hyalinejim

I already have an omnidirectional Rode Videomic (below) but I'm looking for something smaller so that I can slip my camera with lens and mic still attached into a small camera bag when I'm out and about with the family, but still get decent audio.

@MrSMW I picked up a Sigma 18-50 to use in crop mode based on your recommendation and it's great! Vignetting and distortion corrections work. AF is great (quiet as a mouse, I think it's actually totally silent). Build quality is good. Image looks good.

I'm going to use it as a family/holiday lens. Thanks for the tip! I never would have spotted it otherwise, as it's not a popular choice for Panasonic L mount. I think I got the only one in all of Ireland!

4 minutes ago, PannySVHS said:

Looking forward to using it for some photography soon

It's great for photos as you can one click the vignetting away in LR if desired. This is the one I have, which I think is the last version of it.

I guess if Peter Jackson couldn't get the world to embrace 48fps with The Hobbit then nothing will.

It's an interesting question though, whether there is something inherently pleasurable in viewing motion at 24fps, 180 degree shutter, or whether it just seems good by association. I remember reading that cinema arrived at that frame rate as it was the bare minimum at which motion looked fluid (and they didn't want to waste frames unnecessarily).

However, if cinema had evolved to use 48fps and greater than 180 degree shutter and we suddenly were presented with 24-180 would we think "Wow, that looks great!" or "Wow, that looks shit!"?

Because I'm a cheapskate who is recycling his 5D Mk II era EF glass on the latest and greatest Panasonic body thanks to the wonderful Sigma MC21 adapter, I can't take advantage of in-body camera corrections for things like vignetting and lens distortion. And sometimes I would like to do that. It's a lot of fun using the phase detect AF in the S5II to shoot wide open and get in-focus footage with my Canon nifty fifty. But wide open, that lens has something like 2.4 stops of vignetting. That can look really cool sometimes but other times it's not. I first noticed it when editing some interview footage shot against a plain white wall. I wanted to do a little bit of reframing and it looked kind of bad because of the heavy vignetting.

I know there are effects that attempt to add or remove vignetting, but I was interested to see if there's a way to do it perfectly, as you can when shooting RAW and using Lightroom. And there is!

First of all, I put a semi-opaque piece of white plastic over the lens, focused it to infinity, set the aperture to wide open, pointed it at the sky and did a manual white balance. The aim here, in terms of exposure is to get the brightest part of the image (the exact centre) at exactly 50 IRE. Or you can use ACES to make a linear change to the data to get it looking like this:

Then desaturate it, invert it and export as a 16 bit TIFF or similar.

Place this image file on a layer above your footage. Change blending mode to Linear Light and Opacity to 50%. Hey, presto! Bye bye, vignetting!

(Note: doing this in ACES linear gives perfect results, but it works pretty well in log Rec709 too - the center needs to be 50% IRE in both methods)

This is how it looks on real world footage.

Before:

After:

Obviously, this isn't as convenient as doing it in camera as you would need a different vignetting profile for each f stop. But it will allow you to finally shoot your Nocticron f0.95 or whatever wide open without that pesky vignetting! I'm not quite as flush as all that, but I'm quite pleased that my old Canon plastic fantastic that I had in a drawer behaves a little more like Panasonic's version which costs 4 times the price. And a simple Lens Distortion filter at -2 knocks back the distortion. Now if only there was a way of making the focus motor perfectly silent...

6 hours ago, mercer said:

I heard there were some issues with pink streaking

The issue was with light streaking when a bright area is adjacent to a dark area. I was able to reproduce it on my cam but never saw it in real world footage. I'm not sure if some cameras are affected more than others, but people were having conniptions about it on FB and YT.

I think it's such a pity that phase AF did not make into the GH6 as it would have reinforced the iconic GH line's standing.

6 hours ago, mercer said:

are there any good or creative videos floating around?

Ha ha! No! Not for the GH6 or any other camera these days. People just make videos about cameras, it seems 😂 Joking aside, there was Olan Collardy's launch video for the GH6.

I mainly use mine for work and holiday stuff, but I did shoot this with an Isco 36 and gave it a bit of filmic colour treatment, grain etc.

14 hours ago, MrSMW said:

Sigmas 18-50mm apsc

Do you have this lens? Just wondering if you can correct for distortion and vignetting in-camera on the S5II?

14 minutes ago, MrSMW said:

Sigmas 18-50mm apsc lens is tiny and incredible really with its 27-75mm FF equivalent.

Nice one! This would be great as a travel / family lens. I don't think I'd give up my 24-70 for work. In APSC mode it goes to 105, which is handy. I do get fed up of hand-holding it though, so something lighter and smaller would be fun to shoot with.

35-150 is a really nice focal range for shooting people, where a 24-70 isn't quite as long as I'd like.

I rarely go wider than 35mm unless it's a building. But I do find myself switching between 24-70 and 70-200 a lot. I think I'd have fewer lens changes with this focal range.

For decades, fixed lens compact film cameras were 35mm. It was considered wide enough to fit the people around the birthday table in the shot. 

24 minutes ago, FHDcrew said:

 

Lovely lighting here!

3 hours ago, kye said:

I get the impression that everyone is using the latest and (so called) greatest

I'm using an S5II as A cam and GH6 as B cam.

I don't think an 18-35 1.8 in APSC mode offers any advantages in terms of focal range, DOF, weight or size compared to a full frame 24-70 2.8. At 1.5x crop it's comparable to a full frame 27-52.5 f2.7.

On the plus side, it gathers more light (at the expense of more noise in APSC) and is cheaper. As a workhorse lens I would miss the extra range on the wide and long ends and would skip it in favour of a full frame workhorse.

The 17-55 Canon kit lenses look quite bad in my view: too much chromatic aberration and veling flare and nasties like that.

But for standard wide angle, APSC lenses are a great option. Many of them maintain image quality. I have a Tokina 12-24 and I find it very good. It's certainly better than cheap and moderately priced wide angles for full frame. And its usable in full frame mode for part of its focal range. This is a bit redundant if you have an APSC crop mode as it's the same effective field of view that you're replicating. But it's worth noting that at 24mm full frame it's almost distortion free and I sometimes switch to this lens instead of my workhorse for establishing shots that have straight lines.

Of course, if I paid the premium for lenses designed for my system, I could correct that distortion in camera...

Btw, slightly off topic but I'm loving the EF 70-200 f4 non-IS which I picked up second hand for peanuts. It's almost flawless in APSC mode - almost no vignetting. And it's way lighter than an f2.8 which is great for handheld.

4 hours ago, FoxAdriano said:

Which of the 2 filters do you like better?

I just see one file, 3 seconds long, with 2 clips in it?

Why not just post stills here? Might be simpler!

Personally, I would never, ever in a million years add sharpening to a video clip.

A Facebook user reported that phase AF works fine with a Viltrox adapter.

I'd be interested in the Fotodiox one with ND or any adapter with ND. Does anyone have any experiences of them in general? Aside from AF, that is, how is usability, compatibility, ND quality (colour cast, X pattern)

42 minutes ago, SRV1981 said:

What cameras would be good to search on YT for good baked in looks with some flexibility in look without having to grade log?

Canon WideDR profile is supposed to be precisely this. You could also look into cameras that allow you to bake in LUTs.

However, something like WideDR is like a halfway house between log and a standard profile. It's probably not quite contrasty enough so you're going to end up grading anyway. And as @TomTheDP says, grading log is not difficult if you have a good LUT.

The only way you're not going to be grading is if you're shooting with an absolutely lovely profile or baked in LUT and you nail exposure and WB every time. With log you can relax a bit while you're shooting.

1 hour ago, PannySVHS said:

the pure raw RAW image from the camera

Yes, I think the first shot of the sun coming up on the landscape has a fade in of something like sixty seconds. So like, it is indeed getting brighter in the scene but I'm also doing a one minute fade in from black. At the time I probably needed RAW for this. I think it was just before the GH5 10bit 422 era.

You mentioned in a DM that the original file downloaded from Vimeo is much cleaner. There is terrible banding in the streaming version for the first minute, but the footage itself is pristine.

What's interesting to me looking at it now is the softness of the footage as I'm used to looking at 4K (and I think the softnes looks great). I may have shot it at 2.8K or something, I'm not sure, for 2048 x whatever DCP delivery. But then I may even have blurred it a little bit! I know I definitely blurred the title and end credits as they looked a bit too sharp to me.

5 hours ago, mercer said:

only a few people share any of their work

At the risk of going off topic, I also remember when on video forums people would post videos that they had made!

It's the same everywhere else. On FB groups people post pics of their setup rather than something that they shot with it.

By the way I think it's worth pointing out that the original post of this topic was something along the lines of "does 14bit give noticeably better colour?". It's a perfectly valid question or talking point for discussion about one aspect of image quality, and has nothing whatsoever to do with lighting, story, frosted glass or frosted flakes or whatever somebody had for their breakfast... So to veer off into those topics is to miss the point of this thread.

Now, here's a video! This is the last project I shot on the 5D3. Hope you like slow cinema!

Have a look at this thread:

https://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?topic=24933.0

It's been a while since I shot with ML. But I  remember that when the lower bit depths were introduced I used them, as the slight image quality differences were generally unnoticeable to me.

26 minutes ago, deezid said:

red clipping is baked in

Woah that's nasty! I've never seen it that bad. Here's a clip of a lit tail light from my camera for reference.

27 minutes ago, deezid said:

the red clipping

What's the story here? Is the red channel clipping above or below and is it encoded as V-gamut or only when converted to V709?

I have noticed that reds are too dark and saturated with the V709 conversion.

23 minutes ago, jgharding said:

one sentence that answers my f-ing question

Exactly! And sometimes you wouldn't even need to open the link. The answer is in the search result summary. If it's a video, even a short one, you have to click past so much irrelevance from someone who's in love with the smell of their own farts before finally finding the answer (if it's even correct in the first place).

Honestly, it's getting harder and harder. I was reading something a while back on Reddit where someone said they usually skip to the second page of search results as the first is just trash!

Maybe they figured they would prefer people to read reviews on amazon.com instead of dpreview.com

Wow! I guess site founder Phil Askey got out at the right time. His Insta profile describes him as "now travelling and eating around the world". Here's a recent interview with him.

https://www.dpreview.com/interviews/5323285840/phil-askey-founders-interview

The comments towards the end are a little ironic now

"Amazon are giving the site everything it needs to continue to be the leading voice for everything photography related."

...until they pull the plug! The forums will be gone. I still have esoteric questions that a dpreview thread will answer. Are FB groups where it's at nowadays? They suck because they're insular, hard to read, and search. 

I imagine in the future, when these words are also gone, I'll be telling my kids "once upon a time there were internet boards and forums".

12 hours ago, j_one said:

I'm just not married to Panny's color for stills in comparison to Canikon

Are you talking about the default Adobe Color profile in Camera RAW / Lightroom?

If so, then I think all new cameras suffer from a slightly desaturated palette.

If you use a ColorChecker to create a custom profile for the S5ii you should get results that are a lot closer to the Adobe profile for 5D3.

If you're comparing Canon's own profiles (Standard, Neutral etc) versus Panasonic's - or Adobe's reverse engineered ones - then, yes, they are a lot nicer I think.