pablogrollan

I've been playing with the GH4 for a while now. I'll share my video's here. Shot a lot more material, still have to edit/upload it. Will do so in the following days.
 
Go over to Vimeo/YouTube for all the details in the lenses/profiles/settings used. You can download 4K files or high bitrate on Vimeo.
 
Cinema 4K mode - sunset and lowlight. The 14mm makes razorsharp 4K images. Also used a cheap 200mm f/3.5 Vivitar lens. Hard to get the focus exactly right and maybe not really suitable for 4K. For the video on Vimeo I used pretty high iso values. Shots with the birds are 3200 for example.

 

 
96 fps slomo test: with shallow dof shots it is pretty sharp. I have some slomo sufing shots as well, the resolution looks less good with very detailed scenes.

 
Short test shot at ISO6400 in C4K.

 
Anamorphic test with Minolta MD 28mm f/2.8 and Petit Cinevision 1.5x

Forgive me if someone else has already brought this up, but what about dead pixels?  For example: my 5D II has been aging pretty gracefully, but hot-and-or-dead pixels became impossible to ignore last year at the higher ISOs.  When I bought my 6D, it had a few straight out of the box, but thanks to pixel remapping they disappeared immediately.
 
Direct pixel-to-pixel recording in 4K is going to mean that if a photosite dies, you can't get around it in-camera.  And at the high ISOs where the a7S is so awesome, I think there could be a huge risk of the image being spoiled by these little buggers, and possibly sooner than you'd think, which will make high sensitivity shots a massive pain every time you go into your NLE.
 
I wanted so much to love the a7S—I think Sony is producing some of the best new sensors (D800, a7R, and yes a7S), codecs (S-log, XAVC), and all around cameras (I love the F55 and FS700 so much).  Unfortunately, for my purposes at the moment, I think the GH4 is just a more usable day-to-day tool. I'll use the a7S when it's needed, but...
 
Anyone have any other thoughts on hot pixels with this baby?
 
@krisicwalsh

I agree, though I understand Andrew's point of view, especially because lately I've seen some unjustified personal attacks on him. I don't understand why people expect him to be like the BBC and attack him for letting his personal views show. I always understood EOSHD as an "expanded" blog, and it is precisely Andrew's personal and subjective view that attracted many to the site and forum. There are less "personal" rumour and news sites out there, and anyone is free to go there if they are looking for press releases and such.
I personally would hate EOSHD to become just another one of those sites. Here opinion is discussed openly, and that makes a difference, but I would totally understand if Andrew came to the conclusion that it is not worth the rudeness and ungratefulness he has to put up with.

>Here's a test from the EOSHD forum which shows me what I was a bit afraid of. The A7S looks to have similarly extreme rolling shutter to the AX100, at least in the early pre-production firmware stages.

Read the full article here

$3299 is too much. Pros are unlikely to embrace in their masses with wobbly jello and wobbly HDMI cable and consumers are likely to snub it on an affordability basis if it is over $2k especially when they can get the more featured packed GH4 at $1699 and internal 4K without need to spend an extra $2k on a recorder.
 
Careful Sony, this is a promising camera... don't blow it.
 
Reduce the crappy jello and keep the price accessible.

"Already I am hearing reports that the rolling shutter on the A7S is really quite bad"
 
Source? I believe we are all very curious about rolling shutter skew in this camera compared to the known Canikons... 

Red Epic (M642) w/ Ti Canon Mount
16-35mm & 50mm L-Series Lens
 
 

I believe most of what's been mentioned above accounts for a "filmic" look... after all, the properties -and advantages- of footage shot on film and on a 35mm film camera are those, with variations depending on the film stock and lenses used.
 
But I believe there's something else that has to do with what Andy Lee has said. Some people look for narrow depth of field because otherwise it's not filmic. I call BS!!! or maybe just ignorance... Long establishing shots in traditional movies -modern filmmaking likes to break traditional rules- have mostly been shot on wide angle lenses and F11 or above. Descriptive shots are meant to show, and as much as possible. Regrettably -IMO-, you find many amateur videos with close ups shot with very wide angle lenses, long shots with teles and narrow depth of field, etc. that do not quite look right.
 
The fundamental item for a filmic look is a proper DP. After all, shows like House (Canon 5D) or Californication (7D) had entire season shot on cameras that are now are said to be not nearly good enough for a filmic look... yet a good DP, a Gaffer, a nice set of lenses and proper lighting made that footage look on TV nearly as good as 35mm film.

A product's price is SOLELY determined by what consumers are willing to pay. Manufacturing costs condition wether that product is actually viable or not in the market. Pricing is really subjective, it is a "notion" consumers have based on personal beliefs and preferences... that's why Blackmagic may be seen by other manufacturers as destructive, not disruptive.
 
Not long ago, a 35mm film camera with extras could go up to 300.000$. A Betacam could be bought for 30.000$ to 60.000$. Now cinema & broadcast gear seem to have dropped a zero... Our "notion" and subjective idea of what their price should be changed the minute we could have a 5D MKII or 7D -which we though was really cheap-.
 
BM is no real rival for Canon or Sony because they will sell thousands of units, not millions, and their lineup is pretty limted and "niche", but it has had an effect on how we see Canon prices now... Probably the manufacturing cost of a DSLR is lower than we think -like 100$- but if Canon, Sony or Nikon decide to gon the BM way with prices, they may actually change the whole concept of "how much it should cost" and hurt their future business...

Could it be that the new 7D becomes the first DSLR to implement the new h.265 codec in video mode?
 
That way it would not be 422 nor super-high-bitrate and certainly would be aimed at a different crowd than the Cinema EOS line... Same video file size but double the quality, slightly improved dynamic range and low light performance and maybe a headphone jack.
 
Sure they could add peaking and zebras (costs nothing really) + some other firmware related features, but delivering the same concept of "non-gradable" video with the much improved quality of h.265 would make it competitive in certain segments.

Why? C300 is still a hot rental and I understand C100 is selling pretty well, too.
 
I don't think they are too concerned with BM or Panasonic at the moment. BMPCC seems attractive (4K, high dynamic range, etc) but not very practical. Audio recorded separately, the inability to format media in camera or know the available rec time remaining, the price of SSDs, the internal battery, poor ergonomics and a crop factor of 1.86 (what they call s35 is not completely s35). So far BM cameras have felt like they've been released in beta stage (and firmware still feels like that)
 
Panasonic: excessive crop factor + known drawback of the m43 sensor, poor ergonomics with the added brick, the need for an additional recorder and respective batteries...
 
The C-series is probably overpriced and a little outdated specs-wise compared with these new releases but it is still one of the few ready to shoot "camera solutions" with a true top notch s35 sensor, known and tested dynamic range, XLR conectors, built-in ND filters and proper ergonomics.And they have the 1D C in case you need 4K and full frame.
 
Don't get me wrong, both the Panny and the BM sound like very nice cameras but right now I can imagine the people at Canon thinking "Unbelievably, we dodged another bullet!". When they released the C series there was  some 8-bit dissapointment and the feeling that competitors had a perfect chance win certain segments. Unexplainably, it still hasn't happened. No one has cared to release a C300 clone with some added/corrected features and a 5.000 € price range. Why??

If shooting 30p, I'd use 1/60 (180º shutter angle equivalent) unless flickering suggests otherwise.
 
Having said that, the only reason behind the shutter angle rule is that the footage has a natural motion blur, and by "natural" I mean what our eyes are used to seeing on the screen. A very high shutter speed (1/300) will produce a staccato effect with hardly any motion blur, desirable sometimes for aesthetic reasons (remember Saving Private Ryan?). A very low shutter angle (1/30) will produce a very "creamy" image with too much motion blur, almost ghosting (moslty undesirable).
 
Between 1/50 and 1/60 at 30fps there won't be a great difference...