PannySVHS

Youtubers are snoring! Better quit watching, cuz it's so boring!

Youtubers are snoring! Better quit watching, cuz it's so boring!

The book is highly recommended 🙂
Or as they call them in the Netherlands... Booooooooooooooooooooooooooooek

Youtubers are snoring! Better quit watching, cuz it's so boring!

Imagine if MotionCam RAW worked on this…

According to a book, Dutch company ASML got into a big fight with Nikon a few years back.
They both make lithography tools for semiconductors industry. ASML's optics supplier is Zeiss.
To pressure Nikon into a settlement, they had to take the patent fight to them in cameras.
So ASML got Zeiss to make them a camera.
It also doubled as a marketing adventure, shown off in stores but rarely really ever in stock.
Until one day this popped up on my radar, with the serial number XXX XXX.
The AF wasn't working, or the manual focus (fly by wire), lens stuck at macro 30cm.
So I cracked it open, mopping sweat off forehead.
Inside is 256GB SSD, final release model was bumped to 512GB.
Android 6, with Zeiss test suite of apps onboard including FCC certification test suite 🙂
A music player.
A Dutch full frame 36 megapixel sensor with some analogue colour.
A Zeiss 35mm F2 lens (but different optics to the Sony RX1), 4K video (Super 35mm crop) and an EVF.
And some weird prototype issues. I'll make a YouTube video on it.






Sample shot
And I still have no idea how I fixed the AF.
Just wiggled the lens and sensor ribbon cables a bit and it started working properly, but there was no sign of either cable being loose in the first place!
It is quite a fun tool, and a bit different. Android is decently snappy on it, the camera app is well designed, the physical dials are lovely but it doesn't have a joystick or command dials... So a lot is on the touch screen, but it's well done.
Shall I root it?
Update to 3.0 production firmware? (Risks bricking it).
Given the rarity factor... I probably won't!!

Might be time to release my version for free then!
The download link will self destruct in 48 hours.
Until then... enjoy!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Z60UNsWHuc6wFmgEOlp0VgDlucHoutip/view?usp=share_link

Works on Panasonic S9, S5 II, GH7 as well as all the new cameras.
I'd welcome any questions, feedback, help making a guide for regular folk, or even comparisons to the official ARRI LOG profile, or even the odd ALEXA. Sample shots also welcome!!
@BTM_Pixhas shot some nice stuff with it already. If you're ok for me to share it?
And the ARRI LUT library is available here https://www.arri.com/en/learn-help/learn-help-camera-system/tools/arri-look-library-app
Installation is via SD card as a real-time LUT so it sits in-camera, next to V-LOG and the regular picture styles.

Nice is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
But if people don't mind log shots of mainly grey buildings under grey skies in Salford then have at it !

How I would love to see uncompressed 14bit Cinema DNG on newer Canon.
Perhaps the R7, would be a perfect candidate.
Let's hope they focus efforts on supporting the stuff beyond the DSLRs and older EOS M 👍

Yes, it's the AF that makes me think of manual lenses on the GF3.  For stills it's a fully featured camera, but for video it's auto-everything* and so having an AF lens on it is a pain because the CDAF will hunt occasionally.
(* actually I recorded some clips with it last night and discovered it keeps the current WB setting - how odd that's the only thing it will let you lock down!)
If you don't already own the Olympus body cap lens then perhaps the "7Artisans 18mm f/6.3 Mark II" might be a better choice as it's cheaper and faster than the Olympus. 

Equivalency of DOF is the elephant in the room for sure.  In comparison, MFT lacks in the selection of gargantuan lenses with super-shallow DOF and FF lacks in small lenses without shallow DOF.  If someone made a FF 28-280mm F7.0-11 lens then it should be the same size as my 14-140mm F3.5-5.6 lens, but of course the internet would go ballistic over it and run whatever manufacturer dared to create such an abomination out of town faster than you can say "grab your pitchforks - the devil has come for our children!".
It depends on what you're doing of course, but for me personally when I switched from watching YT lens reviews to watching award winning movies and TV shows from the worlds leading professionals I had the Ah-ha moment when I realised very few shots had shallower DOF than could be achieved with relatively normal MFT lenses.  Even when looking at the shots that would have required quite fast lenses on MFT, the aesthetic penalty for the DOF being deeper was very low.
I then looked at what potential benefits would be traded-away for it....  lighter cameras that make me more likely to carry them around and use them and therefore get more shots to use in the edit...  smaller equipment making me more pleasant to be around and having a nicer trip and causing the people around me to be happier and more relaxed and look nicer in frame...  the smaller rig making the people around me less distracted and suspicious...  the deeper DOF meaning there was less chance of having one person in focus but the others out of focus or it simply missing focus by focusing on the wrong thing...  the much lower likelihood of having a difficult conversation with law enforcement or self-important security staff, etc.  I concluded that getting slightly shallower DOF was a very small benefit competing against a significant number of advantages that would make far more impact to the end product and to my experience in using it.
The extra cropping potential is one of the only benefits I can see for sensors above 2.5K.  I put the cropping modes on my GH5 and GX85 into good use when I was shooting on primes and have been hugely impressed with them with my GH7 + 9mm F1.7 PanaLeica which I'll use for shooting in ultra-low-light.
The R5 + EF-RF + 40mm F2.8 would be a great medium size setup.  Perhaps the best second camera FF setup I could think of would be your R5 + 24-105mm F4.  Like I mentioned above, the flexibility and speed of using a zoom when shooting in uncontrolled conditions just gives you more coverage - there's a reason doco and ENG shooters use zooms!
Yeah, that's a real gem, I'm still seeing footage crop up on YT that really shows how much you can push things.  I've also noticed it's very popular with the vlogging crowd and it seems to give really good results, similar to those who might use a small mirrorless, which is definitely saying something when you consider the size of it.
Nah.
Do a complete end-to-end analysis of what gives you the best results in the final edit or final photos, work out what equipment aligns best with those trade-offs, buy it, test it and learn the settings, then shift focus to actually shooting and don't look back.
Beauty magazines make you feel ugly, and camera YT makes you regret your equipment.  Best strategy is to ignore both.
By far the most important skill in uncontrolled environments is being able to understand and predict the behaviour of your subjects.  Not only does this matter for shooting people in public, but it matters doubly (triply?) for safari because the biggest struggle seems to be even finding the animals in the first place.
A professional animal tracker would probably get better footage with an iPhone than an amateur with all the equipment in the world who spent a week and only saw a few animals the whole time.  
Perhaps a good exercise is to think about what the total cost will be of the trip, think about how much it would matter if you didn't see any animals at all, and then see how much it would cost to hire a guide or some other service that would help you locate things.  There's a reason that people hire a model instead of just walking the streets hoping to find someone to shoot!

From what I've seen and comparing to my own 10bit footage, Magic Lantern Raw on Eos M and 5DII/ III looks magical under natural light despite less dynamic range and much less resolution. So I am exited about any news from ML. I am referring to the pure joy for the image. It is not an observation in regards to full time content production.
No, no, no! @eatstoomuchjam No 10bit GM5 flimsyness but a solid and small 10bit GX85 body. Thank you, Panasonic!:) GM5 feels hollow and viewfinder is very tiny. Sorry, but no! 10bit GX, yes please.:)
@stephenDoesn't the 5DIII allow liveview on the screen, just like the EOS M?

The comparison was great. I was thinking you focused on the leave behind the first one. Anyway, 2x crop in 4K mode looks like a great, even downsampled FHD image.
I have the Fuji 12.5 F1.4. Your Cosmicar looks like it's outresolving my lens quiet a bit. The Fuji is still a nice lens though with a very solid build and delivering a beautiful image.

GX line supports its elegent GM silbings, so both to be continued in 10bit alterations of their predecessors.:) @eatstoomuchjam

the camera I'm using could be in a museum ..but it works..i

Indeed!
Actually, the killer combo for the GF3, if we think of it like a tiny vintage film camera, is when it's paired with the Olympus 15mm F8 body cap lens.
It is truly tiny....


In a sense it's an incredibly synergistic pairing, because it gives a 30mm FOV, which is wide enough to make any micro-jitters pretty minimal (especially if you add gate weave in post) and it's sharp, so the softness is just limited by the GF3, and it's deep DOF which fits with the 8mm look.  Without an ND you're also using the shutter to expose, which I understand is also how 8mm cameras worked?
However, perhaps the killer aspect of it is the way you would use it.  You'd never use this as your main setup, so this would be a carry-everywhere low-stakes camera for having fun with.  It would be what you pull out when being silly with friends, or filming random things that aren't so formal.  In a way, that's how people might have used an 8mm camera back in the day, because they weren't inundated with video and didn't have the media savvy we all have now, so they would have just pointed their home movie cameras at whatever was happening.
It's even got a lever that closes it for use in pockets, but it also works as a manual focus adjustment and close focus is something like 30cm / 12 inches which might even get a little bit of background blur (I can't recall) so it's quite versatile.
The challenge is that the F8 aperture means it's basically no good after sunset or indoors, so that's the weakness.  Apart from that, this is perhaps the most likely setup I would use this with.  There's an F5.6 version from a different manufacturer that is tempting, but re-buying it for only one extra stop is a bit hard to swallow.
Anyway, here's a video I shot with this combo quite some time ago....
I can't remember how I graded that, but I think I used a film emulation plugin that added a lot of softening in post, so don't take that as the limits of its resolving power.  It also shows a lot of rolling shutter, so maybe the strategy would be to have it on a strap around your neck and pull that tight when shooting to stabilise the camera a little.
There is something about the extreme lack of technical performance that makes my brain think "well, this isn't going to win awards for literally anything, so ignore all the rules and just shoot and have fun!"

From what I've seen and comparing to my own 10bit footage, Magic Lantern Raw on Eos M and 5DII/ III looks magical under natural light despite less dynamic range and much less resolution. So I am exited about any news from ML. I am referring to the pure joy for the image. It is not an observation in regards to full time content production.
No, no, no! @eatstoomuchjam No 10bit GM5 flimsyness but a solid and small 10bit GX85 body. Thank you, Panasonic!:) GM5 feels hollow and viewfinder is very tiny. Sorry, but no! 10bit GX, yes please.:)
@stephenDoesn't the 5DIII allow liveview on the screen, just like the EOS M?

I think GX85 design is great and I would shock you with a bigger grip if I was a Panny engineer. Stay strong! 🙂 @eatstoomuchjam

I think GX85 design is great and I would shock you with a bigger grip if I was a Panny engineer. Stay strong! 🙂 @eatstoomuchjam

Tokina 28-85 F4 is a heavy baddy, if that's what you are looking for.:) I have never used mine on an actual shoot.
GF3, with that 12MP sensor from the GF1 days is a harsh higlights specialist camera. Respect for giving love to this novelty.:) @kye
Yes, the CZJ 40 has a nice rendering. I would love to try it on a S16 sensor size photo camera like the Nikon 1 series since it's a 16mm lens. But then I like the FOV of the 40 on mft. So I will keep enjoying it that way. Using and enjoying a lens is what it's about after all.:)
 

The comparison was great. I was thinking you focused on the leave behind the first one. Anyway, 2x crop in 4K mode looks like a great, even downsampled FHD image.
I have the Fuji 12.5 F1.4. Your Cosmicar looks like it's outresolving my lens quiet a bit. The Fuji is still a nice lens though with a very solid build and delivering a beautiful image.

Thanks! and yes, I also like those particular shots too.
Some time ago I invested in a M42-MFT speed booster and since then looked almost exclusively for M42 lenses, except for telephoto lenses where a speed booster isn't required.  Vintage FF lenses don't normally get wider than 28mm, at least the ones that don't cost much, and at 28mm the difference between an M42 lens with my SB and an FD lens (for example) without one is a 40mm FOV vs a 56mm FOV.  
I know I shot the above images without a SB, but mine really steers my buying habits towards that system.
I have now fully converted my setup to native AF MFT lenses (14-140mm, 12-35mm, 9mm, 14mm) so I now need to work out what I will use my MF and vintage lenses for.  When I shot those images the IBIS stabilised the image but not the flares, so the video files aren't really usable.  This means that if I want to shoot with very vintage lenses I need to shoot without IBIS and physically stabilise the camera, either going for a shaky image and embracing the aesthetic, or going for a more stable image and using a heavier setup / tripod / both.
Thinking about turning off IBIS and going for a more vintage look, my thoughts turned back to my GF3.  So I compared the softness of the image from my GF3 to the softness and grain of film, and depending on the amount of movement and detail in the image it's somewhere between being a Super-8 camera and a Super-16 camera.
I am still pondering this information, as I'm not really sure what I would shoot with a S16-like camera and vintage lenses, but I definitely feel some attraction to this concept.  
Also, there is something super-cool looking about this setup!

GF3 + SB + Tokina RMC 28-70mm F3.5-4.5 + vND...   giving a FF equivalent of 40-100mm F5-6.4.  This is quite similar to lots of S16 zooms back in the day too.  For example the S16 Meteor 5-1 17-69mm F1.9 lens is equivalent to 49-198mm F5.5, etc.
Part of my is very interested in finding a larger bulkier zoom and really leaning into the form-factor, but I couldn't find any around, and even if I did I'm not sure what they'd cost and if they'd be worth it to me (considering I don't even know what I'd use this for!)
This is just wonderful...  the trees have a painterly look that sort of makes them feel a bit hyper-real and a bit dream-like at the same time.  Great stuff!

I'd argue that this kind of testing is actually necessary to understand how things behave.  Over the years I have tested a lot of things and it's amazing how many things that "everyone knows" do not stand up in even the most basic tests, but continue to be myths because no-one bothers to even look.
Aristotle claimed that women have fewer teeth than men, which is not true, but he obviously never actually looked to see if he was right - despite being married multiple times where he could easily have tested his claim at any time.
No, not mixed up, but the 12-35mm has a shallower DOF and so you have to know where in the image to look to compare sharp details in the focal plane.
This is the unsharpened cropped image:

This is the 12-35mm image:

This is the sharpened cropped image:

The sharpening is perhaps a little over-correcting, but the thin edges are still slightly blurred in comparison to the proper image from the 12-35mm.
This is where it is important to know how to read the results of a test.  This comparison of the zoom to the crop matched FOV but not DOF, and while I probably could have zoomed in using the 12-35mm and also stopped down at the same time to keep DOF the same, the lens sharpness would have been reduced so it wouldn't have been a fair test.  To get around that I should have tested using a flat surface like a resolution chart or a brick wall.
The problem with going that route is that now we're no longer testing anything close to real-life, and no longer answering questions about what will and won't work in real shooting.
The test wasn't "what percentage of resolving power is lost using the CrZ function?"...  it was "is the CrZ function usable for shooting with cropped lenses?".  Realistically I shouldn't have included the 12-35mm optical zooms at all, I should have just cropped in using the CrZ function and left the images to be judged on their own merits in isolation, the same way that any project shot using the CrZ function would be.
This is the danger of pixel-peeing - it distracts from the only thing that actually matters - the image.
The cosmicar really is a gem!
There's a reason that cinematographers have relentlessly driven up the price of vintage lenses over the last decades, and why modern lens manufacturers are designing and releasing brand new lenses with vintage looks, and manufacturers are even creating new mechanisms to control the amount and type of vintage looks with custom de-tuning functions.

Look at that monster!  😉
I don't have one handy to check it, but I suspect it wouldn't fill the "see skin around every edge when in my hand" test.  If Panny wants to just shove those guts into the smaller body, I'm in.

You could do a similar testing like kye for banana leaves and textures in low light, when you enter your neighbor's garden at night.😊