Axel

Sounds like a rehearsal or practice room. I think, no matter how diminutive that room is, just one LED torch will not get you to make it look interesting. You can as well make it look like a makeshift 'studio' by blatantly putting some lights into the room, in full sight of the camera. Let blacks be blacks, let light sources flare into the lens. Work with reflectors. 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZfDbEQAfOY
(three lights, one of them a cheap fluorescent light, and a big reflector)
 
I don't say, do it this way. It's just done quite often and often works well. You can't 'paint' too much with just one LED, that's right.

I think there are more basic questions to consider when discussing light(s). What is the purpose of it all? To pump enough light into the room? This is the one obvious. But unless you are a news reporter, you might want more. 
 
You want to control the appearence, the mood. With modern equipment, it's not too hard to get sufficient light for correct exposure from existing sources. And if you don't get it from the source light, you have to decide whether you want to *add* more light or exclude the natural/existing light(s) completely and lighten everything with special lamps.
 
Old textbooks on filmmaking let the latter option look like the more sophisticated one. Since almost fifty years though, the concept of controlling (or mimicking) existing sources has become an alternative to a dogmatic view on film light.
 
Simply put: The more you want to use artificial light in the sense of a 'dodge tool' (*don't forget the relatively new possibilities to 're-light' an image through color grading) or 'fill light', bounce shadows a.s.f., the less you need to look for a big variety of specialized lamps (floods, spots with different power). 
 
The thing is, that once you start to plan the lighting with external lamps exclusively, you are condemned to follow this path consequently. The physics of light say, that greater distances (bigger sets) need high power lamps, and you end up sitting in midst of a hot film studio, where every mood and atmosphere needs to be created from scratch.
 
Old hands detest LED lights, for a variety of reasons. They may not be appropriate for every situation. For a very soft light, you can use china balls (cheap, make experiments), for the odd spot you can literally buy or borrow a disco or theater spotlight. Scale everything down to your (comparatively) fantastic low-light capabilities of your modern camera.

I bet you used all pre-production tools of the trade, storyboards, moodboards, production design planning. What else?

Very impressing.

I love making short slice-of-life films.  This camera/lens combo is about as light and small as you're going to get at this aperture and sensor size.  Easy to bring along on nights out without looking like a tool.
 
Nobody I was filming seemed to even know I was there.  Maybe that's not such a good thing...
 
https://vimeo.com/59377520
 
 

Your clients have no inkling of how persuasion works. People hesitating to undergo any of the advertised treatments need to feel the good vibrations, not fear to be led to the poison death penalty room (cause that was my first impression, and I bet I'm not too different from the rest, just look at the the beheaded skeleton between the beds: weight loss? Oh yeah!). The receipt for a good promotion is simple: Cut away the bad aspects, show only the positive results. Difficult without beautiful, happy people? Impossible.
 
But: I have done the exact same thing for a dentist. I showed him the clip, the rooms were more friendly, with a lot of modern art surrounding the instruments. I told him, I wouldn't recommend to put the video on his homepage, because it still was a torture chamber, and we needed really some relaxed faces to get this impression fixed, but he didn't give in. Next time, I promised myself, I wouldn't commit to anything of that kind.

Telling for the future of cinema. Why don't those story-wise timeless re-releases gross the big money they used to? It's because very many already own a pretty good copy to watch on a pretty good, pretty big display. There are, say, alternative ways to distribute a film than through cinema or DVD/BD-sales. Historically, the blockbuster-syndrom started with Star Wars IV, among all little stars on the movie canopy this was the Death Star. Now, if we don't re-discover the small, intelligent films, cinema will be dead, in the not so far, far future.

I had the same thing with the GH2 once with a fast non-MFT-lens, a Nikon 50mm f1.4. Every light produced a glow, and the whole image was too soft (not seen on the Sony Monitor I had attached via HDMI). My mistake: I didn't make night-testshots in advance. I did later and found, that the lens was only usable @f2.0 and further. You should have closed the aperture one stop and increase the iso instead.

Very fast lenses tend to produce softer images at wide open. The best sharpness for MFT seems to be 3.5 or 4. At f8, the DOF gets deeper, of course, but details may be lost. It depends, as you say, on the lens. Tests are needed to know for sure.

I agree. There are more 'tests' on vimeo (and more on youtube) that are the peak of what the creator is capable of than experiments for future masterpieces. By labelling the videos tests the publisher anticipates harsh comments that could hurt his feelings. I also hesitate to upload anything of my amateurish stuff for the same reason. 
 
 
What I like about them is, they are fun to watch, because they play with the tricks. They prove nothing, but they didn't claim to do. 
 
We have three cats, and they like cameras, coming close and purring. But never would I expose them to the public, because I do respect their personal rights  ;)
 
What I do quite often is to capture small, personal events, like any other amateur, but more often I choose not to upload that, with very few exceptions:
http://vimeo.com/29954680
 
I did an awful lot of wedding videos and continue to do so, but of course these are too private to publish. I often do second camera for music videos, most of which never see the light of day.

Cameras are now so cheap everyone can be a film maker but many dont realise what that really means and how small a part the actual camera plays and that talent is the key. Vimeo is awash with films that are categorised as TEST videos but really a feeler to see others reactions to what they created.
 
Some of those films can also be fascinating although not educational.
 
Say your looking for a test on a certain camera and find test after test video that is no help at all You may end up only looking at tests from people you know are going to be of value IE Guru's and thats a shame really.
 
Some sites are opposed to tests as they support a camera and dont want to be reminded of the low resolution 8 bit 4,2,0 limitations of their fav product.
 
There are some great test videos being done that have helped me a lot. I completely agree though Why would anyone share what they do if they want to use their methods professionally? 
 
Often though there may be motivations  a) setting up as a guru for financial gain b)  because they have extensive knowledge and want to share AND in cyber space too Just shows how social we really are as nothing stops us. 
 
Problem is anything qualifies as a test video and no one to put them in order of any kind.
 
I've made my own share of TEST cat videos .
 
These are some old test films circa 2003
https://vimeo.com/22477660
https://vimeo.com/22477534
https://vimeo.com/22477503

I agree. In my favorite film, Groundhog Day, Bill Murray gets the chance to 'redo' every action. Creativity founded on experience is the best. Routine mustn't be a contradiction to artistic freedom. One objection I have is that watching test shots of others doesn't help me as much as making them myself. This is, because the circumstances differ too much, and to learn something and know it by heart means having it done yourself. What I often think when viewing test shots is, 'he could have done better'. Or, 'how on earth did he do this?' Then I rise from my armchair.

Y'all know what Darias Khondji and Dean Cundey, Kovaks, Carpenter, Storaro, Toland, Conrad Hall, Harris Savides and pretty much anyone you can think of and dozens you can't, guys who shoot great looking stuff on purpose, not by accident, not because they got lucky but by design and through their own effort and expertise, either for the selfish benefit of the image itself or in service to the story, you know what they did so that they could do that stuff when it count, when they were getting paid to do what they did, when dozens if not hundreds of people were depending on them, waiting on them, when possibly millions of dollars were on the line or potentially rendered forfeit, you know what they were doing so that they could do what they did?
 
They were shooting tests.
 
Every camera.  Every lens.  Thoroughly.  They didn't waste other people's times learning what they could and couldn't do under a variety of common or unique circumstances on-the-clock.  They're smart enough to realize the occasional "happy accident" of a flare or focus pull or color combination or Golden Triangle configuration that just happend to occur at just the right time such that a most amazingly emotional chord is struck when the image is viewed by most humans is great but discovering that that last take, the one where the set/car/character/town is destroyed by fire, the giant monster is blown up, the command shuttle breaks apart the rented helicopter is finally, perfectly aligned with the setting sun to create a perfect silhouette through rippling heat refraction in some exotic locale on their last day of access or visa or the last raw nerve of some local potentate or executive producer isn't wasted because they didn't know WTF they were doing and just hoping for the best.  
 
They weren't satisfied knowing the stuff they were using was expensive, or from a well known pedigree, or supposedly crafted by Santa Claus's most talented, clever elves, or promised in some way to never fuck up, under any circumstance, with any other combination of previous, contemporary or future widgets made by Satan Claus or the Easter Bunny or Baby Jesus.  They had to know.  So they could do it.  On purpose.  On demand.  Repeatedly. 
 
They shot tests.
 
What they likely didn't do, for all sorts of reasons, is share these tests with the world, in a public venue, so that others at, below or above their stature and experience could comment on, learn from, share, ridicule or improve upon.  (this last bit was my maybe cryptic way of saying we should be lucky we're in a community where ideas and techniques are shared openly and not hoarded.  I'm not saying "stop posting tests" and non-narrative videos)
 
edit: TLDR version -- y'all stop marginalizing folks posting test videos because that's how you familiarize yourself with your gear enough to be useful to yourself and anyone else.  It's what the  name brand pros do so snarky comments about yet-another-boring-test-video are really just ignorant.

@Blanche
View some tutorials on color grading with the on-board tools of FCP X (skip the ones that suggest you can do without the scopes or use automatic functions or match colors). I disagree with every single post that says you create one preset and paste it. Why? Because your already good images can be so much improved by thorough grading. Do it as the last step, after editing is finished. It should take a minute or two for every clip.
 
NEVER 'share' your film directly 'for vimeo', because that means, that the inferior Quicktime H.264 encoder is used, and the film is simplified too much. The fade in at the beginning shows 'temporal banding'. You can avoid it completely, if you put a very subtle amount of grain on top of this clip, export as ProRes master and encode an x264 mp4 (for the vimeo upload) with the free x264 encoder from the high quality master.

Beautiful.

Just for the hell of it, filmed myself running in the Texas countryside and put it to a Johnny Cash song.
 
http://vimeo.com/56426354

My wife in tango mode... I shot this video on the last day of 2012 using my two GH2´s with Zuiko 11-22mm and Konica AR 40mm.
 
http://vimeo.com/56585126

It is winter in Minnesota, and that means snow. There is nothing quite like the experience of a walk in the snow clad Minnesota forests. The soft snow and sharp cold winter air create a new extreme of quiet that can only really be experienced first-hand. The accompanying music can only hope to capture some of the mood. Shut out the hustle and bustle this holiday season for a relaxing 11 minute walk by the frozen Sunrise River behind my home.
 
http://vimeo.com/56519741

I think there is nothing to justify. One needs at least the three classical lenses to choose from in a given situation. Wide angle ranges between 7 and 17,5 for MFT, standard between 20 and 25, 35-50 can be labelled portrait lenses, and 50 and above tele. From the good and fast wide lenses suitable for MFT, the SLR magic is still the least expensive.

Wow, jg, this is great (like the music too)!

You are talking about the latest FCP X vs. Premiere CS 6?
 
Knowing FCP X and Premiere until CS 5.5, it is quite clear that FCP X is the better editor. But in version 10.7 it still has bugs, and there are some things you just can't do. You can't, for example, change the project settings to cinemascope. Not yet at least. For 300 bucks, it is more than useful, and many find it sufficient. It's strenghts are the organisation of your footage, the speed with which you can edit and how well it responds (granted you have a fast machine and enough RAM).
 
Adobe has the integration of After Effects, Audition and the new Speedgrade on it's side. High price, and the editor is outmoded with it's track-bound timeline, which many experienced cutters prefer nonetheless.
 
 
For Adobe, you can rely on the said Speedgrade, for FCP X you would export XML for the free DaVinci Resolve Lite or buy the Magic Bullet Looks Plugin (there is a high quality color corrector integrated, but it's tools are limited, i.e, you can't keyframe grades, which is a no-go for serious colorists). In any way, buy tutorial DVDs (not books) for the application of your choice!
 
 
Not the cheapest, but the best in this price range is the Sachtler ACE.
 
 
New is the Eclipse as an ND-Fader. You heard, that you need a bigger diameter than your lenses filter mount? Or a set of NDs like 2,4,8. 

I haven't seen the Hobbit movie yet, but when I heard that Peter Jackson was planning to stretch it to two films (let alone three) I was dismayed - so I totally agree with you that it's too little material spread out too far.
 
Also The Hobbit as a book is a much lighter (some may say slighter) work than Lord of The Rings - it's a kid's book whereas LOTR does have a grander feel and a much more serious tone, which lends itself better to the epic stye of filmmaking.
 
3D I'm not keen on either, but it may be the way of the future in which case we're stuck with it.
 
Whether 48fps will catch on is an open question - from what has been said in various reviews it does seem as though in conjunction with HD digital filming it is possibly too revealing and too much like "reality TV" to work for the movies.
 
I know my clients appreciate the soft look I get with 25fps and shallow DOF - this may just be what we are all used to seeing over the last 90 years of watching films shot that way, but although 48fps may make action sequences look clearer I feel the trade-off of losing the slightly dreamlike quality of 24fps may not be worth it.
 
Perhaps the answer is for action movies to be shot in 48p and everything else in 24?

We live in a new world order driven by unthinking godless consumerism, where idiots consume massive amounts and vast industries produce shlock for them.
 
The idiot industries are incredibly powerful and our future cultural direction will mostly be defined by idiocy, mediocrity and stupidity on a grand scale.
 
If you look at social changes around the world, the big growth industries are related to serving idiots.

Here's a vid I made using FS700 with lots of low light. Post is long and hard if you wanna make it work...
 
[url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuMjew8TbnE"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuMjew8TbnE[/url]

This is a good point. The whole point of HFR and 3D is to make the story telling more immersive. If it doesn't and looks worse aesthetically, then serious questions should be asked of the industry's technological direction.
 
Like the magic trick, art isn't explicitly real, it is allegory and so the camera work should also have hidden meaning and not put everything on display in equal detail whether it is a prop or an actor. Peter Jackson is a great craftsman and story teller but I'm beginning to doubt that he's made a piece of art here.

I would assume the production value of the sets, make up and costumes is very high on this film if not among the best of the industry.
And we all now how good weta is at cgi.
So I guess if there is anything to blame on the "tv look" it has everything to do with the frame rate and nothing else.
 
Also I'm not sure it is something "we will get used to".
Because I don't think tv will lower frame rates or lose oversharp hd pictures anytime soon so anything that looks like that will look like tv to us.
 
I need to see it for myself to make judgment but just because it's new doesn't mean it is better.
Have to give credit to Peter Jackson for trying new things and trying to make the craft evolve though.

I first thought, my god, another cheap effect. But I have to admit (and I'm happy to learn) that it looks fantastic. Thank you for the examples.