mercer

Then why spend tens of thousands of dollars, and hours, on a format that doesn't offer any advantage, if it doesn't exist?

Anyway, the GH7 seems like a very capable camera. One thing I learned from that video, in the comments section, is that Panasonic changed their color science recently, is that true?

It does make sense, when I used the GH6, it did seem to lean toward green a bit but then the S5iiX definitely had more of a magenta look to it and it seems that the magenta has carried over to the GH7. So the LogC profile could possibly work better with the GH6 since the Alexa is known to have a green bias straight out of camera.

4 hours ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

It's no problem.  Your comments are already more than dumb enough.  No need to dumb them down further.

I know you are but what am I? Hahaha.

I should probably be offended but like me, you're just some guy on the internet.

Actually... I feel kinda bad for you. Everything is so binary. You don't believe in a medium format or large format look, yet you own a MF camera. I can only assume you don't believe in movie magic or how a cinematic image can transport an audience into another world.

You seem like the type that probably rooted for the government in E.T.

44 minutes ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

That depends on your definition of shallow DOF.  If I'm focused to infinity while wide open, something that's only 5 feet from me will be completely out of focus.  As far as "lack of a better phrase," the "better phrase" is "stopping down the lens a bit."  But again, they were also avoiding the use of focal reducers which would give the M43 camera a much more similar look to the larger sensor when using the same lens.

There is differing levels of shallow depth of field. You could stand in a wide open field at infinity focus with absolutely nothing in the foreground and on a larger sensor camera the image will look more vast than on a smaller sensor camera... even if you're able to match the field of view.

If there isn't a difference then why would Yedlin shoot Knives Out with the Alexa 65? Why would Tarantino shoot the Hateful Eight in 70mm film? Why were the epic films from the 1960s shot in VistaVision when they all could have gotten the same look with a smaller sensor/film plane camera?

You mention there not being a MF look, but one of the biggest statements made about medium format images is how 3D or lifelike it looks... like you can walk into the frame.

As far as me using "the better phrase" ... why should I dumb down my comments to appease you? It seems like you are smart enough to know what I was saying.

50 minutes ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

You keep trying to make it over and over again and it's getting old.

Believe it or not, I don't exist on this planet to be concerned about how you take my comments. Half the people on this forum repeat themselves and are annoying.

51 minutes ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

Everybody understands that absent a focal reducer, you will need a much faster lens to get the same DOF at the same FOV on a Micro 4/3 camera as you get on a full frame camera.  Beyond that, though, a 12/2 on Micro 4/3 will be nearly indistinguishable from a 24/4 on FF, give or take some differences in the qualities of the lenses themselves. 

And this is basically what I said originally until I was attacked with some pure nonsense claim. We could go back and forth about the difference between large and small sensors... I could say that the background is more compressed to your subject with smaller sensors than they are with larger sensors and you could use "science" as your argument and then I could say that if there wasn't a difference than why would manufacturers produce different sized sensors or more importantly, why would somebody pay $10,000 on a camera when they could have gotten the same image from a $2,000 camera and then you would probably say more resolution and then I'd remind everybody of the science and quote Yedlin about the facade of higher resolution... around and around we would go until the other person gets bored enough to quit...

So whatever, I'm bored... you're the Jedi Master in all things photographic.

3 minutes ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

No, you refer to having to stop down the lens on FF to achieve the same DOF as on M43 without a focal reducer and you call it "dumbing down."

But please, don't let actual facts get in the way of whatever dumbshit point you seem to think you are making.

First off, I don't know why you're getting so angry? I'm just another dipshit on the internet. Who gives a fuck what I think?

Secondly, I also wrote, "for lack of a better phrase" after I wrote "dumbing it down" and I'm sure you're well aware that you can shoot wide open in FF at infinity focus without having shallow depth of field.

Honestly, I find it quite odd that as a medium format shooter that you're ignoring the spatial, 3 dimensional quality, a larger sensor offers.

I made a statement on a forum and if you think it is such a "dumbshit" point... you could always ignore it.

The point was that the filmmaker in that LF vs. GH7 Arri LogC3 comparison test had to dumb down, for lack of a better phrase, his LF to get the two cameras close to matching. I mean, Jesus Christ, he had to set the shutter angle to 45 degrees on the GH7.

For a color difference/matching test it seems like it wouldn't matter and my point was that even the slightest of differences in the frame could leave a perception that benefits the LF in that test, when in fact it was just a byproduct of the inherent differences in sensor size and needing to use two different lenses, with two different lens designs, to match the framing.

The reason I even brought it up was because it was pretty obvious the colors didn't match too well until he tweaked them in post.

One of the things I hate the most about new camera releases are the inevitable YouTube videos about how this new $2000 camera is better than the Alexa. This test clearly shows it isn't true.

3 hours ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

This is just factually wrong.  The Super 35 sensors in my C70 and K-X have a FOV/DOF indistinguishable from FF cameras if I use a focal reducer with them.  They can also work great with glass made for S35 film.  This could be seen as an advantage.  I also have the option to remove the focal reducer and get a second set of focal lengths from my lenses.  That's also neat.

Sensors larger than VV have disadvantages as well - a lot of wider lenses made for 24x36mm format don't cover well all the way to the edge.  Extreme shallow DOF?  Sounds great until you are missing eye focus constantly because the talent moved 0.01mm from when you acquired focus.  Without using eye tracking AF, the Canon 85/1.2L is completely unusable on my GFX 100 (when wide open).  When the DOF is that shallow, it should be considered a special effects lens.  The background gets so blurred as to be unrecognizable as anything other than a series of color splotches.

Almost every format has some advantages over the others and some drawbacks.  That includes M43.  

Holy Shit... it has an advantage for that test! What the fuck does the C70 have to do with it?

And I never said anything about shallow depth of field as being an advantage for full frame. 

55 minutes ago, PPNS said:

dont get this argument? you can get essentially a 95% match across most image formats, but since you can get just that tiny bit shallower with larger sensors that makes it all moot?

I didn't say it was moot, I merely said that the LF had an advantage. If anything, I was giving the GH7 some leeway in those tests. I mean, he had to stop down the 40mm lens on the LF to 5.6 and set the shutter angle to 45 degrees on the GH7 to get the shots to match. Obviously, he didn't want to pollute the test by putting an ND on the LF when the GH7 didn't need one.

56 minutes ago, PPNS said:

the reason to get a gh or fx or pocket camera is because its a shitty camera to own. It’s for personal projects where theres no budget, or as a bcam in certain situations, either as an extra angle during scenes, or to rig it on a car so the good expensive camera doesnt break. If you have to use it, a few compromises should be made. In the case of mft that’s mostly not being able to be super shallow on wide lenses, but for normal use cases, you’ll be fine. this stuff should be liberating to know?

I agree, I am not knocking m4/3 or any shitty camera... I still shoot ML Raw on a 5D3. I'm planning on shooting a short film this summer on a 1" Canon camcorder. I had a GH6 last year and may buy another one, or a GH7 eventually.

1 hour ago, PPNS said:

i think theres about a million things more important than hitting the sweet spot of separation in real life scenarios. that being said, with the right choice of focal lengths and distance from camera, you can get pretty shallow dof from any format!

It depends on what you're going for and what impact you want your shot to have based on the story you're trying to tell. Everyone has different styles.

Years ago when camcorders were used for indie films, we used to intentionally zoom in and frame something in the foreground to look blurry.

All that said, I think there is more to larger sensors than shallow depth of field, there's separation between the foreground and background which invokes more of three dimensional element to the image. With smaller sensors everything is more compressed.

1 hour ago, PannySVHS said:

After Moonlight James Laxton was again Dop for Barry Jenkins. He photographed "Beale Street", which was filmed with an Alexa 65. He must love the look of a 50mm lens on a larger format.:) There are some desired qualities of larger formats for the look beyond the logic of focal length and f-stop equivalence.

Now that you mention it, someone should tell Yedlin about Yedlin's test... if he had known about it, he could have shot Knives Out on a m4/3 camera instead of the Alexa 65...

17 minutes ago, PPNS said:

The ifs have a grammatical function. I’m explaining to you how optics work. A 24 at 2.8 on a 36x24mm sensor and a 12mm at 1.4 on a 18x12mm sensor will look exactly the same when placed at the same spot, with exactly the same separation.

The ifs only have a grammatical function if all else is equal, which they are not, so some aspect of the image, no matter how small will be different.

I understand the optics element of your point. This argument has been around forever. What I am saying is the problem with your argument is that it requires all elements to be equal to be valid but they seldom are... if ever.

Sure you can create a similar image with a crop sensor camera, but something in the image will be different. Or you'll have to make a compromise with the larger sensor camera to get them close to matching. Which you wouldn't do if you were using the camera/lens in a practical way.

But even if you look at Yedlin's example, the subject's face is slightly thinner in the Imax and slightly fuller in the Alexa. Obviously, Yedlin went to great lengths to prove his point... that's the point of his article. And I am not saying you can't get it close, I'm saying that something will be different.

As I said in my previous reply... use a fast 12mm lens on mft and then a fast 24mm lens on FF and tell me that they have the same separation.

With that said...

37 minutes ago, PPNS said:

“Even the same lens on the same camera will have a different look with a couple steps forwards or backwards.”

not sure what you’re trying to say here. Flaring and a different focus point tend to have an influence on the image, sure.

I thought it was clear, but my apologies. My point is that even if you use the same lens, on the same camera, and take a single step forward or backwards, you can hit a sweet spot of the lens and have more pop or separation.

In the Yedlin article, it is clear that he stopped down the lenses to create less shallow depth of field. In fact, in one of the images, the bookshelf is almost in focus with the subject... so again not the same.

In my original "nonsense" post, I was suggesting it was difficult to make these comparison videos because the LF would always have an advantage. Not only does it have a bigger and better sensor, better color science, it has a lens advantage as well... which is obvious since he had to stop down to f/4 or 5.6 so he could get a match with the lens on the GH7. That guy did a good job making them pretty close, but the GH7 looks more compressed and her face is slightly less angular. Is it enough to affect his test... not at all.

You are correct though, I mistakenly referred to the 21mm lens as a wide angle on M43.

1 hour ago, PPNS said:

(i like zeiss super speeds a lot)

I'm a fan of them as well. I haven't used the Super Speeds, but I had a small set of the Zeiss Rollei lenses which were supposedly modeled after the Standard Speeds from the late 60s. The 3D pop from Zeiss lenses is something else. Some say it's micro contrast and others say it is more obvious with larger formats... all I know is that it looks amazing when you pull that focus and hit it.

1 hour ago, PPNS said:

I don’t see why resolution is relevant to this discussion though. are we trying to move goalposts again?

Not moving any goal posts and probably not relevant, I was just curious if you were a believer/practitioner in his resolution theories.

1 hour ago, PPNS said:

lf you had an f/2 20mm lens on ff, and an f/1 10mm on mft, with similarly designed optics, your shot would look the same if taken from the same spot.

A lot of IFs in that statement. The problem with the all else equal argument is that it's rarely applicable because all else is rarely, if ever, equal.

Even the same lens on the same camera will have a different look with a couple steps forwards or backwards.

With a 24mm at f/2, even 2.8, on FF you can still get some subject separation, I have never noticed that with an equivalent aperture on a 12mm lens on mft.

What lenses do you currently use on your projects? I assume, since you're referencing Yedlin, that you shoot in 1080p?

13 minutes ago, zlfan said:

it has prores h265 h254 mp4

Thanks, I found it in the specs.

So, I assumed that the GH7 had ProRes and ProRes HQ, since the GH6 has it, but when I look at the specs, I am only seeing ProRes Raw? Did Panasonic dump regular ProRes in the GH7? Please tell me they didn't.

1 hour ago, PPNS said:

i guess its a nicer starting point than the v log conversion.

 

 

Pure nonsense. human eyes are not closer to 40mm on FF than 21 on MFT. FF only makes it easier to get shallower DOF. Focal lengths dont “round out” your subjects, lens design does. FOV is created between relationship of the focal length and the film back size. Dof by the size of the aperture. 
 

If the colors of the cameras, as well as the dof and fov, were matched, you wouldn’t see a difference. Read the yedlin articles again.

Haha, okay. Take a close up with a wide angle lens and then one with a standard lens and report back what happens. There is more field curvature in a wide angle lens due to the ... lens design of a wide angle lens. This field curvature will round out your subject. Just because the FOV changes, the focal length doesn't.

Yeah but he was using the LF which is full frame, and they were matching FOV, so Alexa had a 40mm lens which is closer to the human eye and the GH7 had a 21mm which is a wide angle that will round out your subject. The LF has the clear advantage there.

Even a wide angle on full frame will have more spatial quality than an equivalent wide angle on m4/3.

I'm also not a huge fan of this new airy Midtone look that everybody seems to be doing. It looks like some kind of Bravo reality show about LA real estate.

I'm going the other way... based on that video alone, the GH7 with LogC is good and obviously can match, but the LF image with just a LUT is so good. I appreciated that he let the footage speak for itself and it did... nothing beats an Alexa.

That said, the GH7 costs 2 grand... so it gets a lot of points for that alone.

And with that said, even though the Alexa only needed a LUT to look good, it also looked pretty vanilla, so I'd love to see what a good colorist could do with both versions to create a stylized look.

5 hours ago, zlfan said:

canon cinema line is designed for handheld shooting. I tried many different configurations. once you mount a big zoom lense, and a zacuto top handle and a zacuto base plate, the rig is too heavy to hand hold. it is only for tripod. in that case, other cameras are better, like f3. 

now I set one of my c300 ogs with an efs 10-18 stm is, I don't use the top handle and the xlr lcd unit at all. I put on a small battery based mike with 3.5 mm plug in. I put on a rail based v mount mini battery to power the nano flash. I use the evf as one contacting point, the v mount battery against my chest as another contact point. my left hand hold the buttom of the c300 og, use the left thumb to touch the hard buttons at the left side, and use the right hand to hold the grip,  the right index finger to touch the start button, and the right thumb to touch the nipple and the button 7 which I set as the af lock. I use continuous af as this c300 og unit has the dpaf upgrade. the footage looks very stable.   

 

You have a lot of cameras. What type of stuff do you shoot?

8 hours ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

Interesting idea!  I hadn't thought of it, but I'll have to give it a try someday.  I'll have to dig up one of my older/smaller monopods, I suspect.  The one I use now is a Cobra and they're like 2 feet long at their shortest.  

I also use a strap on the camera and pull it taut, so the monopod in the tape measure pouch and the strap taut adds a fairly decent amount of stabilization... for static shots.

They make belts specifically for this... I think it's called a MogoCrane...

https://kamerar.com/products/mogocrane-weight-support-belt

I don't know if it's any better than a monopod by itself, with a strap, but it's quicker to move around for run and gun.

Apple probably has the agreements. It actually helps Red/Nikon to allow it, otherwise these companies would use BRaw which could hurt them more in the long run.

3 hours ago, newfoundmass said:

In my travels Sony has been by far more common than Canon. That wasn't the case 10 years ago. From Chicago to Vermont, FX cameras are king and it's not even close. 

People i know that used to have C100s either got R bodies or switched to Sony because Canon took too long to bring out a successor. 

At private events and trade shows, I still see C100s. Don't think I've ever seen an FX camera. I've seen a couple C70s. I saw an Ursa once for a greenscreen/Photo Booth kinda thing, which seemed odd. I've seen Sony mirrorless and R bodies as well, but I'd say 25-40% are still using a C100.

That I've seen.

But just because I haven't seen any FX bodies, doesn't really mean much. I'm sure a lot of private events, conferences and trade shows are shot with FX cameras.

I'm a member of a Discord server where there are a lot of pros... they only cared about the C400 launch with barely a mention of the GH7. To us, the GH7 may be more exciting, to them, Canon cine and FX are their workhorses.

3 minutes ago, zlfan said:

I adapted a cooke 75mm f4 s16 lens to a nikon 1 v1 with an 1 inch sensor. works fine, no vignette at all. maybe wide angle s16 will see vignette on a 1-inch sensor. I doubt about it though, as it is 95 mm2 vs 110 mm2. most branded lenses have image circle a little bit larger than their native formats. some famous lenses like Leica lenses, are actually reaching medium format image circle sizes. so I think s16 lenses on gh7's dci 4k crop mode, even wide angle ones, will be fine. if no need for infinity, c mount is fine. 

Back in the day when I was testing c-mounts with m4/3, I was able to get full coverage with some 12.5mm lenses. In some respects, that was good enough, but I'd love to be able to use a 10mm Angenieux or Kern... or even some 6 or 8mm lenses, that's why I'd really love a true S16 sized sensor.

Unfortunately, Panasonic probably isn't in business to make cameras solely for my interests... BASTARDS!!!

Hopefully, Panasonic has done something to fix their menu system too. The GH6 and S5iiX menus are utter garbage. They were praised for their menus when Sony was getting crap for theirs and now it's a mess. And why do I have to change frequencies to shoot true 24p? I don't have to do that with my FP. When you add the 180 degree shutter benefit in Panasonic cameras... wouldn't it make sense to include a 48p option in that true 24p mode to utilize the benefit of shutter angle? Not including BM, the FP should be the gold standard for camera menus. 

4 minutes ago, kye said:

I told you to keep that between us!

These are not the skintones you are looking for.

3 minutes ago, zlfan said:

there are some s16 lenses with pl mount, and 2/3 lenses, they can be adapted to m43 mount. gh7 can do dci 4k prores raw hq 60p s16. with a good s16 lens like Zeiss 10-100mm, it is very powerful. right now there is not many good s16 digital cinema cameras. 

Is there an equivalent s16 crop mode in the GH7? I haven't looked into that yet. The GH6 didn't have one. Of course, almost any lens can be adapted to m4/3, but I'm talking a 1"ish sensor. I've owned my fair share of m4/3 cameras and shooting with adapted, vintage lenses have always felt wrong and made me dislike the format. The crop was never quite close enough to utilize wider c-mount lenses. Point is... for me... m4/3 always felt slightly handicapped for lenses. Am not a fan of speedboosters and dislike most of the native lenses I've used.

12 minutes ago, kye said:

This is always my challenge.  I have a project that I use for colour grading practice and testing that has two main sections, one with private images that are absolutely full of skintones, and the other section for images I can post publicly that scarcely has any because people don't want to be posted publicly. 

Yeah nobody wants to see your homemade porn, Kye.