IronFilm

Sad, but very true. Unfortunately. It unfortunately is out there almost the Biblical Truth that "Canon is best for video"!! :-o Exactly, for a DSLR then Nikon is currently best for video! (yes I am ignore the insanely priced 1D C, so sue me)

Scarlet/Epic form factor is infinitely preferable over a RED One. I would admit, if in another year the price dropped a little, and I got lucky enough to see a Scarlet MX locally for US$3K then I'd leap on it just simply so I can say "I own a RED"! haha But if anybody ever wants lowlight shooting... the Scarlet would stay in the office and the F3 would come out! :-D But they share the same MX sensor??

Hey hey, I didn't know you're an Australian! :-D I'm a Kiwi in Auckland. Wonder if there are any other F3 owners lurking around on this forum from this neck of the woods or if we are the only two? Yup, ProRes HQ is more than fine for many purposes! I even bumped down to ProRes LT! :-o I really didn't want to... but it was an ultra low budget feature and everything else had been shot with a C100's internal. And the poor director/producer couldn't handle anything bigger :-/ Exactly, I got my F3 roughly half way through last year for NZ$1.8K (USD$1.2K for the overseas readers), while the cheapest RED One I've seen listed locally recently is a staggering NZ$14.5K!! (just under US$10k) But even if I saw a RED One at a more reasonable price of US$3.5K ish listed locally, that is still *THREE TIMES* more than what I spent for my F3! Although, once I've fully rigged it up with handles, V mount, mic, rails, cheeseplate, mattebox, lens, and recorder.... then I'm pushing up to around about 13kg ish in total! :-o (or nearly 30lbs ish for you American types) Partially the reason I'm thinking to switch away from a rails set up, and also switch back to BP-U batteries instead, so I've ordered in a few of those. We'll see how this new set up looks.

Even if you're only just one shooter (yourself), having two bodies is handy so you can keep one balanced on the gimbal and another for your tripod/monopod/shoulder rig. And if you use a second shooter, you give him the easier and less creative shots to do. Fair enough. Though to me F3 is in the "big sweet spot", big enough to get size "benefits": space for XLR inputs on the body / ND filter / "impress" people / not be a DSLR / extra weight to lend stability to handheld shots. Yet not so big I need to get an even *bigger* tripod (which is even more expensive) and would really kill my back at the end of a long day. I reckon that sweet spot ranges (which I agree is inherently subjective) from C100/FS5 at one extreme up to F3 at the other extreme. But a full size URSA or R1 pushes it out into something else qualitatively speaking and not just a quantitatively different size.

I believe BMD now supports Sony's trigger. But you'd be limited to HD. SD vs SSD is not such the big issue it used to be, as SD cards are now so dirt cheap you can record for ages onto one with ProRes HQ fairly cheaply. It wasn't a factor in my decision making between a BMD VA vs a Samurai Blade

Even the greatly lauded 1D C used a crop mode as well for its 4K

Did it only have 60fps FHD before? I am surprised. This 120fps FHD addition then certainly will make it more appealing!

My workflow process (works with any camera. Is universal!): 1) Hand over media cards to editor. 2) Go home.

I think by far and by far the best ultra low budget monitor option is the Aputure FineHD VS-2, as it gives you a massive 1920x1200 native resolution! :-o But it is unfortunately 7 inches, good for some ("that is what she said..."), but not everybody's cup of tea. And a small 4 or 5 inch one for an ultra compact set up would be handy, like a small high resolution smartphone screen (you'd think there would be plenty of options there for manufacturers to purchase from the smartphone screen market to turn into camera monitors!! But no :-/ ). Next step up would be to buy a BMD Video Assist of course.

If you want real 10bit on a tight budget then there are three main options: 1) Panasonic GH4 2) Sony PMW-F3 secondhand 3) Any of the many BMD cameras (such as BMCC/BMPCC/BMMCC) No Sony stills mirrorless camera will give 10bit to you in 2016. Neither does Panasonic, aside from the GH4, or any of the other camera companies with their stills cameras.

Canon's "D500" equivalent is the 7D, and we had to wait for ages to see the 7D mk2, and that only just came out. So no, we will not see a 7D mk3 in response to the D500 any time soon (actually, it is the other way round.... in a way the D500 is Nikon's response to the Canon 7D mk2, they're now of the same generation).

So you want a Nikon D500? ;-) Otherwise, you'll have to wait for the 7D mk3.... and even that might not have 4K! Waiting on the 7D mk4......

Sony/Panasonic/Samsung however are the only ones really pushing hard forward. Not Canon. And Sony has better specs sometimes than Panasonic, but Panasonic cameras are priced cheaper and better polished (such as no overheating issues, better laid out menus. Also, why the hell does the A6300 not have a touch screen?? The A5100 does!). So I'd say G7

They'd never have provide raw in the 50D, compare it vs H.264's heat

True true, *if* I was ever to buy an FS700, I'd only be using it when explicitly one (or more) of slow motion / raw / 4K is needed. Rest of the time the F3 is better.

EM5 Mark 2 isn't the peak of video tech from m4/3, if you're going to compare with an 80D then get yourself a Panasonic G7 to compare with (is cheaper too!)

Nah, C100 mk2 was too recent! Canon doesn't update their cameras that fast. Plus their pro line up gets refreshed even slower than their consumer range would be. This. This. This. Zzzzzzz

it is the studio camera sensor we've seen before, which means it is intended for studio situations where you can heavily control the lighting to fit into the sensor's needs. If you want to make films with it, then probably will not be of interest to you like a BMMCC would be.

Oh for sure, FS700 raw is great by all accounts. I'm not saying it is not! But the FS700 is not the FS7, so it doesn't need to squeeze so many stop of dynamic range into a tiny 10bit linear raw container. And that is the big issue and disappointment with the FS7. And why F5 is vastly superior for raw than the FS7. Exactly! Is going to be a few years yet until Sony will give you "proper 4K" at an FS5 price point. Maybe the "FS5 mk2", but that is a few years away, and it quite likely will not even then. Wait for the "FS5 mk3"! hahaha Meanwhile BMD has been giving us 10bit 4K at affordable prices for years and years with the BMPC4K and more :-D I am astonished at how cheaply the FS700 has been going recently! If I can't afford an F5 come next year, then I'll likely pick up an FS700 for cheap instead to complement my existing F3. FS5 gives 10bit 422 4K over HDMI??? I too thought it was just for HD. What are the gotchas? Losing all other monitoring?

Yeah, Canon only cares what Nikon is doing. Canon ignores what is happening with Panasonic/Sony/Samsung/Pentax/FujiFilm, and doesn't bother responding to them. This is why Canon didn't bother to put video into the Canon 50D even though it could have! :-o It took Nikon releasing their D90 to push Canon to release their own HDSLR in response.

"Virtual Reality" is a very new term and can be a very broad term. So some people could arguably classify 360 degree video content under "VR", but other people who are VR snobs wouldn't regard it as "proper VR". For "proper VR" they'll say you need to not just have 360 degree vision around yourself, but also have complete freedom to move through the space you're in as you wish (just like you can do in real life). So how can you create that freedom of movement? Well you'll need to create all the items in that space (& the space itself) painstakingly from scratch, just like they do with video games. This can be very difficult and expensive (this is why video games can cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make, just like big blockbuster movies do). And the downside is it still won't truly look life like!! Instead it will look like you're in a video game. 360 degree video has the downside of you lose the freedom of movement, you are instead constrained to take the same path of movement through the environment as the filmmaking took during capture. It is like you're on an amusement park ride, once you're strapped in then you're going to go through it the same way the rides are going to go, following the tracks. But the upside is 360 degree video has the benefit of looking waaaaay more realistic, as you're filming real life itself! Also 360 degree video has the benefit that it is relatively "easy"-ish to create content. Well... still quite tough! Just check out my other thread where I'm discussing hardware requirements: Then you have software needs as well! Which are themselves quickly a very complex issue, and can be very expensive to purchase. A slight tweak to this 2nd approach is to do 3D 360 videos, this gives you stereoscopic vision in your VR headset, rather than seeing just a "flat" looking video. A potential big improvement for sure! However.... this means double as many cameras, which means more the double the hardware complexity, and more the double the difficulty in post production. But all of this is a walk in the park compared to trying to do "proper VR" in a truly photorealistic manner. For that you need a capture rig kinda like the bullet time rig from "The Matrix", but even more complex and comprehensive. Then a vastly more complex software step to turn each capture into a moving 3D model with the filmed texture overlayed on top. Another big downside of this approach is you can't do large/complex scenes at once. For instance if you wanted a VR experience of a party via this method, you couldn't just a capture a crowd of people drinking, dancing, and having fun. Nope, instead you'd need to do each person one by one, then insert them one by one into the scene you're creating in the computer. On the upside, it does make it heaps easier to edit the scene in post if you wish to move or even remove elements from the scene! Want to move that idiot with the jerky spazzy dancing to the back of the scene instead of at the front? Done! Maybe the promise of "The Edit Button" will come true one day... The other downside to this approach of using videogrammetry is that currently the quality you get is usually absolute rubbish, here you can see one I took of myself last month (it is a moving 3D model, which you can fly around it as you wish, or place it anywhere within a 3D space you create in Unity): As you can tell, the quality looks like absolute trash compared to what we're used to from our BMPCC / URSA / Sony FS7 / Samsung NX1 / etc cameras!! However, that was just a very rough and quick test capture I did (for instance I didn't bother with lighting it at all), and I could significantly improve this. But it still is at best rather bad, unless you wish to pour millions into this! And even the companies which have tens of millions of dollars of funding behind them still are not hugely better than this, and have a looooong way to go. But I expect "soon" this approach will be mainstream (it is an open question as to when "soon" is, maybe just a couple of years away? Or maybe a decade away.... ). So each of these three approaches have their own serious pros/cons list to consider, and I wouldn't consider any one "better" VR than the other. They're just different tools to use, depending on the task at hand to complete. Looking into the future, I think that although the 3rd approach is clearly the most undeveloped of the three, as tech improves it will likely become the main choice for creating high quality VR content. But all three approaches will remain valid approaches to VR creation for years to come.

Xiaomi Yi is rather good however. Not GoPro 4 good, but up at GoPro 3+ BE level quality. So the biggest downer is the lack of 4K, which would be ideal for VR needs, however.... higher frame rates are also really important. So dunno if I'd want to use the 4K 30fps of the GoPro 4 anyway, instead using the higher frame with the lower resolutions. By which point the gain over using the Xiaomi Yi's 1080 60fps is not much at all, if any. I hope the GoPro 5 puts greater priority on achieving 4K 60fps than doing 8K, as I'd much rather have 4K 60fps than 8K 30fps! I'm starting to lean towards skipping the Soocoo Cube 360 x2 as a stepping stone into this, and instead leap straight for the multi sided action camera approach! It is a bit of a risk, but I will be using the much cheaper Xiaomi Yi. Then hopefully by the time the GoPro 5 gets announced with 4K 60fps, I'll have the 360 degree reputation and clients to justify the US$4,000+ investment which is the cost required to build up a 6x GoPro 5 360 degree video rig. & then I'd likely reuse the Xiaomi Yi cameras as one half of a 3D 360 rig (which needs twice as many cameras as normal, at least. And if Xiaomi Yi has seen a further price drop by then... that would be extra nice! They've already come down in price somewhat since their release last year). Or..... maaaaaaybe, if the GoPro 5 doesn't come this year, or it disappoints us, I might opt for a BMMCC rig with Rokinon 8mm lenses on focal reducers. Maybe, but now I'm speculating and dreaming too much!

NTG2 is not a hot mic, it is too weak for instance to make a good pairing with the Zoom H4n because the Zoom has absolutely awful awful pre amps. I'd suggest instead getting the Tascam DR-60D mk2.

Noticed the Soocoo Cube 360 would be just US$150 for two (as each would cover half of the sphere), before I pull the trigger on it, is there anything else which is an even more frugal 360 degree video purchase than this? I'm thinking to get this just to dabble in making a few 360 degree videos, perhaps a short film or two, and then move on up to multiple array GoPro capture rig once I'm confident in it. http://www.gearbest.com/action-cameras/pp_311067.html Specs: 360 x 190 degree panoramic camera Achieve a certain range of 360 degree no dead angle shooting Hemispherical, circular, segmentation and panorama 4 recording modes controlled by smartphones through WiFi Support recording on while charging Support WiFi function, can connect to 2 devices at the same time Compatible with iOS and Android smartphones WiFi protocol: WiFi 802.11 b / g / n With standard 1/4 screw interface Ultra small mini appearance Video resolution: 1280 x 1024 at 28fps USB cable length: 80cm approx. ( USB cable for charging only, not for data transfering)

I think the JVC LS300 is the AF200 everybody has been waiting for ages and ages and ages. (hey, if the D400 dreamers can have their dreams come true.... then maybe Panasonic will finally release the AF200! But until then, there is the LS300) Preach it brother! I shot a fair few days with the R1 MX as the DoP on a feature film, which lead to my conclusion to get a Sony F3 :-D A far more versatile camera overall as as an all round camera. Yes the R1 MX does win if you go head to head specifically comparing just its strengths against the F3 (raw / 4K / slow motion). But the R1 MX loses on practically every other count! So yes, I can understand and even agree with people who wish to claim the R1 MX is a "better" camera. But I can look at the bigger picture and prefer the F3 overall However.. if anybody wishes to offer me a free R1 MX then I wouldn't turn it down! ;-)