Sean Cunningham

  There's a thread on this very board with several diopter options big enough for the LA7200.  I'd likely find the diopter before buying the adapter though, to be safe, since you could turn right around and sell it for a profit if need be and the Panasonic anamorphic being more common.  I made sure I'd acquired a Tokina achromat before pulling the trigger on my Century Optics adapter.   The Century Optics can be plenty sharp wider than f/5.6 without the Tokina doublet, depending on where you need to focus and your taking lens.  Even with the cheap-o kit lens it's better than merely acceptably sharp at ~f/4 throughout the focus range at wider angles (18-24mm for sure).  On a GH2 at least.

  Not true.  Century Optics and LA7200, the later of which being adaptable to wider focal lengths than 85mm with the 5D sensor.

I've never used it but from memory the NEX-5 is maybe the only recurring Sony camera to come up in videos that I've watched where I was compelled to look at what camera was used because the image looked good and not the opposite.  I can sometimes detect the electrified, sometimes oddly smeary highlights that I associate with camcorder footage but I chalk those instances up to unfortunate camera settings relative to the image being captured, because I've seen plenty of others that just look nice.     It seems like a fairly popular choice in the anamorphic crowd.      edit: yeah, Richard's videos immediately came to mind when I saw this post.

The ISO3200 example is sorta academic, to me. I'd rather see more realistic comparisons at something like 640/800 where too much above that you're pretty much in a horrible lighting situation and just hoping you get an image you can use and then it becomes a contest of "which camera would I rather have when I'm not lighting anything and my light is shit?", more or less. Some differences between the ISO160 examples could also come from the Standard profile reportedly not giving a correct exposure for medium gray on the GH2. According to Shian Storm (ColorGHear) and his tests with scopes and handheld light meter (unconfirmed yet myself) only Nostalgia measures medium gray exposure @ 50% and the others are closer to 40%. Perhaps they fixed this anomaly in the G6?

  It was only January that Andrew wrote up their story...   http://www.eoshd.com/content/9488/shooting-a-feature-with-the-panasonic-gh2-and-lomo-anamorphic-lenses   ...how many of these sets are floating around out there, I wonder.  I'd fucking sell a kidney before I gave these up once acquired...though there was that skew that was never accounted for in their sample footage, if I'm remembering correctly.

  I wonder if that was the set used recently on the project discussed here...

The mix of colors in there is just wonderful.  I love it!

There are no other plugins that do what Film Convert does.     But, yeah, all software has its place.  I wouldn't try using Excel to edit with or Word to add typography to a motion picture...   I don't see the nobility in writing my own grading software for every project and then chucking the binary and source once it's completed because, having it around for the next project is just being lazy.  Saving time is for chumps and using tools written by other folks to do a specific thing is...whatever.

From a spec commercial I'm currently working on...top pic is straight out of the GH2, then FilmConvert, then ColorGHear grade, then my finishing mix.  

  I think this is the model that flooded ebay a months or so ago at around the $200 mark and someone bought them up and are trying to sell them for ridiculous money now.

  Don't confuse the DR of what was recorded to DV for the native capabilities of the chip.  They achieved 9.5 stops which is on par or better than what we have with the GH2 (according to Shian Storm we're only getting an effective 6 stops in video mode, regardless of manufacturer's claims).  Comparing it to the BMCC might be a bit of hyperbole on my part but noiseless (reported by actual Andromeda users) high DR, highly gradable images...the BMCC is the only comparable camera out there.     Folks have used Andromedas as b-cams with their RED.  The age of the camera isn't that important when you forget about what Panasonic sold as an implementation and concentrate on what the modification actually provided.   Also, base ISO was not sub-100.  It reacted non-linearly but under normal circumstances it was around 400 ASA (others assumed 320) in progressive mode yet under extremely bright light, requiring f/16 it performed like its base ISO was 1000 ASA.   edit: the evidence, along with the GH1 and GH2, shows a pattern at Panasonic of releasing implementations that fall far short of what their baseline technology, the chip itself, is natively capable of. 

  And still, didn't see any revelation as to who bought them.  I'm guessing the payoff was behind door number one and a gun barrel, in the form of attack-lawyers, was behind door number two if they didn't sell.  The easy guess would be it was Panasonic themselves (protecting the Varicam) though, at the time, Sony seemed to have more to gain by this product being taken off the market.

The age of glossy print mags died in the USA a long time ago.  They're all shit now with horrible, horrible printing to match their poor, overly digital, obviously 'shopped photo quality.  Still plenty of great work being done in Asia and Europe, as far as I see from international newsstands.  The Japanese are fetishistic when it comes to the quality of paper stock, plate photography, typography and layout.  The last time I picked up a UK auto magazine I could see, if not the Japanese touch at least care given to photography and the printing of said photography.

  The problem isn't the card speed as much as relying on the camera's stock internals to deliver the goods.  As it is the one thing we know for sure is that the process between the sensor and writing to the card is compromised so bypassing the intentional under-engineering may be the path of least resistance.

  Yeah, they were doing software "pixel shift" to get pseudo-HD out of it which ended up being of similar quality to the HVX, which wasn't full-HD either (I think it was the Hydra that was the version of the Andromeda tech for the HVX).  But it was 4:4:4 and, color wise, looked every bit as deep and rich as your better BMCC videos and the like.     It had to make folks like Sony really pissed off because this was happening around the same time as the first picture shot on the Genesis and that was a very bumpy ride (Superman Returns, which I was working on at the time...meh, not very impressive).  HDV was still sorta trying to make an impact and DSLRs hadn't shown their true potential yet.  For under $5K an Andromeda was a breakthru beast.   This was also the rise of the affordable (read non-P+S) 35mm cinema adapters for DV/HDV cameras.  I had a Redrock Micro M2 and that solved the aesthetic implications of tiny camcorder chips since it gave my DVX "Full Frame".  It was just big, and heavy.

  A more practical and theoretically very possible mod would be something like what the Reel Stream Andromeda did with the Panasonic DVX-100 camcorder.  They interfaced right off the chip, bypassing all compression and other nonsense writing 4:4:4 in 10bits or greater (read specs anywhere from 10bits to 14bits) via USB2.0 connection.     Worked so well, apparently, they got bought and buried so that nobody besides a few early customers could ever get the mod installed.  I never read who bought and buried them and the RS guys never said in their original announcement.  Kinda incidental now except for the fact of the sensor size on the 5D, et al, and its specific aesthetic which would make a hack like this still desirable to a select few, regardless of the eventual availability of BMD cameras or the like at similar price tags.

  Go to your local newsstand.  Buy a copy of Maximum PC.  Mind=blown.   PCs are only cheap when they're generic beasts built from lowest-common-denominator parts.  The serious gamers I know have spent almost $2K on just the graphics cards for their rigs.  They're building their systems with cases that nearly cost what you can get a whole Dell or other BestBuy brand for.  Plus, serious gamers went SSD well before camera guys.   Anyway, there are people on this board that have bought cameras nearly as expensive or more expensive than the Scarlet-X (or who have a collection of cameras that might equal the cost of an Epic).  It's cheaper than several Canon cameras (while simultaneously destroying them).  It's comparably priced if not cheaper than some Sony gear (the Scarlet "brain" is about a grand more than an FS700).  Just saying.  Someone could easily save up a decent downpayment for new car but drop that plus a new credit card on a RED and I'm sure they have.   Rednecks spend more than the cost of a Scarlet on stuff like bass boats and jet skis and then you have the weekend Harley crowd that spend Epic money on their hobbies.  I see folks that spend RED cash doing turbo upgrades for their SR20 or JDM RB26 or 2JZ motor swaps for their hobby cars and daily drivers.  Independent filmmaking, even at RED level, isn't the most expensive hobby out there.   Just saying  :D

  Are you positive the Ninja isn't doing chroma filtering upon detection of a lower bandwidth stream than it's expecting.  

There are plenty of independents using RED.  Either rental or purchase, whether that was made alone or by pooling resources with one or more fellow filmmakers.  A minimal Scarlet kit is ~$14K and change and I've seen PC gamer rigs that cost this much in both magazines and online.     "Independent filmmaker" is a term that covers a wide gamut of people and budgets.  From the 48hr folks all the way to Sophia Copolla, Kevin Smith and Steven Soderberg and from what you've got in your pockets up to millions.  This isn't a new phenomenon at all it's just that never before has so much power and control been accessible and in the hands of so many.   The indie movement peaked into the common vernacular by the early 1990s and a new wave of filmmaker who turned the term into a culture as much as it was a simple, factual, socio-economic description.  They were maybe the first to politicize their business but there were plenty of success stories and precedents set for a burgeoning phenomenon reaching back into the 1970s, the main catalyst for the eras incredible explosion of creativity being the collapse of the "Studio System".

There are techniques in chroma filtering that can help reduce the impact of what was lost in both the compression and subsampling.  The GH2 doesn't need as much filtering as Canon cameras but there are plenty of cases where footage can be enhanced prior to, or in conjunction with, the grading process.     This is where dedicated grading packages (including AfterEffects) will outperform staying within the editor for grading, regardless of their advertised bit depth and precision.  It's very easy to exacerbate the damage done in-camera at the compression step by processing both the luma and chroma of your footage simultaneously at every step.

  The folks that go there in a technical forum are really annoying.  It's not only ignorant but obviously inappropriate and odds are they're neither proficient in the verbal or visual aspects of storytelling.

It would cost a fortune and would rely on an as-of-yet-unavailable or un-invented internet service that was at least as fast as something like USB2 for upstream transfers.  100Mbits up would be slow but doable.   These types of services exist for the data footprint of your parents and folks who listen to Rush Limbaugh, not us.  Not yet.

RAW isn't a replacement for DP talent.  That was a rumor started over at personal-view...   RAW is most useful for big productions.   The more talented the DP + Colorist the more RAW's potential becomes material.  You're pretty backwards on how it fits into the picture.     RAW overcomes the limitations of all these codecs, including ProRes.  ProRes 4:4:4 is a viable alternative to RAW (though with its own limitations) but, pretty sure, all the more affordable cameras shoot, 422HQ at best (definitely better than AVCHD, way better, good enough for most low-budget projects where media cost represents a significant portion of the budget, whether that's a hard or relative cost).   NBC's Hannibal, an awesome looking Alexa show, is ProRes 4:4:4 because the Alexa requires a more costly solution to shooting RAW, apparently, than the lower end cameras from BMD, RED, etc.     I forget the project where Soderberg shot digital to CF cards and too lazy to look it up, but production just bought caseloads of them and each card, once filled, was ingested and then the card itself was archived, never to be used again.  It became the film's "o-neg" or camera negative.  Considering what HDCAM tapes cost this, as expensive a proposition as it was, was far mor economical.  High quality SD cards are quite a bit more expensive though  so this is an option for only the exceedingly well funded project (one that would beg the question, "why are we shooting on a camera that records to SD?").  It doesn't apply at all to SSD-based cameras, which brings us back on topic.

  Except that a single-layer BD-ROM can't even backup an average sized SD card much less a single dump from the SSD of one of these new RAW cameras.  Is it worth half a day of doing disc swaps to back up one SSD dump from a multi-SSD shoot?   Optical, in any form, hasn't been a viable backup solution for anyone but your mom and dad, or maybe MS Office users,  for a long time.

Oddly enough, though it doesn't seem to write it, Premiere Pro reads ProRes on the Windows platform.