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The sad part is nobody seems to be truly objective anymore, you can spin things any way you want. Canon (especially the hallowed, beyond-any-reproach-of-any-kind 1Dc) can have any number of flaws, but you can always take refuge with two words: "color science" (whatever that is). And be sure to ignore what you can do in post, it don't matter. Kind of like the $8K Leica M Monochrom buyer ignoring all objective comparisons and calling it worth the price because it's just "magical" (whatever that is).
And it's not just with cameras. Last night we had a Republican debates with 10 candidates, want to know who the winner was? Any of them, depends on who you ask. Heck, we don't know anything for sure anymore, from if there is a multiverse to if OJ was guilty to if a7RII or NX1 can render color as well as 1Dc. Reminds me of what Jack Nicholsen tells Diane Keaton in Something's Gotta Give: "I've never lied to you. I've always told you some version of the truth."

In part 1 of the Sony A7R II review we will look at the A7R II not as a consumer camera but as a professional cinema camera.
The benchmark for this camera is going to be the Canon 1D C.
Read the full article

Quotes like that annoy me as well because it's too easy when you have money rolling in left right and centre from professional video work to say "ah, throw that $12k 1D C aside I'll use it as a doorstop" and run out and spend another $3.5k on an A7R II. Way too easy!
However for the majority of people $3500 is a lot of money and significantly more than a GH4 or NX1 and thus the deliberation needs to be more critical.
When the Samsung NX1 came out Cinema5D basically rubbished it. The reason? Bad rolling shutter! Yet here with the S35 crop mode of the A7R II we have what looks like potentially even worse rolling shutter problems and they are practically mute about that... do I detect a Sony bias?
Well I have seen Cinema5D's guys operate first hand myself, at trade shows such as Photokina and they do know a few Sony people and get cameras early. It is too easy to recommend something when you have the camera literally dumped on your desk by a PR company as well.
I was offered a trip to the US to shoot with the A7R II by Sony and I turned them down. I was offered a demo unit by the US PR agency Sony had organising the A7R II marketing and I turned them down. On Wednesday 5th August I will walk into a shop, hand over my hard earned cash for the A7R II and if it is rubbish I will say so and take it back for a refund.
The only reason I am going anywhere near Sony and their PR agents is that they have organised an interesting shoot the day before on Tuesday and it is a chance to get some decent footage. Most of what I say to the Sony people there will be about how it can be improved and what the most glaring flaws are, because that is what I regard as feedback... saying "wow buy buy buy" does not have any useful substance to it, it is pure hype.
And so back to the topic...
It's an open secret Sony want you to buy more than one camera!
That's one reason why the launches are staggered like this. If the A7S II and A7R II came out on the same day you would be able to compare them and select the best ONE.
As it is, this week if you need an internally recording 4K full frame mirrorless camera and can't wait for a mystery to unfold 6 months from now then you are obligated to buy the A7R II.
Personally this is the approach I am taking because there's always eBay to shift gear whenever you like, whenever it is superseded.
I am sure the A7S II will push video to even greater heights, 4K 60p and at least 250fps 1080p, much less rolling shutter, better low light, etc.
it's a guess though and the A7R II is a guarantee of quality right now.
However there's always the danger with waiting for the next model and upgrading in that you never appreciate what is right in front of you.

hello everybody!
 
Yesterday I’ve been to the Southbank in London to shoot some footage and do a quick grade to see how the camera perform in a real world situation. I’ve also wanted to check how an adapted EF lens worked on the camera so i used a Canon 24-105 with a Metabones Mark IV. Apart from a couple of very wide shots everything have been shot handheld in S35 mode. (therefore apologies for the odd shaky clip!)
 
I’m gonna due a proper write up in due course but for now some random thoughts:
 
- Overall the camera have been an absolute pleasure to use: the ergonomic of the body is much better compared to the previous generation cameras, the slightly chunkier body provides a much better grip and the EVF is big and bright, the best I’ve ever used together with the Fuji X-T1
 
- Having an extra custom button and, most importantly, being able to assign the record to a button of your choice makes a big difference!!
 
- Unfortunately some software limitations that i always found annoying in the a7s are still present, namely: the inability to set a custom white balance from the movie mode, the focus magnification which is way inferior to the one in still mode (only 4x magnification, sometimes in not enough to achieve a proper focus!), the inability to assign the S35/APS-C crop mode to a custom button and the bloody NTSC warning message! I really hope some (or better all) of these things will be fixed with a future firmware update!
 
- Unfortunately the experience with the Metabones have been quite frustrating as usual… Like other users reported the focus performance in still mode is indeed impressive, almost on par with the one on a canon body but in movie mode things are very different: definitely much better than the a7s but not as fast as still mode, moreover i couldn’t get the camera to focus at all past 70mm, i don’t know if it’s a lens problem, an adapter problem or something with the camera but in the end i went back to manual focusing because it was super annoying! 
 
- I’ve tried to shot a variety of material to test the camera strengths and weaknesses and i have to say I’m even more impressed now after I quickly graded the footage with film convert (using the a7s profile since they haven’t released one for the a7r II yet). I once again had the impression that the camera is as good as the a7s in terms of dynamic range and the files are generally cleaner to start with because of the lower native ISO. This is completely unscientific and untested so take this with a grain of salt but there is something that i really like in the colours that I never experienced with the a7s before (at least not with so little grading work required) so i’m starting to wonder whether Sony improved the colour science on this camera.. again, totally unscientific and unsubstantiated, just a gut feeling really but I’ll definitely do some more comparisons to find out!
 
- Real life usage confirmed the very positive impressions about the low light performance of the S35 mode.. the camera is remarkably clean all the way to the top ISO setting (and yes, there are at some shots in the clip that have been shot at ISO 25600!) 
Before last week if somebody told me that I could have shot usable material at ISO 25600 on a 42 megapixels still camera i would have laughed in their face! 
 
-I’m pretty sure that part of the great performance of the camera is down to the extremely efficient codec and there’s a shot in the video that i think show this very well: at 04:59 there’s a blue flag on an almost completely flat blue sky shot at ISO6400… while i was shooting i thought “right, this is the recipe for disaster: an uniform colour in the whole frame at high ISO with a compressed 8bit 4:2:0 codec, it’s gonna be the festival of banding!”… boy i was wrong! there’s not a hint of it, the file is clean as a whistle!
 
Thanks for watching!
 

this is so much fun. driving my wife crazy. she's trying to watch the untouchables on hbo go while I frame her up in various CUs.

Agreed, I get a little suspicious when people rant about specs too much, it is a bit like guitars...when someone says such and such a guitar is sooo much better because of this reason or that, the first thing I want to do is hear them play. As Steve Vai once said...when people get too caught up in I use this amp, with this vintage valve mic, thru to such and such a pre amp and then to tape...yada yada...well you grow old that way LOL!!
Obviously there is a difference between say a great guitar and a shit one, but that difference is not that great (as some make out) between say an NX1 vs GH4 vs C100 or C300 or whatever from Canon..or even a Red, perhaps even the "GOD" Alexa!
So if anyone says the GH4 footage is just "OK" thats fine, but perhaps show something you have shot that is miles better, that anyone could see..(without pixel peeping) otherwise its just words.
Take this footage for example https://vimeo.com/125389854   this could have been shot on an Alexa or anything else, its great!!
However if you think it shows the failings​ and limitations of the GH4, thats fine...but then post something "you have done" that is noticeably better that anyone can see....its easy to quote specs on a forum (and yes specs are important...to a degree) but the reality is, the GH4 (even without V-Log) can produce an amazing image in the right hands.
Buying an NX2 or a GH5 is not going to make your work "miles" better, it will simply give you more options thats all.
How do I know? Well I operate a 20 core Xeon E5-2680 v2 CPU and a ton of VST plug ins, libraries of sounds, and a couple of very versatile DAW's..and a lot of mastering plugs and hardware.
You know what? I cant make better music on this than I did 5 or so years ago on a quad core with far less,the reality is I am limited by my imagination and skills...its the law of diminished returns, go back 20 years...yes there is a difference, go back 5 years...not so much.                                                
The GH4 vs the NX1 vs Canon or others ..even less so.
.

​A7s produces beautiful log images which you can basically color/grade how you choose too. The first step is taking that log image and converting to REC 709, then you color to taste...... From my experience Sony A7s produces amazing colors and grades wonderfully, you just really have to spend some time with it and understand how it works. Here's a before/after picture of an unreleased Music Video (Artist: Gyptian) I worked on. Graded in RESOLVE and Tweaked in FINAL CUT
 

austinchimp, I have the a7s since a couple of months and I am still on a path to get decent skin tones while having accurate colors. Trust me, I tested all those profile guides that I found on the net.
s-log is at the moment no option to me since I want to have ISO 100 and i did not start using ND filters yet. Anyways, you might give those settings a go:
Take PP2 as a base (with default values of course) and change the following:
gamma: cine4
color mode: pro
color phase: +5
 
These settings work amazingly well for me, here is one quick example:

Another very important aspect I found out is setting the white balance manually to appropriate kelvin values. You can look them up using Google if you are not familiar with them. Interestingly, I found myself nearly always using 5600k during daylight circumstances, no matter whether it is shady or bright sun (even with snow!). Only on tungsten light or halogen, I change the white balance to about 3900k and within the above mentioned color profile, i change color phase to +2 (i use PP3 for that to change it more quickly), otherwise the image is very yellowish.
 
You could give those settings a try. I would love to hear from you if it helped a bit since I am sure that this journey is not done yet.

I find it strange to denigrate a product because you don't know how to use it properly...
I have no problem with the skin tones on my A7s and my friends and colleagues who are shooting with it also have no problem - or if they do, they deal with it. Funny that I have friends using A7s' as B or C cams and crash cams on TVCs, as well as A-cams and B-cams on docos and wildlife shows et al. and none of them have said to me how 'terrible' it is and how 'awful' the skin tones are and how 'useless' the camera is...
Seriously, I've not heard one person even mention the position of the record button being an issue, but if you looked online, you would think that one 'issue' is apparently so bad it's hardly worth buying the camera...
 

The only bad thing about the A7S's colour is people's limited grading skills

Get a shoulder rig man, great shot setups in here but it looks like it was shot with an iphone because of the jitter.

Yeah, although it's availlable practically everywhere I look (I went into a store close by just now, they had it), the only place it's not availlable is where I pre-ordered (silly me, I thought that would put me ahead). I think it's the universe trying to tell me something. So I'm going to listen and told them they could just go ahead and cancel it...

​Yes I saw that comment from Olympus.
They are right and they're wrong.
Pana, Sony, Samsung do need to generate 4K content for their TVs.
However my question to Olympus is do you see the potential in great 1080p? BECAUSE YOU HAVEN'T EVEN DONE THAT YET!

It's a joke alright. Unbelievable that they let it out of the door with so much moire, aliasing, softness. The crop is massive in video mode too, more than E-M1 or GH4.
I'll have more to say in the full review, but right now I am disappointed in Olympus.
Like I said they clearly listened, timecode of all things!
It's a bit like being in a restaurant and your dish arrives with no sauce, so you send it back and they return it with the sauce but no chicken!
They are counting on us upgrading to a 4K E-M1 Mark II obviously but I am giving them a very clearly message. NO MORE OLYMPUS FOR ME! I don't care how good the stabilisation is. They are done.

​I was a contributing writer on this review (along with my footage) and I think it is spot on about the a7S as a video tool. DP Review are mainly a photography site but this is the best review of a video orientated hybrid camera they've yet done.
You can read my case for the camera at DPReview here!
Read the blog post here

This is a very nice thread! 
The key is in the intentions. Of course this is about voyeurism, to look what people do normally, not in a staged situation with actors! There is nothing wrong about it!
About the people not living the experience, but shooting it I don't understand them!!! I live in Rome and I see people who didn't watched directly anything. They watched it in their iPads, smartphones, camcorders viewfinders... It's pretty sad. I wonder if in their memories they include metadata like: "The first time I saw the Pantheon I just 20% of battery left and my SD nearly full" "When I arrived at the Coloseum, I made sure the UV filter was tight, format the SD and started shooting".

From http://eddavid.tumblr.com/post/111
I was told I had to redo my W9 income tax form, because the form I filled out was the Nov 2013 form, which was expired.  So I went and filled out the Dec 2014 form and noticed something new - a whole extra page of paperwork - It went from a three page document to a four page document - and that’s our government, the king of bureaucracy, in action.
Bureaucracy was the big theme in this month’s Harpers, currently my favorite magazine of all time, up there with the Atlantic and the Week and the New Yorker as what I read (sorry novels, I haven’t read you guys in a while and maybe that’s another essay to write about next).  
In this issue, they mentioned that bureaucracy also bleeds into the arts, which is my field of work as a cinematographer.  The use of credentials - like a police chief or military commander or certified doctor -  a practice that exists in places like Soviet Russia have fallen into our field.  The highest esteemed titles, like DGA or ASC even go after your name on a movie title (also the only art industry in the world where you put the credits on an advertisement for the product - does Colgate Toothpaste do that?)  Saying “Joe Schmoe, ASC” does that make Joe Schmoe more certified than his name without that title?  Does it make the film any less beautiful?
At what point in the arts are you certified as an artist?  At what point can you say, “yes I know what I am doing.”  Some great artists do their best work before they “become” recognized. A lot of famous artists reminisce about how much easier it is for them to create good art before they are lauded, such as Jackson Pollock.  Once he was called by Life Magazine, “is this the greatest artist of our generation?” his life suffered immensely.
My theory is, you are an artist when you create art.  So anyone is an artist, if they put pen to paper, dirty finger to keyboard.  But in our filmmaking industry my whole life I have felt guilty because I didn’t go to a film schoo, I didn’t get certifiedl - I went to a liberal arts college and was an anthropology major and almost a film studies minor, as well as one point a music major.  I didn’t have the training everyone seemed to be whispering that I needed.
I felt so guilty,  that I didn’t know how to load a film mag, that I didn’t ever sit down and learn lighting or even lenses.  I had no photography background - that was my sister. I didn’t know the difference between a wide angle lens and a telephoto lens, surrounded by many people who did. I didn’t know soft light vs hard light, or the angle of lighting and how it changes on a face in shadows.
I grew up shooting documentaries and prank videos on VHS-C cameras - made one in high school called “perspective” and interviews young people, older young people, and my parents about various historical issues like the Vietnam war, trying to show how our age affects how we interpret history, as well as education level, etc - bigger issues I didn’t address like race and class, because, well, I grew up in the wonderful safe bubble of Fairfield, CT.  I didn’t light it - I didn’t think about the aesthetics of it at all, just what I was trying to say.
But that guilt of me not having the credentials for filmmaking has haunted me for so long.  I would show up on set and be so nervous that I didn’t know anything about lighting - or 35mm film or real lenses - that I would call for the wrong lens - that I was being judged by everyone.  I remember about 7 years ago or so I was on a low budget tv spec spot and an electric asked me my age and I think I said I was older than I was so I could pretend that I knew what I was doing.
But the more I do cinematography, the more I know that whatever unique perspective I have is an advantage.  Not going to film school, coming from an anthropological and philosophical perspective gives me strength, a different way of seeing.  And it is skills that can actually be learned on the job, online on forums, by talking and observing and learning from others.  I  have learned so much about filmmaking from a vimeo series called “Every Painting a Frame” that is just some passionate film editor named Tony Zhou doing it on his own time as from a youtube series spoofing George Lucas, and of course on set mentors like the great DP David Tumblety I shot with a few times.
Everyone who brings a fresh perspective to filmmaking is so needed - we can not just have people do films all the same way.
 I think more and more there is a gluttony of film set behaviors that rewards the same and bureaucratic method of making “films” - traditional, boring, waiting - not just trying to find moments and capture little tiny ideas and bigger thoughts - but this route system of regimented military-like crew that does things traditional ways that people like Paul Thomas Anderson rally against - no marks - no lets go overt here instead - untraditional approaches that open up wonder again.
But also that wonder is not anything without intense concentration and commitment and hard work.  You can’t be lazy and successful.  It’s sweat.  My Puritanical work ethic was at one point rewarded vastly by my former boss and greatest mentor, Joe Baron.  He runs Attitude, Inc - a post house in New York City.  He taught me about perseverance  - about going for perfection - “crossing the finish line” - which would sometimes be at 3am to get a piece to a level of standard he believed in.  To not be mediocre, no matter what anyone else believes - to put one’s full heart into anything.  To not get upset and bogged down by bureaucratic methods - to just be a part of a small group of people and be passionate.  He found my strengths, and didn’t make me feel bad about my flaws, my quirks.  
I didn’t learn this in school, and this mentorship under him, as I assistant edited under him for two years.  And his voice has been guiding me ever since, as I navigate through my adulthood. And whoever I get down because maybe I switch a lens too late or change my mind too suddenly (all artists need to be open to changes that can occur at any moment - spontaneity) - I always think of him there, watching over, making sure I’m okay.  

I think you're being a bit overly critical Vesku. It does show exposure value, just not when changing ISO. But its not exactly rocket science to work out what your EV value will be as you change it.
No DSLR-like camera except for the d750 and d810 can change aperture steplessly.
I've never seen problems with the AE/AF lock. What are you talking about?
Its got plenty of button options and saving options. More than most other DSLR-like cameras.
Why are you using AF for video?
OIS is worse than other brands, but still much better than handholding. Lens stabilisation is kind of overrated anyway. Rigging the camera against your chest or shoulder generally gives a more weighty, cinematic feel.
Noise at ISO 200? Who cares really. Real film has noise at that ISO too.

So, I'm spending a couple months in Berlin right now and thought I might put a shout out to anyone on this board who wants to have a meetup somewhere. Anyone up for a pint and some film talk?

Just keep in mind that pans, tilts and punch ins from a 4k file don't have the same feel that you get from physically moving a camera. The perspective isn't changing and so the subtle visual cues that our brains pick up on with real perspective changes aren't there. The capability is still extremely useful, but shouldn't be treated as a replacement for an actual second angle, movement, etc.
 
 

To add a bit more liveliness to your studio recordings, you could get the camera to move around a bit freely. So the E-M5II would be kinda nice for that sort of B-roll.
Kinda depends if you have lenses with optical stabilization built-in or not if you could make that work with the GH4 as well. You could, alternatively, get the GH4 and lock it off on a tripod and cut down on the number of takes by punching in or adding smooth and subtle pans/tilts from the 4K footage. Eventually you can get both the A7S and GH4 to get you 4K footage for 4K projects as well... and worth noting is they can both shoot really flat.
So... it depends. There's something to say for both. For added motion I'd go with the E-M5II. For the 4K flexibility and like you say a bit more videominded character, the GH4, that whilst keeping in mind that if you were to get an external recorder for the A7S, then you'd also have two 4K capable cameras on hand.
Wild option: you could also ditch the A7S and get both the GH4 and E-M5II.

That video is brilliant!
 

This was at a Native American Festival so it has a lot of colors. 
I made a custom color profile in Edius trying to mimike the look of one of the Red Giant Film Looks need to save up some more to buy that - i think i got it close maybe 75%..
All edited in Edius... Most all the dancing i am using up to 78% zoom in and out when editing so the 16x50 Samsung lens got some better zoom range after the fact. Most of this was all shot with the NX1 auto focus or the rest was focus on - off button no manual except for one shot. I also used a ND filter on the lens for the bright light outside.
 

​hehe, I will

​Just buy and shoot...