SleepyWill

The act of converting 4k output to 444 will reduce it to 1080p. If you perform a digital zoom, you will have to bring the resolution even lower. It will be the exact same quality as if you digitally zoomed 1080p footage anyway, except it will be 444, which you won't notice. And trust me, the added work in using an external recorder is a drop in the ocean compared to the hell you will put yourself through by adding all these processes in post!

Really? You would choose to needlessly throw out colour data? I suppose if you don't have a 10bit monitor & graphics pipe, you really need to! I'm fairly sure you can do this, but is it worth it for 444??

In theory, you can use the GH4 to get 1080p 4:4:4 footage at 10bits. In practice however, having to work with 4k files and adding a really frustrating and time consuming step into your workflow renders this relevant to very few people, currently. http://www.eoshd.com/2014/02/discovery-4k-8bit-420-panasonic-gh4-converts-1080p-10bit-444/

To me, this question is easy, it would have to be the camera that doesn't prevent me getting the shots I want. Many cameras are just to big and vulnerable to water for my style, even mirrorless and phones can be too big. Which leaves me with using a gopro black 4. Of course I would miss getting beautiful images, manual controls etc, but at least I would never have to restrict my vision!

What camera are you / will you be putting on it over the next 5 years? What will you need to do with it? Travel? Hike with it on your back? Can you save a touch longer and spring for a sachtler ace? Honestly, the jump at that point in quality from similarly priced rivals through to the range you are asking about is really that significant! If you really can't, how about the Manfrotto MDeVe 755XB?

The venn diagram of video cameras would give you an overlap of seriously good quality and ease of use but it would be encompassed by the large "expensive" circle. Unless you have hundreds of thousands of dollars to throw at your camera, you are going to have compromises, and ease of use is a selling point reserved for really expensive cameras. Of course ease of use is subjective and one mans sony tri controls is another mans C100 ergonomics.

Think of it this way: The speedbooster bends the image projected by the attached lens into a smaller circle. So there is a trade-off going on, the image the lens projects can only cover a smaller sensor. On the positive side, however, the photons that form the projection are being bent closer together, causing the same amount of light transmitted to concentrate onto a smaller area, thus brightening the projected image. This causes the lens to act as if it had a wider aperture than in reality it has. Likewise with the field of view, that wasted bit of the projected image that falls bejond the edge of your sensor, now is projected onto it, having the effect of reducing that crop factor. If you have larger lenses than your sensor, there is no trade-off as you are just utilising wasted light and image, but you wouldn't want to put a lens that only just covers your sensor through one, it would give you a circle of an image projected onto a black background. In this diagram, a subject being projected into the top left hand corner of your FX sensor without the speedbooster is now being projected into the top left hand corner of your DX sensor with the speedbooster, thus negating the "crop factor" Hope this helps!! FYI, lens extenders do the exact same but in reverse - they take that image circle and make it larger, thus giving your sensor a greater "crop factor" but the trade-off, as I'm sure you are familiar with, is that the light gathered by the original lens is dispersed over a wider area, so less light hits each photosite on the sensor, so the image is dimmer, and the lens acts like it is "slower" while gaining a longer FOV reach.

Indeed he is, I had to triple check to make sure they hadn't already been mentioned! Joke aside, they look gorgeous, I only heard about them last week and I already know what I'll be ordering on payday!

http://dogschidtoptiks.co.uk/ Sidles off, hoping no-one saw me leaving that there....

Just to go into the showing the kit in the reel idea - I'm not suggesting that it's the gear itself that will sell showing a tripod with a camera on it isn't what I mean - it's showing people a behind the scenes glimpse of the camera being used, showing you working the camera on the tripod instead. I believe that they are interested in that, the actual process that they are paying for. I appreciate it is difficult to get a truly candid depiction of this, especially to your standard, but it's not dishonest to get candid shots of an actor using your gear (your wife for example). Regarding the "fancy shot" - it doesn't really have to be actually fancy, but, well I guess a parlour trick, something that someone who didn't have the specific knowledge of how to achieve it wouldn't be able to figure it out - recently we've had shift-tilt "miniatures", drones impossibly and dangerously close to their subject (long lens), high speed car chases that rarely exceed 10mph, super slomo, hyperlapse, etc etc. Just a really well pulled focus does the trick too! Back in the day, I used to replicate crane shots with the tripod trick, before every daytime tv show used them to excess. Just some food for thought really, if it feels wrong, then absolutely go with your gut!

That is some spectacular footage. When I first watched it, I was only interested in looking at the difference between the cameras, but I didn't even notice the first one, I was that captivated by what I was watching, no exaggeration!!! It is very obvious to me that you have a great eye and I really wish I could tag along with you to watch you shoot, just to see how you pick your shots. I think the one that impressed me the most was towards the beginning of the reel, the shot of a train in an urban setting (London?) travelling over a bridge, bathed in an amber light (morning?). It is the type of establishing shot that I see made so mundane and dull at every level of the profession, yet you took a really complex scene and made it look, as others have said, like a living painting. Absolutely brilliant. I don't think the reel is too long, but I have to agree, the tone is downbeat, which may not sell you to every potential customer. There are just a few things I personally would include, that for better or worse seem to be popular with clients - shots of really nice looking gear being used, a few really crisp "HD ad" sharp images - remember how they advertised HD TV's on an SD screen, just a few like that, bright colours too. Lastly, I would include a shot that I refer to as the breath-taker - a shot which people (and remember the public have a vastly inflated sense of their ability behind a camera) do not feel that they could replicate, even if they knew how it was done. Doesn't matter if it's a trick and in fact it's the easiest shot in the reel, and it often is! But don't think that I'm suggesting you add all that to this reel, make several so you can choose which one to show which potential client. This one I think will sell you very well to very many people, especially to people who are perhaps in the industry already and looking to hire someone on a project because they will really understand what you've achieved here! Also, because I believe you want some constructive criticism (if not, ignore this paragraph) - I found the intake of breath as the very first person to talk fades in a bit jarring and could be feathered a little more. So apart from that tiny nit-pick, I think this is amazing!

Wow there, tiger - some of us are actually disabled on this board and while I have very limited motor function and my son has severe learning disabilities, neither of us struggle with the ergonomics of my A7s. Even with our (part time) care, we are fully capable of using the camera as well as anyone, so don't tar us with the "too incapable to use it" brush. :D :D :D

It doesn't work like that, you can't cherry pick one video and ask to compare it against the average output of other camera's. Otherwise GoPro would have Arri by the short and curlies right now, what with the hero 3 black being used in features and edited into Arri footage.

Surely that's more to do with the chips soldered to the sensor than the sensor itself, presumably with a lot more space in the camera, there will be room for better airflow management, heatsinks etc which will allow them to solder faster, hotter running silicon giving slo-mo and/or opening up the possibility for reduced jello.

amateur - from French amateur "lover of," from Latin amatorem (nominative amator) "lover," agent noun from amatus, past participle of amare "to love" Give me an hour talking to an amateur any day over a professional who uses the word as an insult. Couldn't agree more with your point!

Spamming unrelated threads is really frustrating for other users. Please stop. You were heard the first time.

Not quite - the circle projected by the 200mm lens is large enough to cover a larger sensor, but the actual sensor is much smaller than the projected image. When the sensor reads the image, it only reads the bit covered by the sensor, giving it something similar to a digital zoom (though you'd be hard pushed to find a lens with worse resolution than your sensor, so no problems like you get with digital zoom) but you are very much still looking at a picture made by a 200mm lens. If field of view is all you are worried about, then yes, you can equate the 200mm crop frame with a different lens, but if you are also worried about how much space is in focus, how compressed the background is, how close to the camera your subject and the lighting on it is, then you really need to drop the equivalence because it will mislead you greatly.

Well, you could keep adding speedbooster elements ad infinitum onto bigger and bigger lenses, adding £500 a pop each time, but presumably the cost is going to get out of control very quickly, because it's not just the speedbooster element, but the larger format lens in front of it each increment - every m4t lens would actually be gathering for APC, every APC lens gathers for full frame, every FF lens gathers for medium format etc etc, sending the cost through the roof. The last group in every lens almost certainly does a very similar job to a speed booster, so you could think of them as already having them built in! I'm sure if, say Olympus thought they could sell a line of super wide fast lenses at £3000+ a pop, they would have already put them in to production! All in all, a separate adapter seems the best idea all round!

This kind of practice is standard in many industries. Is it anti-consumer? Maybe, but at least let me present an argument that hasn't been talked about yet - you're an electronics manufacturer, you have designed a range of products. Because your design team are competent, they have designed them to share as many components as possible. Now you have two products in particular in that range, they perform the same function, but one does it with 4 times as much precision as the other. You talk to your quality control team and ask, what grade of components does each need. The more precise product needs grade 1 components, say your QC team, otherwise we hit a 7.5% failure rate after 6 months of use which breaches our internal quality. The less precise does not exhibit a breach in quality failure if we use grade 2 components. So the manufacturing process begins. You specify a batch of whatsits which are the component in question and you manufacture them. It costs you £1000 for the batch and you get 20 grade 1's and 80 grade 2's. You send the grade 1's to the machine assembling the more precise product, the grade 2's to the other assembly line. Products get made and you talk to your marketing department. What can we sell these for, you ask. Well, how much do they cost to produce they reply - well, how do you price the whatsits? Are they all £10 each or should you skew the cost of production to represent the different grades? As you get 4 times as many grade 2's, maybe you should charge 4 times as much for the grade 1's, giving you a cost of £25 ish for the grade 1's and £6ish for the grade 2's. Now imagine you have 3 such components in your product, your precise product has a manufacturing cost of £75 vs £18 for the less precise version. Cost at retail £300 for the precise one, £72 for the less precise one. What happens if a canny customer works out how to unlock the precise settings on your cheaper, but "identical" less precise product. They get the £300 version for £75, but 7.5% of people who do this are going to break their devices in 6 months, an unacceptable failure rate to you. I'm not saying this is what is happening, but if you put yourself in the shoes of a manufacturer, you can see how decisions such as these are made and you can understand that the true reasons for them are a little more complex that pure profiteering.

Got to agree with the others - pop the $3000 into a business bank account (a free one!). Get out and shoot 3-6 demo productions, organise yourself as if you are actually working for a client. Find a local printer and get a couple hundred flyers printed and, bundled with your demo reel on cd, distribute to the type of clients you are targeting. Invest in the little stuff: clamps, gaffer tape, reinforced tape, tape that doesn't damage walls, clips, sandbags, pegs, card for flagging & bouncing, a cheap large diffuser (shower curtain), spare cables, etc etc etc. With the $2500 you have left, you will be able to rent or buy random stuff that you find you need as and when you need it! Your kit looks solid, though I personally would upgrade the tripod, but after you have produced your demo reel and have secured your first paying customer!!!

On the budget end, YN-600's are very good in their price bracket.

Depends on where the work is destined to be shown, anyone making video for youtube through to HD broadcast can probably make do with 2k monitors (EDIT: or less). If your work is for a 4k screen/projection then you should be reviewing the actual frames, not an electronic approximation of them mushed into a different resolution.

Thanks Clayton, I have significant memory problems and I had completely forgotten what the thread was about. It's people like you who make life for the disabled that much easier, you clearly have no interest in the camera, yet you suffered through the entire post and then the entire thread merely to help me out! Most people with no interest in the camera just ignored the post, yet you, Champion among men, Hero among lessers, God among sheep, Giant among hobbits, Poet among the illiterate, you sir are just amazing, wonderful and epic. I hope my gratitude makes up for the time and effort you otherwise needlessly and selflessly put in.

I've seen his work... it's fine, competent but his use of colour is certainly nothing to write home about, it's clean, crisp, clinical and.... yawn... devoid of any expression what so ever. Cinematography by numbers - if it wasn't so well lit, I would assume his portfolio was shot on "full auto". Apart from his medal of honour video, where he tries to do something interesting and lets just say, he's no Jeunet.

That was absolutely brilliant! The writing, the acting and presumably the direction, the camerawork and the lighting were all spot on!