cantsin

Favorite: Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera. (The first affordable camera to obsolete film for moving images. Quirks are nothing if your reference is a 16mm Bolex.) Least favorite: Glidecam HD1000. (A good steadycam, but still a pain to set up and use.) One for the future: Windows-based computer with gaming components for optimized Resolve performance. (Objectively, a more rational choice than a Mac, with much more bang for the buck. Still hesitating to make that jump.) Wish: at least 10bit video, log profiles and high quality internal codecs in all consumer-level DSLR and mirrorless cameras. (I will never go back to 8bit in my life.)

In other words, you didn't need our advice, and you didn't need "URGENT" help. Do whatever you want to do, but I tell you that you have GAS if you shoot important stuff with a brand new camera that you have no time to properly learn. All you wanted, it seems, is community affirmation for a buying decision that you already made. And since EOSHD is very Panasonic GH-friendly, you hoped to find it here. Wrong. Next time stop wasting our time.

And the camera advice: Never buy a new camera last minute for real life shooting. When you shoot something important, only use a camera that you've mastered. The new, fancy, supposedly better camera will turn into a nightmare if you aren't familiar with it and have ruined your shots with some wrong setting. Aside from that, you have two really nice cameras with the G6 and D5300. It's arguably easier to produce beautiful/rich color with the D5300 than with the GH4. It seems that you suffer from gear acquisition syndrome (GAS). A new camera won't make you a better filmmaker. Unless you know that the GH4 has some feature you really need (for example, cropping 1080p out of 4K for handheld footage stabilization), you won't need it. Take a time off this blog - it's poison for people who suffer GAS.

In this video, the guy constantly mixes up perceptive image differences (such as field of view) with technically objective physical measurements (f-stop, ISO). It's almost a piece of propaganda made to confuse photographers who use to make calculations based on perceptive differences ("50mm f2.8 on full frame is 25mm f1.4 on MFT") that can be practically helpful but have technically never been correct. Like convincing people that a compact car doesn't really drive at 100mph like a sedan because its wheels are smaller - so they need to turn twice as fast, which means that the car needs to run at double speed to match the sedan; according to which the compact is really only half as fast as the sedan, and the 100mph of the compact "aren't really 100mph" - and manufacturers like Volkswagen or Toyota fool you when they say that their cars run 100mph. [By now, everyone is so utterly confused in their head through this pseudo-logic that they believe this complete bullshit.] Just two measures to deflate this guy: (1) Tell him to go do cinema DoPs and tell them that their light meter measurements (in ISO and f-stops) for smaller film formats like 16mm have been wrong because the f-numbers weren't really the same for 16mm film with its smaller frame size. (2) Give him a Blackmagic Pocket camera with its 1" sensor and let him compare noise levels and dynamic range to a consumer MFT or APS-C compact. Maybe he'll learn that it's about size of photo sites, not sensor size. (And that doesn't even factor in technology such as back-illuminated sensors vs. conventional sensors.)

Since you use such strong language: your calculations are completely wrong because you're comparing apples to oranges - namely 16:9 video on MFT to 3:2 stills on full frame. The only meaningful comparison is 16:9 MFT video to 16:9 video on full frame (on a Canon 5D, Nikon D800 or Sony A7) - which is cropped from 3:2, and thus has a smaller diagonal.

I do have exactly the same problem as you.

Re: the video - I'm noticing blown-out highlights in some scenes (hair of the actress), and underexposure in others. Unless this was an artistic choice, could it be possible that the video was shot in full 0-255 range but edited in 16-235 broadcast range without lifting shadows and bringing down highlights? Or is Stu Maschwitz right with his claim that the GH4 lacks dynamic range?

It appears that you can't take the truth.

[Deleted by EOSHD - No legal talk on the forum]

Interesting - my copy of the 14mm/2.5 doesn't have OIS. Where and when did you get your's?

A small remark, and partial correction of my previous posting that called all Japanese manual primes more or less equal: There are still differences in available lens speeds. A top brand such as Nikon offered faster lenses such as 24mm f2, 28mm f2, 35mm f1.4 and f2, 50mm f1.2 and 135mm f2.

Here's a slightly heretic interjection: IMHO, it doesn't matter that much which Japanese manual focus SLR prime lens you use for video as long as it has been produced by one of the quality manufacturers Nikon, Canon, Olympus, Pentax, Minolta, Fuji, Konica, Yashica or Ricoh. All the lenses will resolve well enough for 1080p/2K video, they will all have decent contrast and color rendering. Major differences will only become visible under one of the following two conditions: [a] when shooting stills and pixel peeing at 16-32 MP, when shooting wide open and under extreme conditions (direct sunlight into the lens provoking flares etc.). At most medium f-stop settings, differences between the above brands will be quite subtle. You'll spot major differences in image rendering only when using true vintage lenses such as 16mm cine c-mounts or Russian M42 SLR and M39 rangefinder lenses (most of which are copies of pre-WWII Zeiss lenses). You'll also see differences with modern-day Japanese autofocus and Korean Samyang primes which (mostly through new coating formula) have been pushed towards higher contrast rendering, but aren't necessarily sharper than Japanese 1970s/80s manual focus primes.

How is that possible? AFAIK, HDMI is only specified for transferring an 8bit video signal at 1080p and the other two bits of the interface are reserved for control information?!?

Most native MFT lenses don't send a good image to the camera but rely on heavy software corrections of geometrical distortion, corner blur and chromatic aberrations. This is why the resulting images look clinical - they're not the result of good optics but of in-camera photoshopping. On top of that, MFT lenses can't be adapted to any other camera mount. It has the opposite strength of being a camera mount to which almost any other lens mount can be adapted. MFT is an excellent mount and sensor format for video cameras. But I wouldn't put high bets on its long-term survival as a stills camera system. On the ultracompact end, it's being undercut by 1" cameras like the Sony RX100, on the enthusiast image quality-oriented end, it's being outclassed by APS-C mirrorless systems (like Sony's and Fuji's).

I don't know about HDMI, but you can get Sony's external electronic viewfinder (FDA-EV1S) for the 5N and use that as a full replacement for the display.

Maybe I'm too harsh. But it seems to me that this is more a pitch for the crowdfunding campaign than anything else if the OP refuses to share information here by pointing people in this forum to his Indiegogo page.

Please delete this thread as spam.

Yes, the three you mention are actually quite good. (Within the hardware/software limitations of the iPad platform. Don't expect anything resembling Premiere or Final Cut Pro.)

I really wonder, especially for those of you who expressed a common interest in more experimental forms of filmmaking: Wouldn't it be useful to create a new forum, on its own website, whose focus is not on technology but on artistic discussion and how-to's for no budget DIY filmmaking? EDIT: Something like the Vimeo Video School could be a point of departure, but it could be done on a higher level.)

Seriously, I think that I'm not quite getting you: As far as I know, you can't trim and adjust footage or add effects in Filmic Pro - or did I miss anything in the app?

What Nikon does, is provide insanely good value and image quality for photographers. Their cameras all lead their respective classes in DXOmark. A D3300 body + a 35mm/1.8 DX lens delivers far superior quality for $580+$200=$780 to, for example, an Olympus OM-D EM-1 + Zuiko 25/1.8 for $1300+$500=$1800. If you take objective sensor and lens rating, and shoot raw, then it's also better than any high price APS-C mirrorless camera, including Fuji's. The D4s is also class-leading for a high speed, insanely low light-capable camera. The price tag won't be prohibitive for the pro photographers who'll buy this camera. The real risk is that mirrorless might die for the mass consumer market because it's undercut in price and outdone in image quality by classical DSLRs like Nikon's.

@Quirky: I must have missed something, but the Filmic Pro app that's installed on my iOS devices doesn't seem to offer editing.

@Quirky: ??? FilmicPro is a camera app, not an editor AFAIK. - You can edit video even on old iPads with the iOS versions of iMovie or Pinnacle Studio (the second is slightly better). All you need is the iPad camera connection kit and h264 video in a Quicktime or MP4 container on an SD card. Here's a video I shot on a NEX-5n, edited and uploaded on an iPad: @tjmsc: I think you're posting in the wrong forum. This is a place for people who do not feel overwhelmed by desktop video editors, but quite on the contrary think that they should have even better pro features...

Yes. Yes! (Was inclined to put this film on my list, too, but dropped it because it didn't seem mainstream enough.) This is how one-man-crew no-budget, no actors, no set/props filmmaking could be done today, with almost any camera on at least GH1/550D/D5200 level, and so much better than the tired 'motion postcard'-style city impressions that are the trademark of DSLR video. More films in that style that every DIY no budget filmmaker should have seen and studied: Berlin, Symphony of a Metropolis (Walter Ruttmann), 1927 The Bridge (Joris Ivens), 1928 Rain (Joris Ivens), 1929 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPD2C0K38jY (And to speak of the devil: Leni Riefenstahl's film on the 1936 Berlin Olympics was explicitly made in the cinematic tradition of the above.)

Since the question is about mainstream films, and the emphasis in most people's replies on (fairly) contemporary films, I'd throw in just two: Irreversible (2002) Eternal Sunshine on the Spotless Mind (2004)