Axel

14 hours ago, Trek of Joy said:

FYI, the late 2015 27" was updated to 10-bit, in case you didn't already know.

Can you link to your source? I know that 10-bit was supported since El Capitan (or Yosemite? - I can't remember), but my own iMac (= yours) was advertised as showing "over 16,7 million colors", I think it was 20 something millions, thereby exceeding 8-bit and allowing Colorsync to represent 8-bit colors with accuracy and (through OSX 10-bit computing) dither gradients.

Just keep in mind that - for many reasons - the $5000 "entry" model is already a complete overkill for editing and normal post, even if you want to edit H.265 4k natively (HEVC-Quicksync, HighSierra). None of the specs (8-core, 32GB RAM, 8GB VRAM) can be pushed to their limits. The "over a billion colors" of the display mean true 10-bit. With 500 nits, it probably is a pleasure to view video on and worth half of the price at least.

Currently available iMacs are no workstations. They are insanely fast if you don't render many clips or if you only export short features. In many instances they are ahead of the trashcan MPs in benchmark comparisons then. But they turn hot when given bigger or more render tasks. This may or may not change with the new fan technology, but all in all, we'll see: no workstations.

Who needs the maxed-out iMac Pro ($10.000 or even more?)?

Maybe for this (quote): "Particle simulation? Elementary. Billowing smoke. Torrential rain. A wheat field in the wind. With up to 18 cores and Hyper-Threading, iMac Pro lets you build and render particle systems of all kinds — static or animated, 2D or 3D — with ease."

On 26.5.2017 at 0:54 PM, Shirozina said:

Smooth native playback ( or lack thereof) is the issue otherwise why would people need to use proxies / optimised media / transcode?

Because smooth playback will stay smooth with multiple effects, multicam and the like. Your machine has no handicap? 18 strokes for 18 holes? Very impressing. It's just not what I see and hear (not least in this forum).

6 hours ago, Orangenz said:

I don't think that's the case in this situation. As Justin discovered it looks like the luminance values are just being tagged incorrectly by the NLEs reading the wrapper. The two files are indistinguishable in quality that is for sure. 

I find this an academic distinction. If it comes to video (latin for "I see") luminance values change the perception of the image and influence the quality. Remember 5D2RGB? A Quicktime-based transcoder from Canon H.264 mov to ProRes. Full range was right for EOS clips, but if you chose it for Lumix AVCHD (16-235), you actually lost luminance values - and you couldn't recover them in post. I am not stating that this is the case here, but do you know for sure?

12 hours ago, Bioskop.Inc said:

I read somewhere, that Kristen Stewart said she was amazed at how much money she was given to make a short film - she's a multi-millionaire FFS, why didn't she use her own money rather than taking the resources out of the hands of others that really need it?

There are of course billions who have to penny-pinch to make their living. Everyone on EOSHD already lives in relative luxury, because one could as well get a basic equipment for free. I gave away an old HDV camera and an old computer to a young enthusiast, and I actually envied him, because he used both so creatively. I could as well have sold the items on Ebay (and buy a third set of headphones in return), but at that time it seemed the right thing to do. People actually are like that. They want to do the right thing. Poor people, you know how generous and unselfish many of them are. Rich people too. They usually have a very good instinct to sense if someone just tries to steal their money or help them spend it to passionately create something. 

Film always had these two aspects. It was costly, and production companies wanted it to be lucrative. On a big scale, cinema always was expensive in the making and cheap and silly in the outcome. Producers were cynics.

Short films, on the other hand, are difficult to sell but easier to finance. A lot of people will do the right thing and invest their precious time in them, with no realistic prospect of getting payed, they'll allow you to use their home as set, equipment rentals will make special prices and offer free assistance, local businesses will make reasonable contributions for being mentioned as sponsors and, if shown all the effort put into it, wealthy art lovers (so not DJT) will be happy to help with money. They know it'll be gone for good, literally.

9 hours ago, TwoScoops said:

Nepotism is pretty much the way of the world.

And corruption too. See The Godfather. The Corleones are more honest, faithful and often even more unselfish than the other characters. They want to do the right thing. It's a film about power, corruption and violence. And love and hate and passion. Not about money. Strange as this may sound, money is overrated.

Worked for a german short film one day, directed by the then-unexperienced daughter of a famous TV producer. A friend of mine was the production designer/set dresser/prop maker (the first being her profession), and I helped her. Everbody got paid after profits, which means nobody. Regular medium sized crew, credits ran long, including a long list of sponsors (???). The regular TV cameraman had a RED, he also worked three 12-14 hour days without payment. Well-known TV and stage actors (in part "borrowed" from the father's TV shows). Everything looked promising, but at the premiere (free buffet with champagne for the crew) I found the result rather mediocre. Couldn't tell a moral from this.

My friend also worked for Cronenbergs A Dangerous Method, and out of curiosity I volunteered to help demount the studio sets. I liked this film very much, but the actual sets were really amazing, I expected the visuals to turn out much more spectacular than they eventually were. To be more precise, I expected a much higher production value. Again, I don't know what to think of that. Both experiences were inspiring.

I've seen it at my local equipment rental. I lifted it, and it's a monster. I still think nothing get's close to the UM 4,6k as far as image quality in UHD is concerned. Had the money saved already. Opted against it because it was too heavy for me. See the big Ursa, step behind it's shadow and actually carry it, you'll understand then.

45 minutes ago, Shirozina said:

Until CPU's become fast enough to decode highly compressed camera media on the fly what choice is there but to work from Proxies / optimised media substitutes in the timeline? At least you are retaining the original camera files for future use when hardware can handle them. I'm just advising against transcoding as some users may be tempted to throw away the original camera files in the mistaken belief that a transcode is preserving perfectly whatever was contained (however imperfectly) in the original camera files.

That's right. "Future use" can't be far in the future or either Panasonic or the NLE companies will lose customers. Ridiculous, however, is the remark about today's weak CPUs. H.264 UHD long-gop-10-bit 422 is around for quite a while, for example in FS7's XAVC. It wasn't supported directly in FCP X for a few months, you had to use a Sony plugin (which by the way made sure the clips were interpreted correctly). But apart from that, smooth native playback never was an issue, notoriously on much weaker systems than Adobe needed, be it Windows or OSX. More so, since you could unscrupulously transcode to ProRes, with no visual loss whatsoever.

3 hours ago, Shirozina said:

I'd be wary of trancoding any original camera media unless you have huge data storage as the edit friendly codecs are like DNx / ProRes use lossy compression and the only way to be sure you are not throwing away data that may become apparent when you start pushing your grade is to use a lossless uncompressed codec which will create huge amounts of data.

The major data loss lies in the extremely lossy acquisition codec. It's a famous Adobe myth that any loss "becomes apparent" with the aforementioned intermediates as valid substitutes for the heavily compressed originals. Unless, of course, the originals have stored more data - or, better: different data levels. Wrapping also can be very lossy, since proprietary codec implementation (such as Sony's XAVC with the wide color gamut, we don't know yet about GH5 10-bit) may include metadata that get lost in translation. This is a known, common issue with wrapping. The same problem applies to transcoding. The software used to decode the video has to be able to recognize it natively. Even if you use Uncompressed, wrong or missing decoding descriptions will degrade quality. Therefore all the current workarounds for PP are crooks. If some NLEs accept the clips already (FCP X, Edius, Resolve Studio), well, that doesn't automatically mean they do better. I suspect they just assume they are standard MP4 for the sake of playback. AVFoundation - the MacOS framework - will decode anything that it recognizes as video. Quicktime on the other hand rejects the GH5 10-bit-clips (but not the 8-bit ones) as unknown. Sounds bitchy and lame, but is probably correct. 

Panasonic should release an importer-tool. Or help the NLE companies to implement the decoder.

Found the source, an editorial article on the GH5 on the german slashCAM forum. Excuse the weird language, it's just the Google translator:

Quote

 

First we have the GH5 generated V-Log L values for the first time in a editing program. After Premiere Pro and Resolve under Windows still here still patzen or the files can not even read correctly, EDIUS showed in the version 8.32 as it should be. 

The program reads the 10 bits  4: 2: 2  Files of the GH5 with the firmware 1.0 exactly as it was already defined at GH4 times for the introduction of V-Log L. Thanks to 10 bits  Color-Picker in Edius you can clearly see the white level at 720 and the black level at about 175 (+/- the occurring noise). 

Where these points should lie exactly can be seen so far only from a graphic from Panasonic to V-Log L, which we copied with the normal V-Log curve. There you can also see, among other things, that V-Log L and V-Log apart from the "light-bend" also in other places somewhat diverge: 
 

According to this graph, the values for V-Log L in Edius are really where they should be. But so far there is only one Panasonic recommended LUT for equalization, namely the "normal" V-Log LUT for the Varicam with a Super35mm sensor, which transmits the signal into the REC709 color space. After using this LUT in EDIUS, the black value is about 64 and the white value is 1020. So if everything is green, the LUT mapples the entire signal as desired almost completely over the entire project color space (in Rec709). 

Nevertheless, we see a fundamental problem at this point: because the compatibility of the larger Varicam S35 sensors with more dynamics, the recording of the entire sensor level on the GH5 fills the possible 10 bits Not full. The camera uses only the values from 175 to 720 in the 10-bit recording as described. This would correspond to 545 possible values, which are also almost 9 bits  (Which would correspond to 512 values). 

9 bits  Are already significantly more than 8 bits  , But with V-Log L you choose a compromise, which is due to compatibility with Varicam. V-Log L material should be easily with V-Log on the Timeline  And for this "compatibility to the big sister" the GH5 sacrifices almost half the possible color resolution. If, on the other hand, you are using alternative (and free) profiles like Cinelike D, you can really fill the entire recording bandwidth from 0 to 1023. If there was a standardized LUT, this would be the better choice on the GH5 vs. V-Log. 

But there are already better alternatives. For Panasonic, the GH5 has given another profile, which is called "Like709". And with this profile, a knee function can be used for the first time in the camera. So you have to deal with a normal 709 profile, where you can manually determine from which point the lights should be compressed. This profile can be similar to Rec709, ie you can work quite regularly in the Rec 709 color space and has "only" the lights compressed. But since in 10 bits  As a rule, sufficient values are still available for the compressed sensor data in the lights. And this should be for many users actually more interesting than V-Log L.

 

1 hour ago, OliKMIA said:

Yeah, exactly, I have the felling that this 10 bits thing just a new marketing thing (maybe I'm wrong, some people here notice a difference in V-Log).

See this video (from 1'15").

You won't notice it at first glance, but the more clips you compare, the more your eyes will be able to identify the differences. I think if the camera can do 10-bit, it should be a no-brainer to use that. I decided for the A6500, but in order to have no banding, color artifacts and the like and still a very good DR, I have to forgo extreme grading and slog 3 and expose very well.

I've read somewhere that Like_rec_709, as is, had the same DR as V-Log (which wasn't written for the GH5 but for Varicam anyway, therfore "V") after the normalisation Lut. Free, easier to handle. Would use it in 10-bit too if it were my camera ...

7 hours ago, OliKMIA said:

Of course I'm aware of the incoming 400mbps upgrade but this bitrate will use a less efficient compression mode. In other word the bitrate will be higher but the compression will be less efficient, so back to square one (even though it will surely help for editing, All-I being less intensive for the computer)

All-I will be almost indistinguishable from long-gop. It will not spontaneously be perceived as "better". As with many things regarding improvements in video quality it's actually the other way around. On the long run, with hundreds of clips to compare between, you will finally consider the lower bitrate as "worse". You will start to notice evidence of temporal compression artifacts, usually negligible. The higher bitrates of the GH2 hacks didn't show more detail, as was often stated. When there was a weak signal in dark image areas, the highly efficient 24Mbit factory codec compressed noise out of the video. The 50-70-170 (or so) hack-bitrates dithered the shadows with random noise. This looked more natural. Many want a less efficient compression for the slightest chance that the image looks better.

You might want to check the HDMI-settings of your A6500. Here is proof that it works:

Also proof, that the dirt cheap SELP18105 indeed has some corner softness in wide, but all in all is everything but an inferior lens, considering price and usability!

18 hours ago, Pedro said:

Have you checked the new SmallHD Focus? Looks promising!
I 

Yes, I'll wait for reviews how well it performs in sunlight. Right now, people claim to see everything, but i.e. in Max Y.'s video the screen appears to be very dim. I just don't want to gather useless equipment anymore ...

You'll find the custom workspaces in >user >library >Application Support >FinalCutPro >Workspaces. You can duplicate them, put them to your desktop and rename them "Factory 2 - Organize.moduleLayout" and "Factory 3 - Color & Effects.moduleLayout". Then you right-click the FinalCutPro-icon in the applications folder >show package content >contents > Ressources >Workspaces and replace the two Layouts with your own ones (asks for permission). Thereby you can further evoke your workspaces with cmd+0 (standard, usually fits best with factory), ctrl+shift+1 (Organize) and ctrl+shift+2 (Colors & Effects) and quickly jump between them (since there is yet no way to assign a shortcut for changing between custom workspaces, request sent to Apple). Settings survived the last FCP X update.

Both will have no problem editing HD video with optimized media, no matter the source codec. For UHD, I would go for a 5k iMac. Why? You might want to monitor the video full size once in a while, without having to shift cmd f. If you connect an external 4k monitor, the GPU will have to struggle to feed both devices. With 5k, you can customize the workspaces for Organize (100% video, space left for two to three columns of browser thumbnails and a slim inspector, no timeline), Standard (=Editing, all windows, with scaled-down viewer) and Color & Effects (100% video, no browser, three small up/down-scrollable "tracks" of the timeline, slim inspector and a "two-up" of scopes). 

I guess my body understands that, it's not far from dancing to house mixes. All the pop songs of our current charts come across as pseudo and neurotic in comparison.

Good music videos are very rare, imo. I can't imagine why any contemporary white pop band or singer consider themselves superior to this funny brazil guy. We can't relate to that, right, but what does that mean? I'm working full time as a nurse for the elderly (people with dementia mostly), and the music they like to listen to makes your gums move back and your teeth fall out. Again, what does that mean? Are they wrong and I am right?

In a way rappers are more authentic than any white pop, for that matter. Why? They openly pose, and in their rap battles they try to find false notes in the other's performances. Very funny. 'I have a dream!' - 'What dream?' - 'That I have a dream!'

Low quality standards for sure. Compare this to music videos you deem perfect. Wouldn't you agree that the differences are gradual? Better music? Definitely. In the end, it's mostly a matter of more refined taste - whatever that is supposed to be - and successful in not being too unashamedly embarrassing. Obviously placing a plastic Coke bottle on the table is a NoGo (label ripped off? What happened to it?). Are better music videos actually better? Everybody is just posing, and once you see through this, you can't see too many differences.

On 9.5.2017 at 3:04 AM, Trek of Joy said:

AF is a tool, choose to use it or not, but reading the condescending "pros never use AF" stuff gets old. I never understand the elitist attitude some have when people do things in a different way than what's been traditionally done.

I agree. You know, I am an amateur. It's my privilege to use anything I want the way I want o use it. I can try to re-invent everything, like he poineers of film. And I can also use anything that makes certain things easier. The word privilege reminded me of this unboxing video and how happy I can be not having to be pro:

On the other hand, I am guilty of being skeptic of new technology too (but AF is hardly a new technology. If I remember correctly, I hardly used MF on my old VX2000, an SD-camcorder, and for weddings also). I could dig out old threads in which I express my contempt of the 4k hype. Like, Avatar had been shot at 1920p, why does everybody now consider simple HD to be inferior?

But that's a good point. UHD makes only sense with perfectly accurate focus. Putting a wide lens on a gimbal with hyperfocal distance just doesn't cut it. Even more so since I personally don't like wide angle shots (exceptions prove the rule).

And: it's not true that AF takes away your creative choices. To make it work the way you intended, you have to program it first. It can be used as an electric focus puller. 

That'd be great, thanks.

If you own a Sony A6... you know how bad the display is and probably heard of the upcoming smallHD Focus:

Can anyone recommend a dummy battery with a long enough cable? To me it's still not very clear which connection is needed. As far as I can tell, they are no detailed technical specs published yet. Any ideas?

The 18105 is a fantastic lens for all it's features, perfect for AF (almost no breathing), smooth zooms (seems to be parfocal or almost), and despite the focal ranges rather lightweight. If it's your only lens, you are probably very happy with it. If you buy a second lens you might notice that it's not very sharp. That's a pity. It is cheap, but had there been a version for, say, $1000, with better optical quality, it would be perfect.

9 minutes ago, joema said:

Starting with 10.3.x, there is a new feature to remove all effects from all clips. So you can duplicate the project, then remove all effects from the duplicate then add them back selectively: 

https://support.apple.com/kb/PH12615?locale=en_US

Very smart indeed.