DayRaven

It's a combination of things -
1. Sony cameras don't handle difficult white balance situations with any grace
2. Sony offer a huge degree of options that control the sensor
3. Sony give you profiles that require grading - and I mean, proper, years of experience as a colourist grading, not just drop on a lut or tweak sat and curves
Combine this with low prices and any tom, dick or harry can grab one, stick it in pp9, wave it around a baby with leds, sunlight and an incandescent bulb and wonder what happened to the skin
They aren't cameras for everyone, thats for sure, you can mitigate many of the issues, but they are cameras that demand, in certain modes, a very high degree of cameramanship and skill.
1. Desaturating the higher luminence can work wonders to help take the green and yellow gills away.
2. Stick to pp0, and your fave creative style, if that's too limiting, stick to cine 4, s.gamut.cine. If that's ever too limiting, then you are going to have to start reading technical documentation to understand what the options do and how they do it.
3. Just look at the size of s.gamut 3, and think what is going to happen when you cram all of that into the comparitively tiny space of 709 and understand why colourists can charge what they do. Then never, ever use it.
Or just grab a camera you can get decent results with because clever engineers did all that for you and plenty more besides

It would be nice if this blog/forum became a place for hobbyists like myself to discuss the art of making a good film/video rather than a place where people bicker over gear choices. I know there's a subforum for that here already but to post there would be like posting in the Video forum at DPReview. If you're tired of gear, why not shift the focus to what you can do with it?

Hi everyone,
I have a site up with free music that you can use in your videos. It's all original...all my own work. All I ask is to be credited as indicated on my homepage:
http://soundimage.org/
I sincerely hope my tracks are helpful. Any and all feedback is welcome and always appreciated.
All the best,
Eric
 
 

Then I would need a stills camera too.
Why can't people grasp that everyone's needs are different and there is no perfect camera for every single job?

4K is the standard of 2016 and future proof.
Furthermore 4K is the only way to get true 1080p or 2K res out of a DSLR or mirrorless camera. None of the 1080p cameras shoot 1080p. It's just a sticker on the box. They are really shooting a pixel binned or line skipped image. The exception are the full sensor readout 1080p cameras like the A7S which down-sample better on the image processor, but shooting 4K is still preferable over this as it's future proof. In most situations you also have to shoot 4K to avoid severe moire & aliasing.
So in short, 4K was necessary to move us on from the crappy line-skipping and moire era of DSLR video.
It's not so much a resolution obsession, even if you deliver 1080p, it helps to have your acquisition quality 4K.
Now we have two kinds of 4K... that from a full sensor readout is preferable for the full lens circle to get used, whilst a crop of the sensor readout is a stop-gap until the sensor & image processor tech gets better - although sometimes it has its benefits - like a Super 35mm mode on a full frame camera, and 1.3x crop (1D C) doesn't hurt as much as a 2.3!
True, rolling shutter and heat issues can occasionally bite you on some of the lower end models, but it's still in the most part preferable to have some kind of technological progress than none. Without progress, we wouldn't get through this early phase of imperfect 4K and onto better things.
The only times I avoid 4K these days is if I am shooting hours and hours of live footage and need very small file sizes, or the other aspects of the image outweigh the benefits of the alternative 4K cameras for a particular project - such as full frame RAW on the 5D Mark III with magic lantern for the best colour and keying, or high frame rate 120fps 1080p which can be lovely for certain things.

I am currently using 2 Aputure 672s lights on lightweight 10' stands with 43" shoot-through umbrellas mounted for SERIOUS run-and-gun stuff... I mean like we have from 10-minutes to maybe 30-minutes to get the shots before we get either nailed by security or flat out arrested.
The guy carrying BOTH light fixtures may even have to climb over fences, etc.,

Using these Aputures was the only way this was going to work. And it surely does work. Killer. 
 

MattH, no-one has any issues with your skepticism, in fact I think we all really rather agree that it is sensible to wait until we can see the results of the camera, and it's support network. DBounce however was not being skeptical. His gambit is that Kinefinity are conterfeiting prores, as evidenced by his link to a federal counterfeiting website, on the basis that they are a chinese company. "China doesn't need permission do they?" When everyone pointed out that his evidence was shaky, and the full picture indicates that they are in a convoluted process of getting the licence legally, (which has now been confirmed to be the case by Kinefinity) he went quiet. that was until he saw the rotated buttons, when this became evidence of their poor quality control. In my opinion that's just as bad as not being skeptical - either being a fan or a hater of an unreleased product are just as bad as each other.
If I were to apply skeptical thinking to DBounce, I would suggest he has been prone to jump to conclusions, and make somewhat xenophobic statements, thus when he states an opinion about a chinese company, my skepticism tells me not to take his opinion at face value and triple check his evidence.
We all know you don't get to see Apples, Nikons, Canons or Samsungs  pre-production models, they employ consultants and maybe even have departments dedicated  to hiding pre-production electronics whilst they are being tested at that level. Remember the preproduction iPhone that someone snapped being used on a train? It looked like crap and they got a roasting in the clickbait press for it. Try to find that picture now. They pursued every copy of that photo that was published with c&d letters, because they know it looked like crap. Is that really what we want kinefinity to be doing, because that little skeptical part of me tells me that if DBounce found out that Kinefinity was trying to hide their pre-production flaws, he would be presenting this as evidence that they couldn't be trusted.

Fyi: It's $9k for the Terra 6k Pro Pack. I think a lot of the folks that have nothing but praise also really are not potential customers. People seriously considering this camera will be discriminating. And QC is very important as it is directly tied to reliability.

The buttons are really the 'pressing' issue. 

As soon as you get into heavily stylized grades, there's going to be a large degree of subjectivity. Still fun to discuss, though.
When stylized grading is done well, I like it. But 95% of the time with stuff I see online, it looks hokey and I think the footage would've looked better with a more natural (albeit safe) look. It's risky for sure.
 
edit: It's often done well with higher budget/hollywood stuff. I think it's because there's a specific plan and reason. The art direction, color palette are all designed to compliment the grade. Whereas with random online stuff, it's just some LUT thrown on to random footage with no real plan. 

If you can get by Blackmagic and ask them about the Quicktime dismisal and what are they going to do about it It would be great!

If you could go by the Samsung booth and just say.... What the Fuck guys.... WHAT THE FUCK lol.
Apparently they do have a booth so if you could go by there and take some pictures of the professional broadcast level fridge camera that would be great. Thanks

Here's what I think is happening. Blackmagic is definitely working on a new camera, but instead of announcing now and hoping to ship later this year, they'll announce at NAB 2017 and ship immediately.

Its just the caps, if the "Buttons where misaligned" I would expect them to not sit in a straight line from one another. The top part of pretty much any button is just a labled cap that is put on last. Either its snapped or glued in the wrong orientation or it might spin. Who knows, but the important parts of the buttons are on a straight line. So its a super easy fix for them that require zero engineering knowledge.
Yes, I think its very obvious to everyone that you are very very skeptical and one might even say against this camera
Me, I will stick to not judging for or against until I've used it myself.

That's a REALLY wierd species of Canna if the Canon has the best colour here - it look's like it was the one grown in the radioactive wasteland!

Lets see camera spec then first used in the field and then some, before asking for money
For 29.99 you guys can have this bad boy

The 4k image is nice, and hard to beat at any price range, but it's the overheating. I've never had my camera overheat, even under stress testing, so good copies do exist, but I would be dishonest to suggest that the chance of getting a good one is even close to acceptable. There are tricks you can do with ram heatsinks, and similar, especially if you can cope with the articulating screen losing it's articulation, but how many times are you going to tolerate it overheating at a wedding? It depends I guess on how you use it - if it's strictly a camera where it's nice if it gets something, but you never rely on it to get the product absolutely perfect, then why not, but if you think that it could let you down even once, well, it's up to you!

It's not quite differently for each object - your brain can correct zones differently, but it's not great at it, and things like hormone levels can affect it greatly, a simple fight or flight state can turn your vision black and white in some zones!
Definately think twice, depending on your sensitivity to WB issues, it's not really reliable, and it sounds like you are sensitive to them
Try to get it perfect for you in camera, especially with 8bits, but don't expect everyone else to see perfect for you as perfect for them! Even when you're trying to shoot a realistic scene colourwise, you're still making artistic decisions, especially with the limitations of technology and some people just have slightly different expectations of correct WB.
It's definately worth investing in a colour card with fleshtone panels on it to play with, set up a few scenes, lit different ways with the card in it, so you can see and get a feel for how your camera handles your white balance adjustments - experience and practice is the real key

Imagine you have a card that is a theoritical perfect white. Any visible wavelength which strikes the card is reflected, none are absorbed.
The sunshine has only a few wavelengths missing or reduced, so let's say photons with wavelengths R-O-Y-G-B-I-V (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo & Violet) leave the sun.
They then strike our atmosphere. As we know, by looking, the atmosphere scatters blue more than red, but at noon, the sun passes relatively little atmosphere before hitting your eyes, so at noon, the full compliment of ROYGBIV hits your card and bounces into your camera
Now, it's nighttime. Very little light from the sun is around, so you switch on your lights at home. These lights are incandescent, or maybe an energy saver bulb made to replicate the yellow light incandecsents produce .The light is giving out red, orange, yellow and green in equal proportions to the sun, but it isn't producing as much blue, indigo and violet. Thus we can write that it gives out ROYGbiv.
You bring your theoretical card indoors, turn on the lights and it reflects ROYGbiv. Less of the "cooler colours".
You look at the card. Our brains are very clever, it automatically balances the picture, you know the card is supposed to be white, so your brain makes it white. Out of the corner of your eye, you see someone walk past your window. They look blue, the whole world looks blue, an anonamly of this automatic white balance.
We point the camera at our card. Our camera is in manual mode and is not so clever, it sees, bouncing off the card ROYGbiv. If you had put a yellow card in front of it in the noon sun, it would have also seen ROYGbiv bouncing from it. As our camera is in manual mode, it does not understand the context of the picture. It has no cultural reference or memory of this card being white, it displays it as yellow because it sees less biv and more ROYG.
Fortunately, our camera has an adjustment, so we can set a temperature. Skip the part where the scale we use is derived from black body radiation, just know, we can set our camera to be more sensitive to blue or red, and we tell it how sensitive to be to either with a scale measured in kelvin.
We know our indoors light is producing a temperature of 2800K, so when we set our camera to that, our white card looks white again.
However, when we take it back out into the noon sun the next day, our camera setting is telling it to be especially sensitive to blues (because our bulb was producing few blues), so our image looks blue. We dial it back up to 5600K and at this point, it is balancing the sensitivity of blues and reds equally. The image looks correct again.
-----
I know you know most of that, but it's important to understand that the reality is, there are wavelengths of light missing, our brains compensate for that but the sensor of the camers shows what is really there. When this gets passed to the processors for processing, a white balances is applied, this is part and parcel of turning electronic voltages into colours. When you look at the screen on the camera, your white balanced eye sees the output of the monitor, and your brain is both clever enough to not confuse what you see on screen with the real object and stupid enough to try to WB to that in the section of your vision that the screen occupies. Badly. Also, the screen being yet another light source with it's own colour temperature just adds to the brains problems. As you have noticed, this is not reliable and, if you spend a long time looking through a viewfinder, the output of that eye is adjusted to compensate, similarly, if you ask people who have watched a movie with a strong colour cast throughout, they often didn't notice it because their eyes adjusted after a few minutes. That doesn't mean that you will be able to balance them to each other though - theoretically yes, if you can hold attention rigidly on both objects simultaneously without anything else moving in your field of view, but the reality is, this is an impossible thing to work towards.
Basically, don't trust what you see, your brain is working against you by trying to work for you!
As for the best method, well, the most accurate is to have a good lightmeter and a grey card, and use it religiously, every shot. The most convienient is to stick it in auto wb. You can greycard your camera and use it's inbuilt metering system, you can adjust the WB only when the lighting changes drastically. I expect there are more methods, these are the ones that work for me, depending on how important quality is, how quick I need to be etc. And, yes, the whole point of a grey card is to give your camera a surface with no colouration of it's own to bounce every wavelength accurately to be metered - it's trying to be our theoretically perfect card. They can be suprisingly expensive, but as we've learnt, we can't trust our eyes when they tell us that the piece of paper we are using is white - it may be slightly yellow, it may be slightly blue, even if we see it as the purest white and that's going to screw us over by a couple of hundred K.
Don't try to go for reality either, for starters, actual reality looks terrible and none of us can see it, secondly, we all develop our internal WB differently, with variation depending on our genes and our upbringing, and reality for us changes constantly over time as well as our brain constantly adjusts. Go for what looks good to you on the day.

That is 2700dpi on a panel that size dude. Why would you need more?

Imagine you have a card that is a theoritical perfect white. Any visible wavelength which strikes the card is reflected, none are absorbed.
The sunshine has only a few wavelengths missing or reduced, so let's say photons with wavelengths R-O-Y-G-B-I-V (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo & Violet) leave the sun.
They then strike our atmosphere. As we know, by looking, the atmosphere scatters blue more than red, but at noon, the sun passes relatively little atmosphere before hitting your eyes, so at noon, the full compliment of ROYGBIV hits your card and bounces into your camera
Now, it's nighttime. Very little light from the sun is around, so you switch on your lights at home. These lights are incandescent, or maybe an energy saver bulb made to replicate the yellow light incandecsents produce .The light is giving out red, orange, yellow and green in equal proportions to the sun, but it isn't producing as much blue, indigo and violet. Thus we can write that it gives out ROYGbiv.
You bring your theoretical card indoors, turn on the lights and it reflects ROYGbiv. Less of the "cooler colours".
You look at the card. Our brains are very clever, it automatically balances the picture, you know the card is supposed to be white, so your brain makes it white. Out of the corner of your eye, you see someone walk past your window. They look blue, the whole world looks blue, an anonamly of this automatic white balance.
We point the camera at our card. Our camera is in manual mode and is not so clever, it sees, bouncing off the card ROYGbiv. If you had put a yellow card in front of it in the noon sun, it would have also seen ROYGbiv bouncing from it. As our camera is in manual mode, it does not understand the context of the picture. It has no cultural reference or memory of this card being white, it displays it as yellow because it sees less biv and more ROYG.
Fortunately, our camera has an adjustment, so we can set a temperature. Skip the part where the scale we use is derived from black body radiation, just know, we can set our camera to be more sensitive to blue or red, and we tell it how sensitive to be to either with a scale measured in kelvin.
We know our indoors light is producing a temperature of 2800K, so when we set our camera to that, our white card looks white again.
However, when we take it back out into the noon sun the next day, our camera setting is telling it to be especially sensitive to blues (because our bulb was producing few blues), so our image looks blue. We dial it back up to 5600K and at this point, it is balancing the sensitivity of blues and reds equally. The image looks correct again.
-----
I know you know most of that, but it's important to understand that the reality is, there are wavelengths of light missing, our brains compensate for that but the sensor of the camers shows what is really there. When this gets passed to the processors for processing, a white balances is applied, this is part and parcel of turning electronic voltages into colours. When you look at the screen on the camera, your white balanced eye sees the output of the monitor, and your brain is both clever enough to not confuse what you see on screen with the real object and stupid enough to try to WB to that in the section of your vision that the screen occupies. Badly. Also, the screen being yet another light source with it's own colour temperature just adds to the brains problems. As you have noticed, this is not reliable and, if you spend a long time looking through a viewfinder, the output of that eye is adjusted to compensate, similarly, if you ask people who have watched a movie with a strong colour cast throughout, they often didn't notice it because their eyes adjusted after a few minutes. That doesn't mean that you will be able to balance them to each other though - theoretically yes, if you can hold attention rigidly on both objects simultaneously without anything else moving in your field of view, but the reality is, this is an impossible thing to work towards.
Basically, don't trust what you see, your brain is working against you by trying to work for you!
As for the best method, well, the most accurate is to have a good lightmeter and a grey card, and use it religiously, every shot. The most convienient is to stick it in auto wb. You can greycard your camera and use it's inbuilt metering system, you can adjust the WB only when the lighting changes drastically. I expect there are more methods, these are the ones that work for me, depending on how important quality is, how quick I need to be etc. And, yes, the whole point of a grey card is to give your camera a surface with no colouration of it's own to bounce every wavelength accurately to be metered - it's trying to be our theoretically perfect card. They can be suprisingly expensive, but as we've learnt, we can't trust our eyes when they tell us that the piece of paper we are using is white - it may be slightly yellow, it may be slightly blue, even if we see it as the purest white and that's going to screw us over by a couple of hundred K.
Don't try to go for reality either, for starters, actual reality looks terrible and none of us can see it, secondly, we all develop our internal WB differently, with variation depending on our genes and our upbringing, and reality for us changes constantly over time as well as our brain constantly adjusts. Go for what looks good to you on the day.

Edelkrone? Just to get a feel for their products, they look excellent but get mixed reviews. They have 5 new products to unveil as well.

I believe there are now electronic contax 645 lens adaptors allowing aperture control.  contax 645 will be the best bet - they still just about deliver on digital backs since are modern by the standards of other mf lenses in the price range.  the cheap mamiya mf glass is cheap for a reason.  The number of RED guys waiting on their Vista vision/8k sensor upgrade who are stockpiling mamiya mf lenses thinking they'll be a good move for what is effectively a full frame sensor is staggering.  Instead of putting the money towards full frame lenses that on the whole do a better job for less weight and cost.
If your budget allows then go contax 645 for best results.  f2.8 hassy V lenses (50mm, 80mm, 150mm) are amazing lenses and a good investment since they have 80mm image circles so are somewhat future proof.  the 50mm matches a good full frame 50mm, the 80mm outdoes most 80-85mm lenses for full frame and the 150mm/2.8 hassy smashes nearly all 135-150mm f2.8 lenses for full frame.  The 110/2 is just a madman, but sadly is very costly.  if sony ever release a mf interhchangable then these will be a very desirable lens.  these lenses are gonna be the only ones worth using with the medium format speed boosters that are coming out too.
 
Personally I;d suggest contax 'CY zeisses' and leitax nikon remounts.  at f2.8 on full frame they'll kill medium format lenses for overall image.  only once you go medium format does the advantage of the medium format image circle become worth the weight and expense.