SleepyWill

​Funny, I heard the precise opposite argument over a coffee time discussion of this thread. My collegue whom I have a great deal of respect for was raving about how, for the same lens, FF picks up all the interesting, more distorted, less perfect and precise edges of the image circle, and there lies a unique aesthetic.

​Possibly because they don't want youtube being filled with footage that doesn't show off their camera in talented hands.

I strongly disagree. The effort required to keep a 100 year old camera working "as new" if applied to a 10 year old digital camera, and instead of mechanical, metalworking skills you have electronic engineering skills, will keep it running perfectly. I took my son out today to play with my 12 year old dsc f828, it was working as well as the day I first bought it, with a replacement battery.

I wasn't saying it was unusable, quite the opposite, but I was pointing out the drastic limitation of a shallow depth of field, thus the naievity of justifying larger sensor sizes by that alone. Unless you are a focusing savant, and they do exist, your subject will be rather stationary in the frame, especially if it is a human face and unless you like the effect of part of peoples faces/the thing that is the subject of your shot being out of focus, which personally gives me a headache, then you are going to be shooting small (depth wise) flat or very far away objects. Yes a human face side on at the end of a 200mm length filling less than a quarter of the screen is small. That's not a criticism. Your scene was gorgeous. But try watching something that makes you desperate to pick up your camera, the thing you turn to for inspiration. You will find a variety of shots, 95% of which are equally as easy to achieve on any sensor size, from iphone through to 70mm +, and you may find those other 5% of shots are in fact easier to achieve on a smaller sensor, depending on the style of the artist. FYI, my vote is for full frame, but the reason is perhaps surprising. It is the budget option. I know, I know, full frame cameras are very expensive when compared to crop frame cameras, but this is a genius of marketing over the consumers willingness to understand the product. If I want to achieve a specific look, it is almost certainly cheaper to achieve that look on a full frame sensor than a crop frame, because lens manufacturers lie when it comes to f numbers. They give the rating for the light gathered by a full frame camera, even on lenses designed only for crop frames. And because the consumer is either unwilling to do the simple maths - full open light gathered = diameter of lens opening/focal length or is willing to believe that their favourite lens manufacturer can somehow bend light into the front of their lens with magic. Thus that $1000 beautiful quality lens is not and f2.0 wide open, it's more like f4. Go look up the price for that lens that can cover a full frame, with the correct f number and see just how many hundreds of $ you can save to get a similar lens. Then work out how many lenses you need to buy before it would have been cheaper to go full frame from the beginning. With products like the A7s, it's getting close to 1 lens. The real kicker is that if you leave the crop frame system to go full frame, your lovely, overpriced lenses won't cover the sensor. So you have to hand over more $ to the scum who lied in the marketing material in the first place. It's important to note, not every company does this all the time, but every company has done this at one time or another. Of course, in the real world, you aspire to have a variety of cameras with a variety of sensor sizes and technologies. Then, no matter the look you are after, you can choose the tool that will achieve it the easiest. Because that's all sensor size is, a tool. I find internet discussions on the merits of claw hammers vs wooden mallets far more relevant and interesting, which is why my contribution to the debate is often tongue in cheek.

​Which is why so many full frame enthusiasts shoot very small, stationary objects?

I want to buy some lenses, PM'd you

​Er, yeah, did you get mine from before christmas?

​What shonky productions have you worked on where the youngest, or any inexperienced person was allowed to play with cameras or computers unsupervised? And you are aware that files can be recovered simply and easily since about 1995, unless the same morons who let the teaboy play quake on the production computers also let him take a used card and put it back into a camera and start recording with it. If your production has the budget to shoot film, then your production has the money to not have the most inexperienced wally on set touching things with delete buttons and the budget to have undelete software, raid harddrives and a full days worth of cards, with a box to put the used cards in that's locked.

I've seen some less great footage when you have a lot of the screen in focus - but then I'm stuck away from my computer right now and can only view this over public wifi on a surface pro 2, not the finest way to watch youtube! Any chance we could confirm or debunk this? This is what I saw: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdoUTiG8XOM, look at the trees at 0:16ish (I'm on a ward, I can't turn up the volume either so maybe the guy explains this?). I'm guessing the new codec uses out of focus areas to heavily compress, maybe?

Well, I wasn't bothering you for "making pans traditionally" (Whoosh) until you bothered me by insinuating that I was lying about using them creatively and was in fact covering up for a lack of skill. And, by the way, shooting for a proper pan in post is really difficult, way more difficult than a "traditional pan" because you can't see what you are doing. In a really complicated move, the type where you maybe have to "traditionally pan", slide and especially crane your shot at the same time, keep appropriate focus, move lights and shims etc you may as well try to get the shot with a blindfold. It has to be planned so carefully and compared to a simple traditional pan is really difficult to nail, at least to any kind of quality, something you won't find out until after you've done a rough edit - which can take 15-20 minutes if you are fully hooked up on location, otherwise, you're coming back tomorrow to get it right! But yeah, I won't bother you any more about it!

Ahh, here we have the perfect example of a "technician" who doesn't understand how fundamentally different a pan is to a "pan in post", doesn't understand how different they can be made to feel, doesn't comprehend the mechanics of the moves, how differently spaced objects move differently and is happy to throw sarcasm, degrading the work of someone whose work he is neither familiar with or knows who he is. Please, tell me about how uncreative my work is, when you don't know what work I do nor where you have seen it before, and I'll tell you all about, in excruciating detail, why sometimes, I choose in preproduction a "pan in post" because a regular pan just doesn't match my vision. Then you can learn something new and apply that to your "by the numbers" music videos - see I can make a strawman too!

Oh, well, if YOU tried it!!! Obviously you are the arbiter of creativity, and all artists must run their techniques past you first! Tell me, I'm painting an oil for my sisters Christmas present, will you allow me to use the Bistre technique, or must I stick to Venetian?

Oh great, so it puts strain on the processor in the camera having to do the intensive calculations in real time, increasing the heat generated, decreasing the cameras ability to set it's processor to tasks that can't be performed better in post (Like speeding up the reading of the sensor and thus reducing rolling shutter). I think I'd let my 5960x do it, to be honest, with my choice of algorithm.

Hmm, you seem to not understand that adding a "camera move" of 1080p over a 4k source is not something you can replicate by moving your camera. Think about when you move the camera, unless you have it mounted on a gimbal directly over the centre of focus of your lens, when you slide, tilt or pan your camera, things move across the screen at a different rate depending on their distance from the centre of focus. Adding a "pan in post" is not the same as panning the camera, it creates a different visual sequence, a different feel to the film and a different aesthetic that cannot be replicated in camera, unless you set up another camera broadcasting live onto a screen which you then shoot with a second camera... that screen would need to be 4k at least though... I'm sure you're about to tell me that the differences in a pan in post and a real life pan are theoretical but negligible, which is what a lot of people used to say about the differences between a dolly and a zoom shot, until talented cinematographers used each of them to great effect.

I think it takes far more talent to make 4k look good. That's why I still work in 1080p :p

Only??? Think of it this way, if you stand face to face with someone, noses only 2cm apart, and you move your head forward until your noses touch, it's only a change in viewpoint of 2cm but it makes a dramatic impression on the passive viewer (the other person) who will probably pull back from you. Now stand 200 meters away and dolly yourself 2 meters towards them, bet they hardly noticed you moved. It's a bit of a fluffed simile, but it makes the point quite nicely, that it's not the magnification that is important, it's what you do with it. 50mm is a nice portrait length, on super35, 150 is a very long telefocal length. So you can have a really dramatic change in viewpoint with "only" a 3x magnification (and when you really get down to it, how many times the wide end can be divided into the long end is a really quite odd way to judge a lens). Also remember every lens is a compromise, the wider a range of focal lengths any single lens covers, the more the lens is going to be compromised to deal with the optical effects - how can one lens adequately control both balloon distortion at the wide end and pincushion distortion at the long end, answer is with absolutely insanely expensive optics or it just doesn't but balanced some balloon with some pincushion and hope the middle is about right (and that is only one of many compromises). This is why you will find the better quality lenses have a lower magnification, they specialise in their range and do it well. If you want one lens that rules them all, one lens that finds them, one lens to bring them all and in the darkness binds them, one single lens that covers every possible focal length, then why would you buy an interchangeable lens camera in the first place. They are fundamentally designed to take advantage of the higher quality optics while retaining the flexibility to be able to shoot a wide range of focal lengths. The compromise, it takes a few seconds to put a different one on. Also, trust me on this, the Samsung 18-200 is not a pro lens and it is not a movie lens, it's a lens designed to have a giant x11 on the packaging to sell it.

Now all we need to do is persuade video game makers that setting the frame rate of their game to sub 60 fps doesn't make it a "cinematic experience", it makes it jerky and nauseating to watch and we will have a full house!

This is brilliant advice, I'm in a wheelchair which can drastically limit a lot of my options (try setting up a "pocket" dolly solo from a chair without using your legs to understand!!) but give me a gorillapod and I am sat in the worlds smoothest, most comfortable slider/tripod :D there is always a bright side!

Thanks guys! Feeling a lot better today!I have quite a collection of lenses from other systems already, they will certainly be being pressed into service - I think for this camera, I will want it to fit into a small billingham or similar, so I will probably take my sigma 18-35 and four other small lenses, probably my nokton 35, my hopefully soon to be mine dog schidt (speaking of which, Richard did you get my enquiry email?) and probably two natives - the reason being, autofocus for photoghraphy and weather sealing - I'm thinking the 16-50 and possibly the 20 or 30 pancakes, depending on the image they produce. If I need a tele, I'll swap something out for my trusty old STF 135. Then again, how can I leave my superwide samyang out... maybe a slightly bigger bag! I know it's a lot of repeated lengths, but each lens has such a different character that I couldn't swap them out. Got plenty of standard and lightweight rigs, audio gear (endless mics), sliders, tripods and heads etc but most cameras have one thing which can be really helpful, my BMPCC really benefits from a coldshoe for example, something I wouldn't have anticipated before buying, and instead of a mattebox, I use a lee filter system with formatt glass, again something I wouldn't have anticipated in advance having always found vari-nd's acceptable before. So yeah, it's less about the basic gear (though if you're here asking a similar question and this is all new to you, these guys really know what they are talking about) and more about what idiosyncrasies the nx line has, as I am woefully ignorant of them at the moment.

Well, that not only demonstrates just how sickly I am, but also makes me even more excited! Small flange length and no mirror to conflict with protrusions = even more flexible system. :D

OK, so I am excited about an SLR camera for the first time since the 5D Mk 2. I'll be honest, I am full of flu right now and I'm hoping to benefit from the research of others so I get a headstart on my own :) So with that in mind, what would be your ideal partners for an NX1? What glass would you mount on it, what gems are there in the native lineup, etc etc

It would be a lot more conclusive if the two pics were lit better and framed identically

I wonder what percentage of sales were made directly or indirectly because of the e-mount flange distance? I suspect that without it, we wouldn't have sony mirrorless cameras, but translucent lens minolta mount slr's.

A hackneyed old trope that I suggest is not true in 99.999999999% of teachers, lecturers and professors - believe it or not, there are some people who educate because they love to educate, because they love the working environment, get real job satisfaction from helping kids and because they are sick of associating with the type of scumbags who inhabit the industry who have no qualms about, say, taking advantage of an inexperienced person, trying to persuade them to work for free whilst showing them nothing more than how to work a coffee machine. They are certainly not doing it for the money, prestige, low working hours or ease, I can promise you that! If you do choose to work for someone for free, be really, really careful. All that being said, be really careful about choosing a film course, there are plenty of really bad ones and very few good ones and don't expect to come out bustling with contacts and a relevant portfolio, you almost certainly wont.

But is it what photographers have been waiting for, or us? Either way, exciting news!