fuzzynormal

I have an x-pro2 and the gx85. Yes, there's more DR with the Fuji. I don't view it as being a lot of DR difference, but it's there. Good thing too because the baked in color effects of the x-pro need a little extra grading push to align them with other camera footage. It is fascinating to pull out so much detail in highlights and blacks from the x-pro2's clips. Not exactly sure why Fuji buries that stuff in the color space they're using...

I use Vimeo Pro. VOD. Any title you put on the service can have "bonus features". These bonus videos could be segregated clips of your production. The last title I listed had 5 extra bonus clips. They're easy to see and access on a browser or streaming device.

It looked great, don't misunderstand me. I loved the experience. Compared to the resolution and imaging in say Revenant, however, it wasn't as solid and crisp. --which is fine. I mean, H8 WAS an honest to goodness "film." That nice organic soft roll off look. Really good watching film in its traditional glory, but for me I kept thinking, "this is wonderful, yet digital projection is more solid." Then again, I watched Jaws again last week and loved the digital transmission of the (restored?) film. Best case scenario: shot on film, scanned, edited, projected digitally? One thing that a lot of young folks (probably not you) tend to forget, or are maybe unaware of, is that film projection had diminishing quality the longer it was on the circuit... My childhood is full of watching flicks at the local $1 mantinee grindhouse. Y'all can't appreciate how crazy beat up those prints would be by the time they hit the theatre I could afford to go to. Then, while on my first career gig in Mississippi, I used to literally go to a converted cotton gin to watch films. It was glorious and lousy all at the same time. The projectionist was this sweet cinefile with asperger's who never really knew how to run the projector. Gate problems, bad focus, missing reels, the whole bit. Romantic and fun in a nostalgic way, but never all that "pristine." Film is beautiful, but it's certainly not visually practical compared to digital. And when both are more or less equal, we'll...

Of course they are, you got the right idea. What do you really need a camera to do -or even NOT do? I used two GX85's to create six episodes for a documentary series on PBS. (unfortunately I didn't write it, direct it, or have final say on the color grade. boo!) Regardless, I firmly believe they were close to the perfect camera for such an assignment. I'd rather shoot with that gear 9 times out of 10 over an Alexa. Sounds weird, but it's really true. The stuff is just so innocuous that I could capture stuff and stay out of the way of the subject and director. (wish she could have stayed out of her own way, but so it goes) And, holy moly, at one point I had to edit in some previous footage from a RED, and, ugh, that footage was a disaster. Ugly as sin. That was mostly the ops fault though. Anyway, once done, I sold those GX85 cameras on ebay. Moving on....

Yes, if one has the means to acquire the best camera, then maybe use the best --but look at the images posted by the OP, do any of them look like they'd be impossible to capture/create with modern/cheap gear? "400 Blows" especially. The more wonderful and advanced consumer gear gets, the sillier we all look [points finger at self] hanging out on-line talking about things rather than doing things.

Me too. It was fun as it tapped into my nostalgia for watching a film screening. The whrrrr of the projector was cool. But, aside from enjoying the novelty, it didn't look technically good as a digital projection. And I truly like the minor flaws that pop up from doing something mechanical and analog, but honestly, it's inferior to digital.

Anyone dabbling with Resolve and Linux in editing? I'm intrigued. Would love a strong viable editing alternative. Didn't enjoy my first rodeo editing with Resolve, but I'm willing to try again...

I cut a concert film once where the two main cameras were a 5d and a gh1. Liked the gh1 image more, but they were close enough IQ-wise that it didn't really matter. "Filmlook" really comes down to other things beside the sensor. I truly believe sensor preference is akin to choosing a particular film-stock. No more, no less. So...maybe you don't have the fastest and cleanest "film" for your movie, doesn't mean jack-squat that it would stop you from making a cinematic production.

I learned still photography on 35mm film, and that's typical of what people often talk about regarding "equivalence" online; which makes it easier to grasps from the get go the whole debate about it all. If you came into the camera enthusiasm/hobby these days, god help you. Ignorance mixed with all the jargon and all the different sizes of things? Yeah, we can understand why it'll make one's head spin. Mine still does because the maths on all this are not symmetrical. Sliding scales, expotentials, and numerical gradients. Physics stuffs. But here's my rather redundant summation and basic understanding: shooting a 50mm lens set to f2 on an M43 is "equivalent" to what would happen (circle-of-confusion-depth-of-field-wise -- not exposure-wise) if you put a 100mm f4 on a full frame sensor. Here's where the frustrating part comes in, I think. Folks use f-stop to generally talk about what it take to achieve a certain depth-of-field. You know if you're shooting glass wide open, you're going to be increasing the out-of-focus stuff in the frame, 'kuz that's how lenses work. Director: "Hey, we need shallower DOF on this shot, go to a f2.8" DP "Got it." Those folks ain't talking directly about how many photons the want passing through the lens. Rather, they're talking about creating a visual look. So "f-stop," becomes an easy marker to achieve a certain visual result. That term can get convoluted in the broader technical consideration. (And, hoo boy, let's not even bring in t-stops to this part of the discussion, lest brains start to implode) The thing about full frame sensors, and even larger sensors, is that you can achieve the very shallow depth-of-field easier and with wider lenses than you can if you have a smaller sensor. So, when doing a portrait shot, one can whack some back ground out of focus effortlessly and rather affordably with a cheap 50mm f2 lens on a full frame. Yes, you can get such "equivalent" DOF with something like M43, but then you're spending a lot of cash to get more exotic lenses that'll shoot f0.95 or something. The good thing about full frame, pragmatically speaking, is that you can easily get shallow DOF while closer to a subject. This is cool because when you have a wider field of view and shallow depth-of-field, the visual creates a sort of 3D pop. The in-focus bit separated easily from the background. Not to mention that motion in wider field of view has a different visual quality. I believe this is referenced as "parallax," which can also has a quality that should be taken into account. Also, again, FF lenses cost less to accomplish the same shallow DOF/FOV than M43 lenses. Other than that, I think a lot of people on-line in camera forums maybe don't have comprehensive wisdom, (including me) but certainly have a lot of notions they want to assert. More often than not, it seems like those assertions are wrapped up in some rhetorical ego. Seems like people want to hear and write affirmations about their current version of reality rather than actuality. So it's easy to understand why it's all a mix-up for readers of these words. The phrase "circle-of-confusion" is apt, in more ways than one ain't it? For me, I have a general knowledge of what stuff looks like simply because I've played around with this crap for decades. All one really has to do is put their eyeballs on results they create themselves and it's all obvious. It may remain inarticulated, but it does become obvious.

I had the D90. I shot video with it. It was pure shit. Horrible image. Embarrassing, really. Also, fwiw, putting old glass on any camera gives one a manual aperture.

Are you curious if they will literally respond by adapting their products, or are you just wondering what they're doing next? Their production pipeline stretches over years.

I do indy stuff for broadcast and I can tell you I don't obsess over IQ. The shows I've shot and broadcast this year look better than anything that came down the pipe from the guys doing productions in-house with their high end production gear. That result has nothing to do with cameras or properly calibrated displays. Obsession over other elements of the production, like story, visual compositions, cinematography, and editing, is much more justified. Calibrate your own stuff, do your best, and don't worry about it.

Yes. You work with the limitations. Lots of hybrid cameras don't allow this function. The in body stabilization. Also, they're cheaper.

I've been surprised to find how enamored I've been with the Olympus cameras. They're far from perfect, but I just like 'em. The model I've been using is the EM5's. And even thought the EM5II doesn't spec out as good as the LUMIX stuff, it just works better. Ultimately, that makes it a better production tool, for me, than. say, the GX85...even though the GX85 does shoot better looking video.

Artistic and/or craft contentment from the work; hopefully allowing one to make a simple living from it. I get what you mean, but (to get pedantic) this is inherently impossible. The best one can do is to try and be fair in service of a truth. The craft and art are always at contradiction to objectivity. Almost everything about filmmaking is subjective. I suppose you could screen footage from a security camera as a doc and call it extremely objective, but even then someone had to decide what the best angle of that camera would be. And that's not even considering the craft of structuring story and editing. If anything, docs are more, in a weird way, subjectively manipulative than narrative work.

Neither could I, but there it is. Randomly. Rather annoying. Not the biggest problem in the world, but when you're at the desk for months on end, that time adds up. Who knows what it is? Indeed. Same hardware all around except the integrated sound card, so you just bypass that with an external. You can literally buy the same components, just half the price and then you also allow yourself upgrade room. When I got my latest PC a half year ago, it was specifically for Premiere and to have a machine that would push the numbers, which it does. I really wanted to like and embrace the setup. But the fact that I can edit faster and easier on a 9 year old iMac literally using the same projects, that's enough for me to switch back to OSX. Too bad too. The first short film I edited on a consumer non-linear editing system was a simple comedy skit I did back in 1994. It was a PC and Premiere must have been version 1.5 or something. 3 years later I used Premiere for a local TV series. A few years after that, my first 16mm film was cut on Premiere and a PC. But when FinalCut came out. Forget it. The integrated system, great hardware, and commitment of Apple to the product made it a no-brainer. When things went wrong with FCP, you could figure out a real answer back then. With Premiere, it was a crap shoot. The hardware variables were maddening. Trying to figure out deep BIOS settings, IRQ address numbers, manual OS registry editing; it was all computer sciency-bull shit to try and get all the components and software to play nice. It was a time suck rabbit hole. No thank you. On the other hand, the DIY nature of PC builds is kind of fun... Now with hackintosh, everything old is new again.

I've spent the last year hoping back and forth between Premiere 2015.3 on Windows10 and Premier on OSX. I can't tell you the number of times I've clicked the mouse on the Windows machine within Premiere, have it do nothing, click it again, and have it finally work. Endless Windows quirks like that. Maddening. Never an issue on the 9 year old iMac that opens and edits the same project. Just sayin' Of course, hitting the render button on the Windows machine is fun. So, my next step is Hackintosh all the way. The joys of cheap swappable PC hardware and the Apple OS combined together...I'll go that route since I'm more of a power user with OSX anyway. Agreed. The trashcan machine is an insult to professionals. That said, I bought a "cube" once back in the day. Of course, the cube never claimed it was a high performance pro rig.

Thank you for the advice. I'll continue to play with RAW and see if I can get to a place that I'm comfortable with. The 444 examples give me hope. Potentially: Shoot RAW, transcode to 444, create proxies in Premiere from that, edit, grade, export. I suppose that's the extra step that bugs me. I want to grade completely after the cut, not at all before. Anyway, I've hijacked the thread, so I'll bow out...

Thanks. I'll continue to dabble with my 5D with option 1, but, as I understand it, anytime there's a transcode going on as mentioned with option 2, you've pretty much baked in your image by doing the encoding, so you wouldn't be able to pull effectively in the grade, which is the whole idea with RAW files; lots of post control. Shooting RAW for a direct transcode kind of defeats that purpose, wouldn't it? Which is something the OP should keep in mind. What workflow would they be aiming for with the $3K camera? Maybe the OP wouldn't mind dealing with RAW.

I'd love a URL link to a video outlining useful workflows so I could get a better handle on it. Maybe the path I'm on is the wrong one. Also, perhaps it's because I'm shooting docs, that dissuades my embrace of the RAW workflow. When the shooting ratios of the footage to final cut are so high, the process of manually "touching" every single clip to get them into the project is just too impractical. Based on how I've been understanding it, the "quick" RAW workflow doesn't deliver a big advantage IQ wise, and the "slow and simple" / "laborious" option are out for reasons stated. But, please, if anyone has an example of a RAW solution that would jibe with doc shooting, my goodness, I'd love to see a video. Thanks!

Of course, that's good for interviews as well. Allows a better report and interaction with the subject. So often film making is not about the visuals.

Yes. My theory is pretty straightforward: ISO is only one of the exposure variables. The amount of actual light (ambient/direct) in the setting, as well as the speed of the lens makes a huge difference. When you can shoot at 10KISO in a room with decent light and a fast f-stop, it's going to hide the noisy shadows, right? This footage, while technically in a low light situation, also has lots of ambient light bouncing around in the corners. There's a good scoop of photons for the sensor. On the other hand, when you get someone shooting 10KISO in significantly dim situations and a slow lens, then blacks will be the majority of the frame. Flaws will be more obvious. Bottom line, it's all relative. Take it all with a grain of salt. Consider the context of the shots (and operator skill set) when trying to judge this stuff on youtube and otherwise. Or, as mentioned, it could be a straight out misrepresentation to cynically garner attention. Such is the early 21st century in which we live.

Yup. As a doc filmmaker, I could work with that. ;-) 10KISO and a f.095 lens? That's handy for dark scenes. I might actually be able to make a film or something now!

Thanks for being willing to give this a test and share here on EOSHD. I've been curious as well. This setup, depending on how it renders DOF with wide open medium format lenses, might be ideal for documentary/corporate "talking head" interview production. Extreme shallow DOF and good low light offers an ease of interview shooting that potentially could justify it? I could see this as a dedicated rig for only that purpose if the advantage was there. If not, full frame and a 55mm f1.2 still looks awesome.

I've used a pro level Dropbox account for a few years now. No problem here regarding large files. It also will allow for upload interruption and continuation without trouble. So if your signal drops when uploading a huge file, it's no big deal. It just keeps going when you reconnect to the internet.