Inazuma

Very good out line. Wonder if you can test the battery life of the a7s? Just leave it recording until it turns off.

Also, does the gh4 picture degrade at 60fps? Or you mean above that?

She doesn't get darker as she passes by the pillars except at the end. She also has fill light exclusively on her while the floor and walls don't seem to catch any of that. So I'm guessing GH4 with green screen background.

Great shots! Only I think it could have benefited from a more stylised grading.

When you use a profile like that, do you need to sharpen the footage in post and what does the noise reduction really do to video, especially in daylight?

 

Yes, I bought the Panasonic/Leica 14-50mm two days ago and it should be delivered this week :) Some say that its stabilisation is much better than 12-35mm. I'll keep you updated.

I have tested the NR setting a few times over the course of owning the camera. It seems that from -5 to +5, the difference is really quite small. At the positive end, the pictures becomes a touch softer. But the noise never really lessens. I supposed you would need to record at a higher bitrate to see a real difference, but sadly you can't attach a recorder.

And no I almost never sharpen the footage. That way the footage has high resolution, and yet stays kind of filmicly soft.

Excellent. How much did you pay for it? Please tell me how well it balances with the GX7 and show us some shots wide open :)

My GX7 does not have 29 minutes recording limit and in the last two days, I used it to record an academic workshop (10am-6pm) and it worked brilliantly without any hiccups or overheating. 

 

On a side note, does any of you use iResolution, iDynamic or Curves on this camera? Not sure what's the best combination of settings, if any, as I find they degrade the image quality. I would love to hear your experiences.

I used to use iResolution, but it makes edges of trees and grass too sharp. It's basically like the Clarity slider in Lightroom.

The other stuff.. I use iDynamic on High usually. It really brings out a lot of range.

Then +2 shadows, -2 highlights. This is useful when outdoors and you want some more detail in the sky and dark areas. However it can sometimes make skin look a little too flat.

And finally, I use Neutral picture style with -2,-5,-3,-5 (Contrast, Sharpness, Saturation, NR).

And then graded with a Fuji 400 LUT and some tweaking with Colorista:

By the way, did you end up getting the Panasonic 14-50mm?

If you're "run and gunning" you won't really be swapping lenses anyway. So just buy one 10-stop ND filter and maybe add a vari ND.

I don't know how bad the rolling shutter is compared to the 5D, but I've seen films with a lot of action, such as The Raid, where you can see things bending whenever the camera moved fast. However, the rolling shutter didn't really harm the fast paced movements at all.

If I am mixing strictly for stereo and have two characters on screen. One that's about 5 feet away and to the left. The other about 15 feet away and to the right. Then do I record their voices individually with a mono shotgun mic and then mix it so that the person in the back is a bit quieter and balanced to the right than the guy at the front?

Or is there some scientific thing whereby simply lowering their volume won't make it sound like they're further away? And I'd have to do some other magic to get it correct.

Quirky, I already have a rubber band suspender and two deadcats for the H1 (one to cover the mic and another to cover the body). However it becomes impractical because the suspension gets in the way of the buttons, which don't have a very tactile feel anyway. I think I'm going to sell it and buy a shotgun mic plus a cheapish but sturdy recorder.

I use a Hama variable ND which you can pick up for about £25. They are indespensible because otherwise you'll have to be shooting at f16+ outdoors. In fact sometimes I also place an ND4 filter behind the variable ND.

On the other hand, some vintage lenses give quite a nice look despite using narrow apertures.

The good thing about this camera is that it is flexible. You can mount native mft lenses on it or you can use a speed booster with other lenses to get a super 35 look. And if you want it to look softer there are ways to do it with filters or post production. Personally, I don't understand what all the fuss is. No one looks at an IMAX or RED film and goes "woah this is so sharp it looks like a video"

I'm currently writing a short series that I'll also be directing in the near future. Unfortunately I have very little knowledge of audio. I have got a Zoom H1, but I find its susceptibility to noise from handling or even wind on the body of the unit, not even the microphone, makes it off-putting to use.

Ok so first, what's the best shotgun mic I can get for around £100? Is it the Rode Videomic Pro?

How do you manage sound space? For example, if you have two characters at totally different positions in the frame and you have mic'd them individually, how do you get this across in the sound stage? Can it be done with Adobe software?

When I first watched the video, I was about 8 feet away from the monitor so didn't notice the shakiness much. All I felt was that it was a brilliantly executed video.

Now that I'm looking at it more closely, I can see there's something strange going on. Some of it is warping as if they've used a post stabilizer or an ineffectual lens IS. I can see why you guys as video enthusiasts feel it's off-putting, but I honestly don't think it matters that much. It does in a way add to the spirit of "Hey we're just a couple guys trying to execute a great idea".

At the end of watching the video, I felt that really the camera choice was one of the least of their worries. However I can see why they would have chose it:

- MFT sensor; deeper depth of field.

- Smaller than most pro video cameras, so easy to fit on a rig.

I guess they could have used a BMPCC to achieve the same thing, but hey they didn't. What are you gonna do..

I appreciate your help (and defense) very much!

 

It would appear that the result is the same regardless of the order of multiplication (listen... I'm an artist who's not good at math - sorry!) Lens*Crop*SB is the same as Lens*SB*Crop

 

Either way, it looks like that makes total sense to me now. I know the formula and I can apply that for any future lenses I may check out.

 

But the last mystery remains - how to do this with an ASP-C lens who's FoV would be different on a MFT lens as opposed to a full frame equivalent. But I THINK I know how to figure this out and will report back.

My bad :) When I did your formula the first time, I got a completely different result.

APS-C lenses (like Canon EF-S or Nikon DX) still use the standard focal length numbers. The only difference is that those lenses are not big enough to fill a full frame camera's sensor, hence the vignette/circle. This is also why you can use APS-C lenses on speed booster on MFT but you cant do the same on APS-C cameras like the Sony NEX.

Probably a faulty lens. Unless you have turned the OIS switch off?

I used to have the 12-35mm, which has a similar stabilization technology and that worked well to remove jitters.

The OP is asking a simple question. Why are you guys bringing all this complicated semantics into it?

To answer your question, your calculation is wrong.

It should be Lens focal length * Speedbooster * Crop factor.

So a 35mm lens * 0.71 speedbooster * 2x crop factor = 50mm (or 49.7mm to be exact). This basically means that a lens with a speedbooster attached to a Micro Four Thirds camera will become the same focal length as if the lens was just mounted on an APS-C camera.

Sorry to bring back a dead topic but Andrew, how did you get the slow motion shot at the end? Were you still using the same settings (24fps @ 4k, 1/50th shutter) but Twixtored to 25% speed?

I think it just adds some additional flocking. 

 

Waiting on a report on this one...$87.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/291135342480

What is this "Built-in IS function" ?

These sound great.  I'm guessing $19.99 will be the fee for non-commercial use? What if your personal project ends up making you money? Like if you got a prize through a festival or competition.

Blackmagic is first I think? The tonal range just looks more organic to me.

When you DirectLink form Premiere Pro to Speedgrade and then bring it back, there is no extra effect added to the layer that represents the Speedgrade edits. So does that mean that if I add a denoise effect on the same layer, then the denoise will be happening after the LUT application from Speedgrade?

Looks like the cameras are handling greens a little differently. Do you use Adobe software? I recently started using Speedgrade and by applying a "Secondary" look layer, you can specify the exact range of colour you want to edit and then change all sorts of values, like hue, saturation, tone, etc.

Some more info on ImpulZ LUT-s

http://blog.sherifmokbel.com/?p=220

 

I've just seen some of your other work and am HIGHLY impressed! You have a terrific sense of colour, framing and all that jazz. Can you tell me what lenses you use? Especially for things like

You got pictures?

Link takes me to login page

That's very kind of you. I haven't had a look yet, but I hope someone puts them to good use.

Went home for Father's day yesterday and took some footage whilst we were out. I didn't really mean to make this into a piece, but I started doing colour grading tests with the footage and ended up obsessing until it became this. I'm currently writing/directing a series, so this was good editing practice.

Feedback welcome!