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Phil A

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Posts posted by Phil A

  1. I'm a bit surprised there's no budget I/O for using with the current M1 Mac generation, seeing how the marketing pushes the use case so hard.

    I had an Intensity Pro 4k in my Windows PC and that worked great for a low price.

    But for the Mac Mini the options are Ultra Studio Monitor 3G (135$)which only does 1080p60 or then the UltraStudio4k that does 2160p60 for 1095$. There's imho a huge gap in between and getting a PCIe-box to externally connect a Decklink/Intensity card via TB also adds 300$+ to the cost of the card.

  2. Did you consider one of the "travel screens" like the OLED that Andrew posted about recently? They're 14-ish inch and reasonably thin and light. There are also cheaper IPS options.

    I think the main issue for a travel grading screen is that they need to be reasonably color accurate (calibratable) and have uniform brightness. I don't know how well one can find information regarding that without just buying one and trying/measuring yourself.

  3. Rumors were pretty accurate. Seems like a solid upgrade over A7 III and I like what they did to address usability (e.g. foto - video - switch).

    But it's 2799 EUR here and at that price point, there are a lot of options, especially when willing to buy used.

  4. I'm using these Cullmann Revomax RX448 quick release plates on my tripods and gimbal.

    71hkNB8R1zL._AC_SL1500_.jpg

     

    They work reasonably well because there's no fiddling, tightening, etc.
    I have a Manfrotto plate with a Cullmann quick release on it for when I need to use my fluid head, etc.

     

    For the strap I just use the Peak Design anchors.

  5. I was so satisfied with EmotiveColor for my GH5 that I purchased it again after switching to a X-T4 but I got a dumb question for @Sage:

    For the GH5, there was a PRE for levels when transcoding VLOG-L in H.264 to ProRes. Is that not necessary when transcoding the F-LOG H.265 to ProRes and using them in DaVinci Resolve?

  6. 5 hours ago, IronFilm said:

    Doesn't sound as good.

    I started with a NTG2, then I "upgraded" (it wasn't!) to a ME66, then I got a Sanken CS3e / CS1e (and many others since!). Should've just skipped those first two and gone to something decent.

    It's pretty difficult to know what is decent by looking at YouTube reviews with all the different opinions. On one hand I assume I have trashed ears because I often don't hear the differences they mention, on the other the microphone is only one piece in the whole chain. People say they love mic xyz but their frame of reference is not spending more than 300€ while the next person says it's trash and favors something else but it's 1k and out of the first person's budget (and maybe needs). Do you go into an interface or a field recorder? How much gain do you need? Do you stream live or can you carefully EQ, etc. in post?

    Anecdotal: I wanted a mic for indoor dialog because a lot of social media content I record can utilize that, so I wanted an upgrade from the Rodeo Video Mic Pro and I tried to kill two stones by also using it for video conferencing. So I bought an Oktava 012 (my voice isn't very deep so I liked the accentuation) that I use via a Focusrite Scarlett Solo (3rd Gen). But even 30cm away from the mic I need ~90% gain on my interface so I'm a bit concerned about booming.

  7. On 1/31/2021 at 10:44 AM, Amazeballs said:

    Now some chinese manufacturer need to make a 250$ phone with an HDMI input and mock Sony with it.  

    It'll have 50 to 100ms lag, within a year there won't be any OS updates for it anymore, the UI will be unresponsive and it'll have a screen with 85% sRGB color space.

    But the YouTube shills will make 30 unboxing and hands on reviews saying how amazing it is, total game changer, shocked face thumbnail.

    Everyone who bought one regrets it and 3 months late we moved on to the next gadget of the moment.

  8. I wish they would bring a 27mm with f/1.4 or f/2 ... or for Sigma to finally port their three APS-C mirrorless primes to X mount now that the protocols are being available to 3rd party manufacturers.

    It's obviously a first world problem but I want a fast lens between 23mm and 35mm. Currently using the EF mount Sigma 30mm 1.4 ART lens on a Viltrox mount adapter but it's bigger & heavier than I'd need to and obviously isn't great from AF perspective.

  9. 30 minutes ago, zerocool22 said:

    Def could live without all those movies, but the shit netflix is producing is even worse. I def see value in the fact that cinema plays movies at a certain time. There is no pauze, everybody needs to be quiet, so the movie has your full attention. While at home there are thousand distractions (please pauze I need to go to the bathroom or I need a snack, oh I forgot to start the dishwasser, smartphones, kids, friends/wife/kids start talking when bored, or commenting and the list continues)

    You must go to very different cinemas than me.

    I would rather see a movie at home than at the cinema, precisely because at home I can focus on it. At the cinema there's a high chance for people to talk during the movie, kick seats, etc. plus as mentioned before, it's a total rip off with the snacks and all. Last time I was at the cinema I paid 50 CHF (47 €, 57$) for two people. That's just not worth it to me tbh. And then chances are your movie isn't even in the best setup (biggest screen, high res, good audio, etc.) unless it's Marvel Avengers or so.

  10. On 11/6/2020 at 4:32 PM, scotchtape said:

    Something more stable than 16? 15.2 was solid for me. 16 crashes all the effing time for me. I turned on live save because of all the lost work.

    Like three days ago I'd have said 16.x is 100% stable for me. Now it out of the blue crashes every time I try to set project framerate / resolution to anything but 24fps, and I didn't update anything (system currently not connected to the network).

  11. 1 hour ago, Danyyyel said:

    I understand your point fully, but I think this a bit less true since BMRAW. When you look at the bitrate of Braw and from feedback of some friends who work with it and Davinci Resolve, it works very very well. At 12.1 which I saw some test footage is just slightly less sharp than other less compressed version, we are clearly less heavy than normal PRORES. We are closer to H264 compression rate!!!

    Screenshot 2020-10-14 203458.png

    But not everyone wants to massively increase the footprint and weight of his camera by adding an external recorder. For many people, the whole point of shooting with a hybrid camera is the size. I couldn't care less what's available via HDMI out, it needs to be in-camera or I'm not going to use it. I'm clearly not in the minority with that opinion. For 90%+ of users, the new Nikons will be 8bit cameras.

  12. I'm mostly interested if it'll get 10bit log internal at least up to 2160p30. It could be the ideal compromise between Sony A7 III (great af, bad codec, great lens options, bad EVF/screen) and Panasonic S5 (great image, bad af, weak lens ecosystem) in the mid price segment of hybrid cams, especially with the TechArt adapter that opens the E mount lens options for it.

  13.  

    Found this on YouTube and while it seems to do a somewhat decent job of keeping the lady in focus, the DFD pulsing of the background is a total deal breaker to me when it comes to AF-C in in video. If it completely goes off the rails like on the GH5 where it just runs off to infinity focus, you know you gotta cut at that point or reshoot. But who wants footage where every half second the background juggles between being sharp or blurry (which you probably can't even tell on the EVF/screen)?

    In combination with AF-C during video still being too unreliable and manual focus being the best option, I really am even less happy with the decision to go for such a cost-cutting choice of EVF and not at least the one from GH5.

    We're really at this point where everyone is one step away from the perfect(enough) camera. Panasonic is missing good AF-C, Sony could kill it if they put 10bit codecs into their cameras, Canon needs to get a grip on the thermic limitations, etc. ... "Luckily" the market is still driven by photography and there basically all brands are exceeding what 99% of users need.

  14. On 9/6/2020 at 3:11 AM, kye said:

    I would definitely upgrade to Resolve Studio.  IIRC the free version of resolve only lets you have a single node?  If that's the case then having the ability to have more than one node let's you do a few killer things:

    • Choose what order your effects get applied in by separating them into different nodes
    • You can start to work with selective adjustments where you take a key and adjust only certain ranges of colour (eg, skin tones) or certain areas within the image (eg, track a moving window on someones face)
    • Apply multiple OFX plugins
    • Use Temporal Noise Reduction that compares multiple frames to do NR instead of blurring just one frame at a time

     

    That's not correct. The free version can do 99% the same as the studio version for most users, you're only missing out on resolutions bigger than UHD, it doesn't have the noise reduction and film grain OFX, etc. For normal editing and grading, it's widely the same.

    I don't think it makes sense to invest any money into your system if you haven't actually identified a bottleneck. I would edit/grade a project and run resource monitoring to find out if you every approach a limit regarding CPU, GPU or storage. There's no benefit to increase e.g. GPU performance up to 200% of now when you maybe never reach over 60% currently.

  15. I really want this camera to be good.  I want to move on from the GH5 , mainly because it's not meeting my demands for photography when it comes to the lens selection (I want f/2 or better equivalent DoF from wide to tele which is easy on FF but only very limited possibility on m43).

    So far the S5 looks impressive, I'm just not impressed with the EVF being such a step back to lowest current consumer levels (so not so great for manual focus) in combination with them staying with DFD auto focus (which in all likelihood will again be unusable for anything but AF-S on non/slow moving targets).

     

    Makes me wonder how much cost saving they realize compared to just slapping in the EVF from the GH5 / G9? 50 EUR per camera? I would definitely pay a 100€ premium to have a better EVF. The high quality EVF of the S1 line was one of the main reasons I considered it but it's just too big/heavy for my ideal do-it-all system in combination with the lackluster lens ecosystem.

  16. I would agree that one of the main reasons that holds Panasonic back at the moment is their subpar auto focus performance. It took them so many firmware updates with the GH5 and their DfD gets an somewhat okish video AF performance some of the time with native lenses, it's absolutely unusable with adapted lenses. That's just not something I want for my next camera as I'm not shooting narrative / team based stuff.

    For photography the AF is actually decent, especially the AF-S is pretty good and eye detection reliable, both with native and adapted glass. But then the GH5 is not ideal for that either, if I use the Sigma 30mm 1.4 in EF mount with a focal reducer, I hit nearly 1.4kg for a setup I could realize (for photography, focus being on the aesthetic characteristics of the image) at around half the weight by going Sony with e.g. the Samyang 45mm 1.8. The native lenses are of course super light weight but I doubt anyone who is into photography will get too excited about shooting the Panasonic 25mm 1.7.

  17. I'm using my phone (iPhone 11 Pro Max) mainly for pictures but I have to say it has really eaten into the amount of use my camera sees. I leave my GH5 behind more and more.

    With fake bokeh thanks to the Focos app followed by editing the colors with Adobe Lightroom Mobile, I get results pretty close to what my camera gives me... unless the phone screws up the background detection and makes everything wrong. For social media use, there is only limited advantage lugging around my camera and that kinda makes me sad because I enjoy the process of using it way more.

    Slowly but surely I wonder if I should just sell my camera equipment and downgrade on image quality and performance to focus on portability. If phone cameras and computational photography progress another 5+ years, I doubt I'll still need a camera for private use.

  18. 20 minutes ago, bjohn said:

    On the Blackmagic Design forum, Dmitry Shijan demonstrated how if you shoot at the camera's native ISO and "native" white balance (in the case of the Micro Cinema Camera, about 5500-5600), Prores HQ has exactly as much flexibility in terms of adjusting ISO and white balance as raw 3:1.  I agree that in general you'll get more flexibility from raw, but ProRes HQ is actually quite flexible.

    But the fp has no log profile so you record Rec709 with strong contrast and saturation baked in. It doesn’t work as you think unfortunately. You can also record Sony A7s externally into ProRes, It’s still not gonna be better than what the camera can output.

  19. I think when you get very close to relatively small things is when you can't substitute for a slider, e.g. when doing product videos for advertising / online stores or also when doing cooking show / recipe type of stuff. You can try to replicate it with a gimbal but there's zero reproducability and because of the small scale of everything, even the little bit less stability and off-axis movement you get with a gimbal can screw up the shot. It's very different if I close in on a person with a gimbal to end with a medium close-up shot or if I have to close in on a single shoe and end up with a close up of the laces, for example.

    Different tools for different applications.

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