j_one

Sigma recently spoke about a new camera to be released in 2020 with a full frame Foveon sensor. No news on if low light performance will be improved, or if it will shoot video yet. 
 
 

mlvapp is the one you want

I think it will turn more heads once it gets raytracing and bug fixes. It has great potential, the developer has tons of cool content showcasing previs work on his IG

I am a bit of a Matt Workman fan (the creator of cine tracer) because of his old YouTube channel where he explained the lighting for famous movies and music videos. Unfortunately it was taken down because of copyrighted material.
When it comes to Cine Tracer, it looks very promising with ray tracing. If it works halfway decent I think I'll get it. I'm used to making maps for old shooter games and the process seems similar which should make it rather fast as soon as you're familiar with the tool.

You might be able to get a good deal on the 'bay if you're a little patient. I just won an auction on the Micro WITH an Olympus 17mm 1.8 bundled for $555, and I immediately resold the lens for $250 and used that to put together a solid rig (Smallrig cage/monitor mount, wooden rosette handle, NP-F bridge with NP-F batteries) that makes it very functional and usable. It's like a little baby Red camera now.

You need to post in this forum more often. You always have something helpful whenever you post here.

In the comparison's I've seen with Red vs Alexa, the red clipped the highlights faster. Wasn't their latest sensors though. 

Dynamic range is just very subjective. For example comparing my XT3 to my BM pocket(og not 4k) they both have pretty similar dynamic range, the XT3 being cleaner. The Pocket shadows look nicer though once recovered, there is just more color you can get back into them even though its noisier. My experience at least. 

Don't get me wrong, slo mo option is nice to have. But I just feel like finally, and only now we have small cameras available which don't bring along that feeling of missing something compared to high end cinema cameras or photo capabilities of those same small cameras. I'm surrounded by Alexas and Reds though my job at a rental house, but those cameras are not meant to be carried around by single shooter without a crew. And while testing various DSLRs and now mirrorless I'm finally finding these to reach the level where they are so good as to not miss the picture from their big brothers anymore. As for the slo mo, I'd be much happier if the manufacturers would implement under-over cranking in fine steps. Right now it seems that BMPCC 4K is the only one doing this.

I shoot a lot of timelapse. Let me know if you have any questions. I'm not too bad at it.
 
 

I shot with an xt3 and an nx1 on a recent project, and while the xt3's footage was visibly better in 4k 24 when i pixel peeped, i really can't say it really made a difference for my project. Of course having that quality in higher frame rates and a faster readout are real benefits, but even the nx1 peaked for diminishing returns in terms of color, compression, and dynamic range. At this point the biggest upgrades i want are for workflow: timecode, ergonomics, false color, and such.

I think you need to reread my post without a pair of defensive glasses on. I have not pigeon-holed anybody nor anything else that makes me look silly.

I just added a couple of thoughts to what could be a meaningful discussion about the problem all people that hang out here, including nerds like myself, face.
We risk the chance to be "home blind" and forget about the real people out there, you know the audience, the non nerds... They are at the end of the day our bosses. What they like goes.
But to answer your questions, yes they do, its starting to drift a little. But that's normal with any trend.
If we look at the last 20 years so what you call "heavy-handed grading, blurry images, harsh lighting and distracting out of focus backgrounds" have been considered "professional" looking.

That's merely because the real non nerd people haven't been able to get those looks with their own equipment. Its been unobtainable and different = professional an likable.
When they hire someone to shoot video they want something different than what they can get them self.
Before it was easy. Just use a tripod and good audio and you kicked their ass.

Today the world is different. Everyone and their cat has a tripod or stabilized lens. A large sensor and a decent mic.
So today we must once again look at what we can offer to our clients and audience.
But there are of course a few things that never go out of style. Story, good music, great acting, good exposure and to some degree contrast.
People seem to enjoy contrast.
But please note that I haven't even commented on the video at hand nor the response to it.
I just commented that contrast isn't always a bad thing and shadows can be both crushed or not and still look good.

Why do you think every new camera that's ever been mentioned on this forum gets a dedicated thread with people bashing the crushed shadows.
Just to a make a new thread a few weeks later celebrating the shadow detail?
Its not because Panasony doesn't know that "nerds" like raised shadows. Its because they know that the big chunk of non nerds out their like it their way.
And they are more important.
 

I love my X-T2. I've only had it for about a month and used it mainly for stills so far. Planning on doing more video soon. I carefully chose my lenses around their IS zooms for video use and their weather-sealed primes for photo. Here's a couple shots I got in Hollywood. 

Nice vids from the archive!
I'm the same, I don't like rigging up my cameras. I want them as bare bones a possible. Some of the FS5/7Q rigs I've seen are like houses, not my kettle of fish. 
Yes, I have an Inferno but I can't find an ergonomic way of mounting it on the camera. So I just run it off the SDI and let the other guy hold it for monitoring. 
Recently, I shot a music video on the A6500 with this criteria, to see what would happen:
Completely handheld.  Only A6500, 18-105mm gear used. No lights, No grip. Nothing.  Autofocus only.  Mostly 4k, and some 100fps.  At the time, I had an FS5 in the bag too with a bunch of Sigma lenses. Didn't use them. 
A6500's dim screen and rolling shutter was annoying, but I got round it. 
 
 

I remember a story many years ago when home studio recording first started to take a hold and Tom Robinson (ask your Dad, kids) was talking about why he'd got a new fangled (at the time) Tascam Portastudio to record his demos on. His reply has always stuck with me because he said that when a band reaches a certain level of success the first thing they do is get flight cases for their gear and cables that you could tie the QE2 to the quayside with. This all then has to go into storage. So when he felt like writing a song, he'd have to call a roadie, call a van hire place, get the roadie to go to the storage place to pick up the gear, book a rehearsal room (because the flight cases made it impractical to have in the house), drive to the rehearsal room, wait for the gear to be unpacked and plugged in and then he could start to jam and record ideas. At which point he'd forgotten what it was he wanted to do and had lost the energy to do it anyway. With the portastudio, he could just switch it on and get on with it.
I see a lot of parallels here too.
The only thing thats inspired me to pull the RED Epic out of its case since I got it back was to do the side by side to tune the GX80 profile.
It felt like having to go to the corner shop in a Sherman tank.
In my real day job I have to take the same 'get the big clunky stuff out' approach because there is an expectation to deliver a set standard both in terms of image quality but pretty much in terms of content too. Coverage is what its all about to be honest. And the demands of that type of efficiency directs you to a certain type of kit. All of which means I'm about as creative as the guy sitting next to me who has also got exactly the same sort of kit (with a 50/50 shot on the brand). Which means to say, not very creative. Or certainly not a massive differential in creativity. We're looking at the same scene and covering it with the same kit so inevitable we're going to be much of a muchness creatively. But the creativity can sometimes be forced upon you (by equipment failure usually!) so you have to do something with what you've got and that triggers the resourcefulness response that is so often at the root of creativity.
Being in a situation of "I can't make what I want" often makes you find better ways to make what you actually need.
After wrestling with the Epic and then putting the same lens on the GX80 and shooting the same thing, I was left (with a bit of twiddling) with these two test charts.
So, could I shoot this same scene with a camera that cost less than the media of the other one?
Yes.
Could the same be said the other way round about what I could shoot with the little camera?
Yes but not without calling the roadie and hiring the van and getting the flight cases and, well you get the point.
 

GX85 has nice colors for sure. Shot this footage with contrast and saturation at 0, -3sharp, -5noise, in 1080p with automatic shutter and -1/3stop ,
oh, and accidentally with ISO 1250
 

Man, I suffer in silence when I read some stuff here (I guess I'm masochist to keep reading it). But this one is too much for me... On what ground do you think it should cost 2,500$ ? Please tell me. Do you know a video camera costing that price and doing this ? And don't tell me blackmagic please (fan of the brand, but their cameras aren't in the same price range and they are way less reliable and easy to use, and no autofocus, no support) Do you know  a pro 1/3 sensor camcorder costs more than 2500$ (Sony, Canon) ?. It might not be the camera for you, that I totally understand but with all due respect, I think your comment is from a spoiled naive non pro shooter who doesn't know the requirements of pro work and on being on the field with reliable equipment.
People always complain, at some point it's just ridiculous. They want new technology right away, but when Sony releases a new camera too soon, they think theirs just became obsolete and hate Sony for it. In the mean time they blame Canon for holding off. And now they unleash something very unexpected from them, still complaints. Same goes for bitrates. Canon files take too much space, now they want that kind of bitrates in their gh5, and they're suddenly ok with the file size. And all that to end up posting videos on Youtube (which is not a bad thing but just all those concerns are irrelevant for that type of delivery).
Anyway, this camera seems to be freaking great. Canon used to deliver not on specs but on the field and with the image quality/mojo. Now this one also has the specs ! Granted an intermediate codec is more than necessary for a camera at this price point, but it will come down the line anyway.
Pffiou, sorry I had to get it out of my chest  Now I can burn in hell !

When learning still photography, I spent a lot of time (and money) buying LED lights to replace strobes (best bang-for-buck strobes I found were the Einstein E640s, fantastic light output and quality (one strobe can easily overpower the sun in broad daylight at the beach). However they don't fire 100% of the time (recommend perhaps Profoto as a step up or if doing full-time stills and traveling, etc.)). Even with gels and a light meter I couldn't get the LEDs which weren't great from the factory to produce nice skintones. Spending a lot more on Dracast LEDs, which are built like tanks, got closer, but they still didn't look great for skintones (magenta bias). The lower cost Aputure LSx series LED panels finally produced great skintones, as did the spot source LED Fiilex (fantastic skintones though not a great bang-for-buck and relatively low light output per dollar, plus the fan can be audible in recordings (it's pretty quiet, but not silent)).
We talk a lot about how Canon has too much red, and red objects don't look right, etc. The reason Canon does this, is to make sure skintones look good. However for certain lights and conditions Canon's red bias can look no so good and must be fixed in post.
To get a better idea of what camera and light makers have to deal with: https://www.provideocoalition.com/doestlcireallywork/ . CRI and even TLCI aren't great predictors of light quality. I can say I agree- only testing the lights has shown whether they work well for skintones/color accuracy. I recently replaced LED bulbs in my studio office to help make shooting video from my desk look better. The new Hypericon LED bulbs rated at CRI 95 were purchased to improve the light/color over these Crees which IIRC were 80-85 CRI. To the light meter, both bulbs have a magenta bias, but to the eye (and cameras) the bias is green. The CRI 95 Hypericons looked no better on camera than the older ~80-85 CRI Crees. At least they use 2W less power, 16W vs 18W.
What's the deal with red and skintones? http://www.leapfroglighting.com/why-the-led-r9-value-isnt-important/  (read the article- they are actually saying the LED R9 (red) is the most important for skintones).
If you are having trouble getting great skintones indoors, take a closer look at your lights, especially if using LED or fluorescent lights (my first lights used fluorescent bulbs designed for photography/film and they still had a green bias: skintones didn't look that great). If on an ultra low budget, tungsten with china balls is still perhaps the best bang-for-buck (provided all the lights in scene are tungsten).

So as some already know, I recently purchased a 5D3 primarily to shoot Magic Lantern Raw. Well this week I started my first short film with it. It was definitely a learning experience but I really don't know of any camera where I would have achieved such pleasing images. I also purchased the Canon 24-70mm f/4 lens and I am consistently blown away by what a great lens it is and the OIS is so damn good, even at 70mm, that the majority of my short, thus far, has been shot handheld.
With the recent 4K Raw developments, I figured I would post some pros and cons in case somebody else is looking to pick one up.
Well the first pro is that shooting Raw could not be simpler with it. Set up Raw histogram with the overexposure hint and when it shows your color channels are starting to clip or the word "over" appears on the histogram, then just dial back your exposure a touch.
Another pro is that there are a bunch of people on this forum still shooting with the 5D3 and everybody is helpful. If you have a problem about any aspect of the process or workflow, there are plenty of other ML shooters around here that go out of their way to answer even the stupidest of my questions... not nearly as daunting as the ML forum.
Now a couple cons... you need a bunch of cards... or a computer and hard drive to offload your footage... 12 minutes on a 64GB cards gets filled quickly. Even with 3 cards, and trying to be conservative with my shots and shot ratios, I still ran out of space 3/4 of the way through my second day of shooting.
Converting the footage is a bit tedious. The RawMagic route of converting the MLV files to CDNG is fairly fast but then you still have to process the footage through Resolve or After Effects before really seeing what you have. I really like the MLRawViewer program, but although you get to preview your footage, the conversion is slow and after I updated my Mac to Sierra, the version I have does not work with it, but I believe there is a newer version,  so hopefully it will work then.
I guess that's about it for now, so I'll leave you with a couple graded screen grabs, from a couple shots I briefly messed around with yesterday...

Was on a makeup shoot the yesterday and decided to test how well I could use the 3K Raw mode on a job. The primary camera was the C100MK2 and after I captured the main shots I broke out the 5DMK3 to experiment.  I captured about an hour worth of footage in 3K.  Resolutions higher than HD are not recommended on productions until the liveview is fixed.  You can only effectively shoot static shots or shots that move but stay within a fixed depth of field range as the choppy grey/color liveview is nearly impossible to use to follow focus on moving subjects.  

Thanks for keeping us updated. The mjl forum can be daunting for non tech people just getting interested in it. It's hard to figure out the nomenclature. Would be great to know when or if ever this will be ready for production by having a usable live view, playback functions and hdmi out monitoring for resolutions around 3k. She looks nice in your video. Besides Arri some of these down res 3k are the best 2k images I've seen on the internet. Pretty unbelievable for a five year old camera you can get used for under 2 grand.

On my walk to drop off some gear at the rental house, I ran into 5 teenagers filming.
I of course wanted to ask what they were up to, camera, lens etc, and it ended up being a very enlightening experience (15mins of).
They are vloggers and instagramers here in Finland with over 100 000 followers/ subscribers in each medium. 
I, indeed, was the old fart (all 37 of my years on earth) they were humouring but they were super pleasant and made my day.
But to the point, all they had as 'gear' was an olympus, native pancake lens, and a tiny plastic tripod. Their main goal was to walk around the city and produce content.
I metioned I had some stuff like the Zhiyun Crane, like it was impressive... but it turns out that kind of stuff was arbitrary to their interests.
These guys were content machines.
It made me think. Have I been getting it all wrong?
Yes, I script, I storyboard, I know my way around a manual cinema camera and traditional lighting techniques...
But who cares anymore?
These kids are the future and they did not care a toss about dynamic range or bitrates. They wanted everything auto so they could focus on actually enjoying a shoot.
Something to think about...

I know some people like messing around with footage from other cameras, so I figured I'd post a couple ungraded/graded clips from the D5500 in case anyone wants to mess around with the flat profile.


Here are two more...
 

I have a rule. Even with A7S. If you need more than 1600ISO, you probably shouldn't be shooting there in the first place. Either change the scene's location, or use lights. Simple.

@j_one couldn't have said it better, bang on! I'm still gonna stick with the A7s and wait for a price drop. Cheers mate. 

Oh yeah, if you're cool with hacks, the best option IQ wise, imo
5d mkiii RAW 10bit 60p 
Wedding example