Promit Roy

So a 1:1 center crop of the D500's 20.9 MP image to get a UHD frame results in a total crop factor of how much? My back of the envelope says 2.2 ish?

Had a chance to do my first filming test of the A7R II earlier tonight. We went to a glass blowing tutorial/class thing. Of course when you're standing in front of a 2500 F degree oven, things get a little warm and I was curious about how the camera would hold up. I didn't record a ton of footage but I did run the camera continuously for a 10 minute clip with no problems. The thing did get very hot in my hand - not uncomfortably so, but enough that I can imagine a prolonged day of heavy shooting would begin to stress the system quite a bit. It's not a problem for my usage, but I think others won't be as lucky.
That image, though. It's just absolutely gorgeous. I took a random guess at color settings and ran the default 'Cine1' gamma on top of a low contrast Neutral color scheme. It's not perfect and there's definitely a lot of room for experimentation and improvement in both recording and workflow. People who are really particular about their color work probably have a long road ahead of them; I'm not enough of a colorist to really be sure. There's a LOT of available combinations of settings and I really think someone will eventually dial in the camera to be magical. I might buy Andrew's settings and LUT he posted earlier, we'll see.
Setting aside the rather tricky color issue though... there is a quality to full frame that I just adore. It was possible to get there with GH4 + SB + 18-35 but it's an awkward combination, lacks IS, and it still missed something. IMO whatever you want to complain about with color science or 'digital look' from the Sony cameras, the Panasonics were always far, far worse. The GH4's output always felt like the world's greatest camcorder to me. Fantastic on all technical points, but weirdly clinical and lacking in 'film feeling' without a lot of work and judicious lens choice. I feel like the A7R2 has gotten me much closer much more quickly. 
Battery life, though, is freaking awful. These FW50 batteries were designed to fit in a NEX-3, and now they're being asked to drive a massive sensor attached to an IBIS rig attached to a massive CPU. The A7 cameras should have been built off a larger battery platform from day 1. It's embarrassing. The good news is that USB external batteries work wonderfully for powering and charging. I have an Anker sized like an iPhone 6 that slips into my pocket and provides 10x the internal battery power. USB cable fitment seems a bit loose though, so we'll see what happens. Might be best to buy FW50s by the half dozen.

Had a chance to do my first filming test of the A7R II earlier tonight. We went to a glass blowing tutorial/class thing. Of course when you're standing in front of a 2500 F degree oven, things get a little warm and I was curious about how the camera would hold up. I didn't record a ton of footage but I did run the camera continuously for a 10 minute clip with no problems. The thing did get very hot in my hand - not uncomfortably so, but enough that I can imagine a prolonged day of heavy shooting would begin to stress the system quite a bit. It's not a problem for my usage, but I think others won't be as lucky.
That image, though. It's just absolutely gorgeous. I took a random guess at color settings and ran the default 'Cine1' gamma on top of a low contrast Neutral color scheme. It's not perfect and there's definitely a lot of room for experimentation and improvement in both recording and workflow. People who are really particular about their color work probably have a long road ahead of them; I'm not enough of a colorist to really be sure. There's a LOT of available combinations of settings and I really think someone will eventually dial in the camera to be magical. I might buy Andrew's settings and LUT he posted earlier, we'll see.
Setting aside the rather tricky color issue though... there is a quality to full frame that I just adore. It was possible to get there with GH4 + SB + 18-35 but it's an awkward combination, lacks IS, and it still missed something. IMO whatever you want to complain about with color science or 'digital look' from the Sony cameras, the Panasonics were always far, far worse. The GH4's output always felt like the world's greatest camcorder to me. Fantastic on all technical points, but weirdly clinical and lacking in 'film feeling' without a lot of work and judicious lens choice. I feel like the A7R2 has gotten me much closer much more quickly. 
Battery life, though, is freaking awful. These FW50 batteries were designed to fit in a NEX-3, and now they're being asked to drive a massive sensor attached to an IBIS rig attached to a massive CPU. The A7 cameras should have been built off a larger battery platform from day 1. It's embarrassing. The good news is that USB external batteries work wonderfully for powering and charging. I have an Anker sized like an iPhone 6 that slips into my pocket and provides 10x the internal battery power. USB cable fitment seems a bit loose though, so we'll see what happens. Might be best to buy FW50s by the half dozen.

​Sensors don't have colors, but the internal image processing sure as hell does. Actually, the Bayer filter array also has physical colors associated with it and not everyone is using the same colors. Still, it'd be one thing if we were all grading 12/14 bit raw output off the camera sensor but we're not talking about that. We're talking about video recording in 8 bit 4:2:0, which means the camera's color interpretation is heavily baked in. You can't just hand wave away the intrinsic color settings of a camera because of color grading. Color grade those blue clipped highlights, why don't you?
On the flip side, often times these cameras have surprising settings that produce great colors. Andrew's done a great job of documenting these in the past, for example the 'Sunset' trick. It remains to be seen whether the color science has been changed or improved in this new camera.

If you're willing to consider a USB 3 drive, take a look at this bad boy: http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Backup-Portable-External-STDA4000100/dp/B00HXAV0X6
It's actually two drives crammed into a RAID 0, crammed into a single bus powered enclosure. 4 TB, and I'm seeing it deliver in excess of 230 MB/s (yes, megabytes) per second in real world file transfers. That's SSD level sequential (but not random) performance. Comfortably fast enough to edit on! They include a free NTFS driver (Paragon) for Mac which works extremely well. And just look at that price. Really cannot recommend these highly enough.

I work in real time 3D graphics (read: games) and unfortunately people have a habit of dissecting the hell out of screenshots. I mean Halo was excoriated over rendering at 900p instead of 1080p and then doing an upscale. Can you imagine someone complaining that a movie, even a CGI movie, was only delivering 900 vertical lines of resolution when screenshotted? That would be insane. Unfortunately it has led to emphasis of technical parameters over aesthetic quality, and so a lot of these supposedly high quality games look awful. I don't feel that the art direction in many big name games is competent, as well. 
 
More relevant to here, though, is that working in imaging that way attunes you to every single fault - and feature - in an image. I need to be able to see everything, because my job is to get it right and make sure there are no mistakes in the underlying systems which might later crop up in surprising and unwelcome ways. My wife gets annoyed when I stop a game or movie in order to take a look at the technical aspects of how it's put together  :D

Canon's made it clear that they don't consider DSLR video to be a serious thing. And for those who do consider it to be a serious thing, they can go buy or rent an EOS Cine series product. And by all accounts, they're quite happy with how this has worked out. Hoping for anything else from them is simply irrational given their statements to date.

I work in real time 3D graphics (read: games) and unfortunately people have a habit of dissecting the hell out of screenshots. I mean Halo was excoriated over rendering at 900p instead of 1080p and then doing an upscale. Can you imagine someone complaining that a movie, even a CGI movie, was only delivering 900 vertical lines of resolution when screenshotted? That would be insane. Unfortunately it has led to emphasis of technical parameters over aesthetic quality, and so a lot of these supposedly high quality games look awful. I don't feel that the art direction in many big name games is competent, as well. 
 
More relevant to here, though, is that working in imaging that way attunes you to every single fault - and feature - in an image. I need to be able to see everything, because my job is to get it right and make sure there are no mistakes in the underlying systems which might later crop up in surprising and unwelcome ways. My wife gets annoyed when I stop a game or movie in order to take a look at the technical aspects of how it's put together  :D

So as long as we're on the subject - what IS the current feeling about the GH4 vs the NX1 as hybrid cameras? (So taking both stills and video into account.) Both are obviously excellent cameras, but are there any key points to tip one way or the other?

Hm, substantially different color signatures between the two images. I'm not going to cheat by delving into any kind of technical analysis tools on the images.
 
Some observations: A is warmer, higher contrast, with significantly deeper blue hues. At the same time, A seems to be crushing colors, visible in both the blue and red hues. A is noticeably sharper than B even viewed at 1080p; zoom in to see that color fringing in B is hurting sharpness quite a bit.  Also take a look at the shadow tones - something is off in A, almost some kind of green veiling noisy thing. Zoom in and you'll discover macro blocking in the shadows.
 
My guess? B is the raw image. Better gradation in the colors is my primary motivation for saying so, but the color fringing suggests uncorrected raw CA to me that the processor is dealing with in the graded video image. I also suspect that the green tinge in the shadows is being introduced by the video grading. My first instinct was to pick A for its visibly better sharpness, but that's a mistake as we don't know what the CA correction and sharpening settings are at, and video is more likely to be sharpened than a raw conversion. More subjectively, A just feels like an Andrew Reid color grade with the slight warmth and the shadow tone contrast. B feels like an ACR conversion, with the understated color tones, well preserved gradations, clean shadow tones, and clinically perfect white balance.
 
Going to feel pretty silly if I'm wrong.

Hm, substantially different color signatures between the two images. I'm not going to cheat by delving into any kind of technical analysis tools on the images.
 
Some observations: A is warmer, higher contrast, with significantly deeper blue hues. At the same time, A seems to be crushing colors, visible in both the blue and red hues. A is noticeably sharper than B even viewed at 1080p; zoom in to see that color fringing in B is hurting sharpness quite a bit.  Also take a look at the shadow tones - something is off in A, almost some kind of green veiling noisy thing. Zoom in and you'll discover macro blocking in the shadows.
 
My guess? B is the raw image. Better gradation in the colors is my primary motivation for saying so, but the color fringing suggests uncorrected raw CA to me that the processor is dealing with in the graded video image. I also suspect that the green tinge in the shadows is being introduced by the video grading. My first instinct was to pick A for its visibly better sharpness, but that's a mistake as we don't know what the CA correction and sharpening settings are at, and video is more likely to be sharpened than a raw conversion. More subjectively, A just feels like an Andrew Reid color grade with the slight warmth and the shadow tone contrast. B feels like an ACR conversion, with the understated color tones, well preserved gradations, clean shadow tones, and clinically perfect white balance.
 
Going to feel pretty silly if I'm wrong.

Obvious choice in new lenses is the Rokinon 85mm IMO, in either photo or cine versions. Both versions are running under 300. You might be able to get something decent used for less though.