Oliver Daniel

The Trump looks great! I would love to test this on day on some old super 8 stock I still have in the fridge. Is the Trump 38 on MIR 38 basis? The Helios is very long for S8.

I would shoot spherical and apply all that flares in AE. You can achive this look much easier with videocopilot stuff or similar... And if it has to be anamorphic - maybe the adapter from SLR magic is the one to go with as it produces blue flares and looks modern/"artificial" or clinic and is just easy to use I think.

Unfortunately I think you might do well to look at high quality flare overlays rather than risk shooting anamorphic last minute.  Unless you can budget for a nice and clean 35mm lomo squarefront and the required rigging.  There are not really any offerings apart from the SLR magic that flare similarly.  
 
On the flip side, and i don;t like plugging dso here personally, but I would actually suggest a trump58 and trump38 in combination with a speed booster.  a few nifty oval apertures, with the intention of overlaying the horizontal flares in post.
password= trump
 
Being in the UK, I could rent you a TRUMP body and attachments for a few days...

There are various solutions:
- If you want to shoot anamorphic & get those blue flares on a budget, then pick up a cheap Singer 16D (think they are also branded as Sankor). It is dual focus, but you can work around that quite easily. If you couple it with a very flare driven taking lens, then you'll get the whole bundle of anamorphic flares, taking lens flares etc... It also has a very large rear element, so you can use with more lenses. Cost is about £150-ish (think there's one on ebay from UK ATM).
If not you could rent/buy a Blue Streak filter (they come in different streak sizes) & once put on a flare driven spherical lens, you'll get everything.
Or you just use a Flare driven taking lens & add the streaks in post.
Check this vid out at about the 0.50 for the blue flares from the Singer 16D (not mine, just found it).
 

I don't think it's very good. I'd never shoot at ISO 3200-6400 like the review states. 

To be fair on the client, the inclusion of such heavy flares does fit the brief. The brief is an incrediblly high octane performance with a sci-fi neon feel - using distortion, flashing lights, flares, defocus techniques, glitches, lens whacking (we helped them out with the idea of course). We referenced the flare techniques are now they are obsessed! 
I could do it in post but where's the fun in that? I'm a firm believer that if you can do it in-camera/practical - then you should! (Look away George Lucas!) 
 

Having played with both cameras side by side with identical settings, the RX10 II certainly seems to have a more pleasing look out the box. It feels more natural and accurate - whereas with the A7S it's not as prominent. I feel this may have something to do with the ISO, as the A7S needs 3200. You get much more pleasing colour when you add light, rather than artificially boosting the sensitivity. (this is completely non-scientific, just experience). 
Only buy the A7S if you need full frame and better low light, but don't live under the illusion that your overall image quality will be better just because you can boost the ISO. Be prepared for a lot of noise and cocktails of weirdness when used this way. A lot of the Vimeo-lots "replace lights with the A7S". Not a good idea for serious usage. The A7S for regular use under a different picture profile can look spectacular though. Slog2 + low light is best avoided. 
I would personally wait for the A7S II unless you get a ridiculous offer. Very good camera. Keep enjoying the RX!

Thanks for the review. 
As an owner of the camera, I can definitely relate to some of your points made. 
I would highly recommend anyone shooting on the camera to not use the factory settings for Slog2. It looks like Homer Simpson put too much butter on his bacon and threw it all up, and you have a toothbrush to clean it up. By playing with the Slog2 settings, I've got very pleasing skintones and colour - better than the A7S. 
It's certainly no replacement for an FS7 either. The difference between Slog3/Slog2 10bit/8bit combination is very obvious when you start playing with footage and matching it up in the grade. If you need 100fps and have the budget to rent the FS7, then you should  
The camera is great quality though. I bullishly took it out for a night shoot to do some narrative shots for a music video. We had battery powered lights, so low light wasn't too much of a concern as most of the shots were mid/close-ups. Unfortunately, it was too time consuming on the tight schedule and we called out for an A7S and whipped out the Sigma ART lenses - using two LEDs to shape the light around the faces. (The A7S record button - absolute fail!). 
The RX10 footage was superior - because it was lit properly. The A7S did the job but the shots are very noisy, and I certainly would not shoot this way on a regular basis just because I can - unless I want cocktail zombie vomit images! Point is - the RX10 II shows it is a great cinematic tool with all factors considered. Certainly the great low light of the A7S has very serious trade-offs. 
The BEST thing about the camera is the ability to run around with just the camera, grab your shots and put more time/focus on the subject. It's a liberating low budget tool that's perfectly capable of creating fantastic images with a very small footprint. 
Just the one thing I'm struggling with is sharpness. I have a feeling the peaking is a bit inaccurate and I think Sony should have a look at this for a firmware update. 

To be fair on the client, the inclusion of such heavy flares does fit the brief. The brief is an incrediblly high octane performance with a sci-fi neon feel - using distortion, flashing lights, flares, defocus techniques, glitches, lens whacking (we helped them out with the idea of course). We referenced the flare techniques are now they are obsessed! 
I could do it in post but where's the fun in that? I'm a firm believer that if you can do it in-camera/practical - then you should! (Look away George Lucas!) 
 

There is no denying that this looks like an impressive camera, but I'm going nowhere near the pre-order button until I've actually tried it on a professional shoot. I do that with all new cameras, throw them into the deep end straight away and start shooting a paid project.  The 4k, 5-axis, Slog2 etc means nothing until it's been put through it's paces. 

We've spoke about it before on this forum (lenses with character) - but I'd particularly like to collate some thoughts/findings on lenses that have a weird aesthetic feature, and post visual references here.
There are also times when I see a particular video that repeatedly creates an in-camera aesthetic through the lens. I'd like to make this topic an area for sharing such images and finding out which "weird" lens can perform such an aesthetic.
So we are looking at: 
Any lens with some kind of weird feature/aesthetic/artefact.  Features: bokeh, lens flares, color, tints, haze, distortion.. anything bizarre/odd/weird/strange.  Recommending lenses/sharing images/finding out what "weirdness" features on what lens.  I'm shooting a music video in 2 weeks, and the clients wants this particular aesthetic in their video, all over the place. I've attached an image. 
Anyone with some weird less love?  
 
 
 

Cheers! Making more sense now. 
I'm going to spin a few projects through the drives and see how it performs. Hopefully it will be ok and i can get back to focusing on the things I do best
I'm just this minute saving 163GB of video footage onto the drive... the waiting time is just 4 minutes! 

One thing to keep in mind: if/when these proprietary hardware solutions fail - you won't be able to get to the data on them until you get an identical unit delivered back that can detect the disks.
Hence it's smart to backup to other thunderbolt / USB3 disks, preferably also when you're in the middle of working on a project.
If you keep that in mind, it doesn't matter much what mode you set the device to, as long as the controller in this hardware device is up to the processing.
Personally I wouldn't go for RAID-0 with four disks. If one single hard disk fails (with 4 disks, the chances for this happening is four times higher than with a single hard disk) - the whole array fails and won't work until you've plugged in another disk and rebuilt the array. With large disks this takes quite a while, and also note that any data that existed on it needs to be copied back if it was running RAID-0 - since all the data is lost in case of one disk failure. So it can cost you time...
If you run the array in RAID-10 or RAID-5 mode, you can lose one physical disk and keep on working (actually in RAID-10 mode you can lose two disks and keep on working if you're lucky and lose the right disks). Later you can insert a new disk and put the array rebuilding in a few days when you have the time to wait for the rebuild.
I've been building file servers for myself for 15 years, so quite a few things that seem obvious to me might not be obvious for others. But feel free to hit me up with questions if something seems unclear.

I might not be too professional about this, but I came to the conclusion that complex RAID setups are nothing for me and as long as you're no data host or anything, I don't believe it has to be for you, either.
Consider this: the really high transfer rates you need only for editing, so I go like this: I use a RAID 0 of two inexpensive 7.200 RPM HDs for editing, temporary storage, two SSDs (one for OS, one for caching), so you can always read from one, cache on another and write to a third array/disk. If you need more speed, just use an SSD RAID 0 or whatever. In terms of storage and backup I use inexpensive USB 3 solutions like these:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tool-free-Inateck-Including-External-Comaptible/dp/B00GIDNLI6/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&qid=1440515061&sr=8-10&keywords=inateck+usb+3
Windows 10 works perfectly with USB 3 solutions (previous Windows versions did have issues), dunno about Mac, though. I just dump the data onto inexpensive 7.200 HDs (write speed around 120 to 140 MB/s), handwrite something on the label and put them into a closet. If the data is super precious, just get two disks. I do have a Synology 8-bay NAS, but I hate using it. And if something goes wrong, rebuild times are tedious, the damn thing has to run all the time and it's not as fast as your main workstation. So nowadays I'm all about JBOD (just a bunch of disks) as long as you have good control over your environment and shit. Works as long as you're no corporate bigwig. Inexpensive, uncomplicated and imho reliable.
Oh, if anyone in Europe wants to buy the Synology DS1813+, give me a shout.

Here's a very simple explanation, I hope!  A drive head can only be in read or write mode.  Drives slow down when they switch between read and write mode.  The more the drive goes between read/write, checking what it reads, the better.  Also, the hard drive head writes in chunks and can only write so much before it must stop, go into read (catch its breach so to speak), then write another chunk.  In RAID 0, the drives are configured so while one drive is writing a chunk, the other drive is preparing to write another chunk on it.  This means that the first drive will get part of the data, the second drive the second part, and so on, switching back and forth.  Obviously, if anything happens to either drive ALL the data is lost because each drive has a part of the data.
RAID 0 is all about speed!
HOWEVER, For RAID 0 to be maximized, it needs an internal card.  Going through Thunderbolt will probably remove a lot of internal memory bus benefits, so I would skip RAID 0 in Thunderbold.  I'd go RAID 5 if you want redundancy, though I'd KISS (keep it simple and stupid), and just create backups every day.  
In short, be wary of advertising from drive makers.  If you don't see a difference, go back to KISS.
Every time I study this stuff myself, I end up in tears too!  So you are not alone. 

I think most pros buy another duplicate raid 5 and back up the first array to that one. When it gets too full offload to WD Red drives stored in different physical locations. Or if you can afford the LTO Tape type stuff go for that. 

If you're looking for both speed and redundancy, RAID-10 or RAID 0+1 will be better.
The RAID levels using checksum data (RAID-5, RAID-6 and such) will always be slower.
But, with a fast enough processor for the raid storage you can get decent speeds out of RAID-5 and RAID-6 levels too. I'm not sure what kind of CPU that device has.
 
Here's a test you can do if you have an internal SSD:
Just create a large file that you put on SSD, preferrably a few TB's of size. In terminal you can do the following command:
time cp /path/to/testfile /path/to/destination
This will test the write speed of your volume (as long as the internal SSD is fast enough). time is a command that will give you the exact time it takes to execute a command. cp is the unix command for copying files.
Do this test both for RAID-10 and RAID-5 on your device. For reading from the volume you just switch the source & destination paths and write to your internal SSD instead.
 
A note here: If you don't have a fast enough SSD, you'll be benchmarking the read/write speed of the SSD instead of the thunderbolt volume. Then you'll have to find some software/script that can create semi-random data fast enough in realtime for benchmarking reads & writes.
 
Anyway, how fast your volume will be with RAID-5 is very cpu dependent. I'm myself using a NAS I built myself which uses ZFS raidz2 (functions similar to RAID-6). The network connection is my limitation and I've reached write speeds of 400-500 MB/s when benchmarking on the machine itself with no network involved. Read speeds are even better. But that machine has quad-core Xeon cpu doing the checksum calculations.
 
In the end what matters for you when you do your copy tests:
- What sequential read & write speed is fast enough?
- Is the most speed or the most available disk space more important?
If you have the time to test with real data (test with the highest bitrate material you will be using), try that on RAID-5 first. If that is too slow - you will get a bit more speed out of RAID-10 and can rebuild the array with that.

I used it the other day to get some pick up shots for a music video. Shot in Slog.... It's the same old story you will hear over and over. Very yellow, kind of ill-looking Homer Simpson skintones, lots of tweaking required but achievable. 
HOWEVER - mess with the Slog profile (lots of resources online) and Slog becomes something quite beautiful. Still, grading after is key. Filmconvert, Impulz and the like are your friend. 
Everything is cool with this little guy. Battery life isn't the best, peaking could be better - but hey - it's a great tool in the bag. Highly recommended. 

Well that took a bloody long time! But I've just this minute completed my new reel and site. It's not "announced" until Monday.... social media campaigns etc blah blah. But it's live! Check them here: 
View my new showreel and website!
Some info
Each and every image -  I shot, lit, edited, graded. A little directing. Very involved in creative ideas.  Core crew was mostly 4-5 regular people in these productions (Director, DOP, Production Manager, Spark, Make Up Artist).  For the geeks - cameras used are Sony F55, FS7, FS700, RED Epic, GH3, BM Pocket.  All images are music videos, but going for commercial/corporate work aggressively into the next year. (and still many music videos).  The aim is to have 100% new material for Showreel 2016. Max creativity required.  Anyway, if you like it or don't like it, whatever. Just thought I'd share.
 

Well that took a bloody long time! But I've just this minute completed my new reel and site. It's not "announced" until Monday.... social media campaigns etc blah blah. But it's live! Check them here: 
View my new showreel and website!
Some info
Each and every image -  I shot, lit, edited, graded. A little directing. Very involved in creative ideas.  Core crew was mostly 4-5 regular people in these productions (Director, DOP, Production Manager, Spark, Make Up Artist).  For the geeks - cameras used are Sony F55, FS7, FS700, RED Epic, GH3, BM Pocket.  All images are music videos, but going for commercial/corporate work aggressively into the next year. (and still many music videos).  The aim is to have 100% new material for Showreel 2016. Max creativity required.  Anyway, if you like it or don't like it, whatever. Just thought I'd share.
 

I used it the other day to get some pick up shots for a music video. Shot in Slog.... It's the same old story you will hear over and over. Very yellow, kind of ill-looking Homer Simpson skintones, lots of tweaking required but achievable. 
HOWEVER - mess with the Slog profile (lots of resources online) and Slog becomes something quite beautiful. Still, grading after is key. Filmconvert, Impulz and the like are your friend. 
Everything is cool with this little guy. Battery life isn't the best, peaking could be better - but hey - it's a great tool in the bag. Highly recommended. 

I had not intended to say what is right or wrong, or FF equivs. I'm just talking in terms of S35 and why certain cinematographers use odd specific non traditionals like 28. Why did they settle on 28 instead of 24 or 35. It's worth experimenting and seeing some results.

SORRY SORRY SORRY Oliver.  Marketing 101 here.  "We Direct" is great for musicians who don't know what they want, but for those who do (commercial clients), it's a red flag that you'll impose your ideas on the shoot.  I'm going to sound really old man here.  This is why I get hired;
1. The client has tried to do what I do and has failed. 
2. I'm available and I have the necessary tools.
3. It doesn't look like I have a drug problem.
This is why I don't get hired.
1. I think I'm smarter than the client.
2. I want to use my tools to do things that interest me, not the client.
3. It looks like I want to party.
Again, put yourself in the position of hiring a PA say, What do you want to see on the site where they want to work for you.
The irony here, Oliver, is that what little I know of you through this forum is you're very humble and client-focused.  The site doesn't put that across. "We Direct" ?  It doesn't really represent you, I feel.  When I read "We Direct" I think about a smart-ass hipster telling everyone what to do.  Maybe I'm wrong.  Just some ideas "Superlative Video. On Time.  On Budget."  Or "We Film. We Edit. Our Clients Look Good"  "Your Vision.  Our Crew"  Etc.  
I know I"m a broken record on this.  Focus on not scaring anyone away.  Let your reel do the rest!  It's that f'ing good
Oh YES, site is VASTLY improved.  You're getting there.  Keep sweating the details!

At least they don't seem very demanding or have unrealistic expectations 
Keep up the good work on the site and the filming!

Very true.
Glad to see the positivity. It did take me a very ,very, very long time to make this - and I'm getting really great feedback. 
(p.s this particular client will ring you - they want to shoot tomorrow and shoot on a RED Epic Dragon in the highest resolution on a yacht in the dark with 200 semi-naked models, for $500.)