BTM_Pix

I'm a bit confused about the objection to having to go external to record ProRes on the Z cam and then going for a camera that doesn't record internally at all ? Interested to hear how you get on with the Micro Studio Camera though as its not a camera that gets much if any attention on here. What recorder are you going to use with it?

I've brought a BMPCC with me on this trip and using it with the two Panasonic small cheap zooms as they have IS and using internal batteries to keep it all small as well. My batteries are pretty ropey so I get about 5 minutes of actual shooting per one but its no big deal carrying a few. I've no idea what the footage really looks like but I'm mainly doing night stuff with it but off the back screen it certainly looks suitably neon lit urban sleazy ! Don't forget to treat those old SD cards carefully because as you know its a bit of a bastard trying to get recently produced ones to work in them.

The thing that amused me about this was these sites doing an official timed launch announcement for the release of a rumour. I'm surprised they didn't live stream it.

Yeah, you've now made me up my buy it now price by a few quid. Really nice.

I know it has its faults and doesn't get much love but, purely in terms of what I've seen people shoot with them, I've never seen much from the BM 4K Production Camera that I didn't think looked pretty good. I saw one in the window at a CEX branch a while ago for £650 and I see MPB have got one now for £709. Won't be long before they reach my totally arbitrary "oh go on then" price of £500!

As is the camera

I think its this one https://www.wiralcam.com/

IBIS is the common denominator. New lenses could well be the reason actually.

I was only kidding about the external ProRes RAW thing obviously. Its internal ProRes RAW really.

I just asked the man in the camera shop what it was for and he said its for the upcoming ProRes RAW output. Or he may have been giving me directions to the toilet. I dunno, my Japanese is limited to asking if that price is tax free.

The current score is a bit measly, just a used 7Artisans 24mm f1.4 but I'm off for a serious go around again in a couple of hours so that will be added to I've been toying with the S1/24-105 as its about £600 saving so that might happen. Thats some deal for that 200mm f1.8. Judging by the picture you put of it on twitter, someone had the same dilemma over putting it in hand luggage and strapped it to the outside of the plane instead!

Leica SL

I've never looked back at anything I shot with the H3D and mumbled "what was I thinking when I bought that" and I suppose thats the acid test. Ten years on it still smokes every other camera I've had image quality wise. Unfortunately, it developed a fault on the main board in the digital back and the quote from them to fix it was a "what are they thinking" moment. So much so that I've resigned myself to waiting until a used one comes up at the same price as the repair and buy it, which it is virtually at now. The good thing with it being modular is I'll then have a spare of the camera body and OVF as well as a spares kit for most of the parts in the digital back. That's what would concern me about the Alexa in that you're buying a £50K camera for £5K but as soon as anything goes wrong on it then its a £50K camera again But then again when you look at the devaluation of new cameras then if you got three years out of it and had to throw it in the bin you'd still be about even with the cost of ownership against a even a low/mid range Canon or Sony cinema model. I suspect that there are many people that have lost more than £5K trading in gear in the past few years in pursuit of the Alexa look so at least this would stop that. Shall we go halves on that one from CVP then?

First purchase of the 2019 edition of Tokyo Used Photo Gear Frenzy. Found a 7Artisans 28mm f1.4 and adjourned to a cafe to put it on so this is literally the first shot with it but more to come later in the week. Shot wide open obviously and, well, it certainly glows.

Thats what I was driving at really, I'm not aware of any substantial numbers of reports of hangups with these specific models (or any these days to be fair) that would require it, particularly as some of them have been out in the wild for a good few years. IBIS is the common link between them so perhaps its just pre-emptive based on there being something that has come up as a potential long term risk based on their service data. Interesting timing with it coinciding with Nikon having to recall Z6 and Z7 because of IBIS issues as well. I was thinking about getting a used Z6 on this trip if I saw one cheap enough but I'll be taking a big swerve on that one now With regard to the Playmemories, the A9, A7iii and A7Riii have already had it removed so this won't be specifically to close the door on the hack but as you say it may well do it indirectly on those that can be language changed/record limit removed using it.

You haven't installed any dodgy hacks on it have you?

So, Sony have released a set of firmware updates for cameras old and new. These are : A6500, A7ii, A7iii, A7Rii, A7Riii, A7Sii, A77ii and A9 Beyond saying these firmware updates "improve the overall stability of the cameras" they don't elaborate at all on what the specific issues might have been. I'm presuming that there must be some sort of common library that these models share that they've found a bug with but I wonder if its something else? Possibly some new future functionality that needs an intermediate update for would be one possibility. Another might be a patch related to similar issues that Blackmagic original Pocket/Micro and VideoAssists have with reading new Sandisk cards. Another might be some sort of semi-lockout/feature reduction or enhancement related to 3rd party lenses in relation to IBIS? The last one I could think of would be to patch some vulnerability to a hack. Its this last one that is an immediate concern to me as I'm writing this jetlagged to fuck in Tokyo and looking to go out and pick up a cheap used A7Rii or A7Sii in the next few days which both rely on using the PlayMemories hack to get them into English and I don't want the very diligent vendor to have upgraded them I think the IBIS one might be the most likely though as it is the common link between all of them. Curious though and I do wonder how many of us who own a camera on that list consider it unstable enough to upgrade it based on such a vague statement as that from Sony?

Oh, well played Sir.

Its one that came up a few times so in this one I've added the B&H link to the, currently, 50 different L mount adapters they supply.

I doubt they will do anything now if they haven't already but here is a link to a one page site made by one of the victims of the scam about it. https://ebrahimsaadawi.wordpress.com/ This is his vimeo page https://vimeo.com/ebrahimsaadawi And these are links to posts in this thread regarding the actual creators of that content that he his is passing off as his own. So if he doesn't steal your money, he'll steal your work. The point I raised a couple of days back about his post on THEIR site is very relavant as through this whole saga he was claiming to be the Grandfather and yet when confronted on DPR its suddenly was his Father. Who in another attempted deflection is also now deceased. That post also states quite clearly that the production company if it ever existed was never his and that he is a dentist. So by his own admission on THEIR site he has no organisation under which to perform media production and is actually gainfully employed doing something entirely unrelated on a full time basis. Allied to the only visible evidence of his film making being proven to be plagiarism then I'm not sure how much more evidence of him NOT being a professional film maker is actually required. None of this is new and is all contained in this thread which they have been alerted to on many occasions so either they haven't read it, don't consider it damning enough or don't care. As I said in the previous post, because of that, if something happens to one of their members then its on them. If you feel strongly enough that they are not doing enough to prevent him developing a similar scam on there then the next step would be to contact the actual owners of the site and tell them about your efforts. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Photography_Review

I've had a look and the answer, unfortunately, would be no. Well, no, in the sense of the practicality of it rather than it being completely impossible. The Sony cameras and the GH5/S are supported because they are able to be controlled and provide live view through the PTP protocol which the GX80 isn't. In fact, I think the GH5/S are the only Panasonic ones that can whereas its more or less ubiquitous on Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Pentax and of course Sony. How the Weebill is operating as far as I can see is that the control input from the handle goes to the camera through USB and the return data from the camera, including the live view, is then passed by wifi to the app which then returns any changes you make back to the handle which then passes them through USB to the camera again. So.... To make this work with a GX80 we would need to make A) An interface box that pretended to be a camera to take and return the control information from the handle and then pass those controls via bluetooth to... B) A custom app that would be connected to the GX80 via wifi to pretend to be the Panasonic app to take the live camera feed and pass the controls it was receiving via bluetooth to the camera. Neither of those things are insurmountable by any means but they would require a fair amount of time and, crucially, buying the gimbal to develop and test it with. The end result in terms of cost to make something that custom and with a potentially very limited market would make it pretty expensive.

It is not going to give you the same targeting capabilities of that array of 360 microphones but it is capable of some flexibility in the simulation of different polar patterns. The original Soundfield ambisonic microphones have been used for many years for orchestral recording and the advent of DAWs and plugins now makes it more effective for post targeting. https://www.prosoundweb.com/topics/studio/soundfield_sps200_microphone_used_on_recent_abbey_road_session/ Some more general information here, although it is related to a product but is useful nonetheless as the principles are the same in other products. https://knightlab.northwestern.edu/2018/03/29/capturing-the-soundfield/

Based on this particular requirement, where you are wanting to capture behind as well forward of the camera, I'd see if you could get a demo of the Zoom H3VR ambisonic mic/recorder. Its slightly different (and slightly more expensive too) in being a recorder as well but it can be camera mounted and has a line out to feed the camera a guide track for easy sync later. Because it records in the Ambisonics format you then have the ability to steer the listening position in post to create the balance that you need between the action and the crowd. I am looking to buy one of these myself but haven't as yet so can't vouch for the quality at all (and the price of £300 is very cheap in comparison to anything else you'd need to have this capability) so as I say try and get a demo of it first. This is a demo that B&H did of it recording a jazz quartet in binaural mode so pop your headphones on to listen. It is meant for 360 viewing really but if you view it flat with the trumpet player and bass player facing you then you should be able to get the placement cues of the sax and guitar player to the rear of the listening position. When recorded in ambisonic mode, you will be able to alter the listening position to alter the balance to suit what you are after to make it more immersive.

I finally finished that roll of filament so Black is the new Electric Blue If you did want to go wireless with your project, Bluetooth might be a bit too short range. The easiest thing to do would be to use two Arduinos (one with the wiichuck and the other connected to the tripod head) and put one of these HC12 modules on each one. They are about £4 each and will let you have a wireless serial link between the controller and the head of in excess of 1km as opposed to probably 20-30m of bluetooth. They are really simple to implement in your code as the library lets you address them exactly as you would a serial port for debugging etc so you should be able to get it up and running in your current sketch really quickly by sending the values from the Arudino with the wiichuck that you would have sent to the controlling pins as data out to the HC12 serial port instead and have the Arduino with the head attached picking them up and actioning them. Mmmm.....I might even think about making that the 73rd project that I'm simultaneously working on as I've just thought of a way to send camera data to it as well to make a cheap high end PTZ camera.

Too big and too heavy are all a bit relative to me considering the rocket launcher sized lenses I've had to hawk around for work Funnily enough though, I saw the lens in the flesh for the first time the other day in a display case at a camera shop and it was actually smaller than I had been expecting. I've just used the camerasize.com tool to see how it fares to a lens that I use a lot which is the Nikon 14-24mm f2.8 and they are actually reasonably similar size and weight wise. Based on my experiences with the 14-24mm, its still a bit of a lump (though thats not always a bad thing stability wise) but I wouldn't be worried about using it all day. I'm looking at it really as three f2 primes, and all points in between of course, so for me there is an overall saving in terms of size and weight in the bag from carrying multiple primes which is often more of a priority than the size and weight when its in use. Doesn't hurt not having to change lenses (24 to 35 is definitely a regular swap for me) not just for speed and convenience but also in keeping the dust/out of focus birds off the sensor which I'm far more plagued with here in Spain than I was in the UK.