture devices (we used Codex). 5d RAW records into 1000x CF cards. THAT'S CRAZY! It's also funny how fast USB3 can be compared to the Thunderbolt / Codex combination. We get material just as fast into our harddrives from both cameras. Yeah the 5d is worse especially in highlights but man... the difference is way, way less than people say in forums. It's like being in Hifi- forums. People are saying things like "blows away!" and "night and day difference!". Then when you actually listen side-to-side, the difference is... very small. Something like that happens with the 5d RAW vs Alexa. Yeah, there is a difference... but in most situations it's moot.

That's actually whats happened to me. A couple of friends picked the 5d from two different films I did saying "A7s looks really good!" while I was playing back 5d material. Placebo man, it's really strong. Wait till you go to hifi- forums like head-fi. Though I did finally do a spot where I really liked the a7s. It was a parody of product commercials and the slightly off skintones of the a7s fit it perfectly xD And I was using Kholis settings!

What's so great about cinema screens? Most are only 2k and the contrast is always really bad. If you can intercut material on a grade A calibrated monitor, it will also look good in generally shitty "cinema screens".

5dIII with the RAW hack is absolutely, hands down, one of the best images for that price you can get. Unfortunately, installing it and getting used to the workflow will be a huge stone to get over for most people. It's not a beginner camera. I'd suggest getting something cheap, like the Sony a5100. Though syncing audio is something that DSLR (and blackmagic) users should be doing anyways.

That's pretty annoying to watch fullscreen and fullres, so much microjitters. Looking at it smaller is easier.

I'd go with the A7s. I've done several videos with shots from the 5dIII and A7s and have had no serious problems matching them "in the ballpark". Some people have even confused some of my A7s shots to be from the 5dIII and vice-versa. Don't believe the internets too easily.