AlexTrinder96

L O L.

Here's my top 5 cameras of 2018.
Of course we all know "there's no such thing as a 'bad' camera" any more but there is such a thing as a dull, boring rip off. Then there's the stuff that has a shelf life of a few months, that you just know is a stepping stone before the real deal arrives. In many ways 2018 was a good year to keep hold of what you have and wait for the dust to settle. An eventful one for technology, especially in the second half where we saw some glimpses of the future. In 2018 we had six truly great cameras for filmmakers and a few that didn't make my top list like the RX100 VI but which are nevertheless still useful in one way or another.
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Had a chance to get a few shots with the Canon 35mm f/2...


And here’s one from the Nikkor 24mm f/2 ai-s...

That last one could have used a little more diffusion on my Aputure M9 (awesome little light btw) but you can still get an idea of the characteristics of the lens wide open. 

Pairing the Pocket 4K with some good vintage glass is pretty blissful. There's been a lot of talk about how it looks more digital and modern than the previous BMD cameras - and yeah sure, I guess it's not as organic and grainy as the 2,5K. But throw on some c-mount glass or a speedbooster and old Pentax stuff and the camera sings. Haven't used it with this kind of setup on a production yet, (it's playing second fiddle to the Ursa Mini and been on a gimbal on about half a dozen shoots now) but I'm just having a lot of fun taking it on a walk and just taking some throwaway nature shots. It's something I used to do back when I used the 5DMK2 regularly, and I'm happy it has revitalized that habit again.

This was taken with the speedbooster and a Pentax 35/2.3 M42 lens on a cool winter afternoon. One of my favourites due to the very distinctive, oil painting-kinda way it renders out of focus areas and the transition between them and in-focus areas.

The E2C could be good. I wish they decided on 4K 60p or 1080p 120p but for $799 with ProRes and Raw out of the SSD/USB-C... I guess who can complain. Hopefully, the h.265 will be all-i at a decent bitrate. 

Tbf to Z cam, the Terra 4k is double the price of the e2...

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Here's a new music video I directed, shot, graded and edited recently, for the Finnish punk/thrash metal band RiESA (Loosely translates to Burden). It's in Finnish, but I find it quite interesting even if you're not well versed in Finno-ugric languages. Their new album is a concept album, depicting a protectivist, totalitarian state controlled by a single dictator, and led by fear and propaganda. This gave us a nice opportunity to play with some 1984-like imagery and I'm quite happy with the end result.
We did the video in essentially two days, with one day spent building the sets (the whole thing was shot in a basement of a local office) and one day of shoot. The interrogation room was mostly lit with practicals, with fluorescent tubes on the background and some IKEA spotlights lighting the posters. Only cinema lights used were two Aputure LED panels with diffusers used as fill lights. The jail cell was lit with one overhead 300W Fresnel and a 650W fresnel right outside the door to give us some heavy volumetric light. The propaganda scene was done simply with a home theatre video projector playing a video loop I prepared beforehand.
I shot the whole video using modern EF lenses but with a Cokin P Pastel filter. It's one of my favourite diffusion filters as it gives a gorgeous bloom effect on light sources without eating too much into microcontrast or fine detail. You can see this if you watch the video in 4K, some of the skin detail is pretty astounding imho. And, not to sound like a Blackmagic fanboy, but I have to say the Ursa Mini delivered in spades, again. It's a fine workhorse. Visually the biggest downside is the youtube compression, which introduces banding, even here where the original image has some added film grain.
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated, and if you guys have any questions about the production I'm happy to elaborate

Looks like they will also be releasing a 'lite' version of the E2. under $1000...
 
4k 30p
10 bit (same codecs as e2)
USB C and SD Card...
11.6 stops DR 
M43 SENSOR (GH4 sensor?)

Looks like they will also be releasing a 'lite' version of the E2. under $1000...
 
4k 30p
10 bit (same codecs as e2)
USB C and SD Card...
11.6 stops DR 
M43 SENSOR (GH4 sensor?)

@Emanuel with all due respect... do you even own the P4K? Do you have any footage to show? Do you have a photo of your rig?
I only ask because you come here and attack @webrunner5 for having a valid opinion about the P4K and state the same reasons you love the P4K that you stated about the GH5, which you never owned and about the X-T3, which you never owned. So if Don can be criticized for not liking a camera he’s never owned, I think you can be criticized for praising cameras you’ve never owned.
But to a greater point... why does one camera need to be better for everybody? We all know my choice of camera and I understand being excited for a camera purchase and if you have the P4K, I wish you luck with it, but there have been cameras before the P4K and there will be cameras after it. 
I am personally more interested in the evolution of this Z-Cam and the X-T3 than I am with the P4K. That doesn’t mean that the P4K is a bad camera... quite the contrary. It is a great camera at a great price but hardly the best camera to ever grace cinema. 

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Wow has it already been 10 years. what have I done with my life. At least Philips career took off from then  and peaked and is now back where ever he started I guess. 
I remember Philip Bloom's 7D tutorial series. Which helped me out a lot when starting out. But dang this is the proof right here, dont fixate on gear and stop waiting on the gear to become affordable. 

There's two separate nd filters btw. One is 1-7 stops, the other is 5-11! I have seen quite a few reviews (all positive) but the vast majority have obviously been sent for review.

Sony's marketing focuses on Specs because that is where they are on top. I think this generates a very negative attitude toward other photographers as a byproduct. Other products are "inferior" 

In my experience, Red is very generous with its ratings. The MX was rated very high, but I remember in practice it had about one stop less DR than the C300 (which is a more recent sensor design, so it makes sense) when I used it, which in turn had two to three stops less DR than the Alexa. Then the Dragon was noisier in the shadows than the MX but had more highlight detail, still trailing the Alexa by a lot. That was the original OLPF, I think they switched it up. For the time it was pretty good, but today's mirrorless cameras have more DR than the MX ever did. Dragon looks great exposed to the left, though. Good tonality. Recently, Red's gotten a lot better. My friends who've used the Gemini think it's just great. Super clean, good resolution, great DR, too.
I've found CML does really good tests that correlate closely with real world use:
https://cinematography.net/CineRant/2018/07/30/personal-comments-on-the-2018-cml-camera-evaluations/
They give the Gemini half a stop less than the Alexa–not bad. They also post Vimeo links, where you can see skin tones, etc. Venice looks awesome.
Not sure about the Alexa and Amira being any different. Same sensor design and both to me seem leagues beyond anything else I've used. Not just best DR but best tonality and texture and color in the highlights. I remember that the original Alexa had worse performance than the Alexa Mini (pretty subtle, but it was there) and Arri confirmed that they did little tweaks that push the newer models to 15+ stops. But that should favor the Amira, if anything. In my experience the Amira is just as good as the Mini, though, 15+ stops. I think Cinema5D changed their testing methodology so their results are inconsistent, and they've always seemed pretty careless to me.
 

C5D has to keep up their past strong track record when it comes to unreliable/conflicting/confusing dynamic range test reports! ?
It just wouldn't be normal them if they didn't have something like that.....

Also noticed they didn't do a black shade...It defo makes a difference!

more than 60 pages before, this thread started wit "I WILL be getting a Fuji X-T3!" and I have him!
I sold my Samsung NX1 and bought a X-T3. Great camera for photos and filming. Now building my ideal setup that will be finished end of december I hope. I ordered the cage and some other things at Smallrig.
Lens setup; Voigtländer Ultron 40mm f2.0, Bolex anamorphot 16/32/1.5x, Rectilux HCDNA. 
 

We don't know what the deal is, like you said - we have little information about the sensor. The camcorder listed has to use an external box to process the footage? Do you really expect a small mirrorless camera to deal with such high power draw? It would also cost a hell of a lot more to produce/manufacture than their current x-trans sensors... 

I can't say this test is at all conclusive. Neither camera clips, so you can't really see what the DR limit is on either camera. It looks like the Arri keeps the highlights a little lower on the waveform, but the Z cam's waveform shadows are also at a higher level so it could just be an exposure difference. The different field of view and angle make it hard to tell. I'm still going with "everyone exaggerates by 2 stops except Arri" so 15 for Z Cam is really more like 13 (as measured by Arri).
I do think that the color on the Z Cam is phenomenal. The real conclusion is that the Z Cam's footage is really good enough for any cinematic purposes.
 
@webrunner5 they are both UHD
I can't say I agree. The Z Cam actually looks like it has less noise. Arri definitely has more chroma noise. However, the Z Cam's depth of field looks shallower, so they might have a faster lens and a lower ISO.

We don't know what the deal is, like you said - we have little information about the sensor. The camcorder listed has to use an external box to process the footage? Do you really expect a small mirrorless camera to deal with such high power draw? It would also cost a hell of a lot more to produce/manufacture than their current x-trans sensors... 

Some of the nicest looking footage I've seen from the pocket 4k so far!
 
 

@DBounce thought I'd share this with you...
https://www.newsshooter.com/2018/12/14/kipon-elegant-full-frame-lenses-for-the-nikon-z/
The 90mm could be interesting!

I'd say you could buy one without HDR support, Though most cameras can already do HDR. The thing with HDR is that the industry is still trying to catch up a bit I'm finding. If you edit in Premiere, you can't really even grade for HDR unless you export it to Resolve (Premiere viewports only support up to 120IRE and apparently doesn't add the HDR Flag in the metadata), then there's the fact that barely anyone has HDR monitors to grade with. On top of that, there's a lot of youtube tutorials of people who think they are doing HDR  and teaching how to do it when in reality they have no idea of what they are talking about.
 
Camera body's come and go, and if you're going to buy a new camera within three years, you don't really need HDR. If you're going to keep the camera body for a long time, then it'll be worth it, But SDR won't be phased out for a long long time. Master SDR Rec 709, and then you'll have a much better-starting ground for HDR when it becomes more standardized.