BTM_Pix

Great that Jon

Nice shot. 
I was thinking about running a few more tests at different apertures with the 35mm lenses but to be honest its shown me enough to think that the Sigma is only going to be making an appearance with the speedbooster attached when I need a 24mm that can see in the dark with the DOF of a cigarette paper.

Which part doesn't make sense mate?
That on most decent headphones if you have a knowledge of how a broad range of reference pieces sound comparatively on your headphones then you can make a better fist of mixing on them ?
Or about the near field monitors that were used as a check reference of average consumer equipment (the Auratones in AM radio times, the NS10s for FM and home hifi) and how there is now an argument for using the iPhone in that capacity? I didn't mention anything about actually mixing on them to be fair. Either with or without headgear  

thanks @BTM_Pix, interesting comparison! I'm surprised by the performance of the Fuji at f1.4. I have the lens too and knew it was sharp but didn't think it'd be as sharp as the Sigma Art. What I also like about the Fuji is the flare it renders. 

I've just done a small test if anyone is looking at options in the 28-35mm prime area.
I've got a Sigma 35mm ART 1.4 in Nikon mount (with a Zhongyi Lens Turbo II booster), Fuji's own 35mm 1.4 and for a bit of an older school alternative the Contax Zeiss Distagon T* 28mm F2.8
All collages have the images in the following order :
 
Top Left - Sigma 35mm ART 1.4 with Lens Turbo
Top Right - Sigma 35mm ART 1.4
Bottom Left - Fujifilm 35mm 1.4
Bottom Right - Contax Zeiss Distagon T* 28mm F2.8
 
All shots are OOC jpeg with the simulation set to ProNeg STD -2 -2 with the lenses wide open and shutter speed of the exposure used to compensate.
The first collage shows the full field of view each lens produces.
The second collage is an adjusted matched crop which makes it a bit easier to see OOF rendering etc.
The third collage is an adjusted matched crop of the focus chart to compare sharpness and DOF differences.
For me, if I had to choose one to put in the bag now, then the Sigma and the Lens Turbo combo offers the greatest flexibility. Yes, there is some degradation in IQ with the booster but its by no means near enough to not use it considering the advantages it brings. However, its bigger, its manual focus and the weight of it unbalances the camera completely. Plus, I'd have to carry the dumb adapter with it too.
The Zeiss is small, slightly wider to give a nice 40mm-ish equivalent FOV which I prefer to 50mm-ish from the 35mms and with the extra bit of crop of the X-T2 in 4K its even more important and is sharp enough without having the razor edge that the other two have. I also have the 50mm,135mm and 28-85mm from this range and I'm on the hunt for an 18mm so I'll write something up about them as a set at some point if anyone is interested.
That leaves us with the Fujfilm lens which, to be honest, is probably the one I'd go for if I had to put one in my bag and go out and shoot right now. It's far lighter than the other two, performs as well as the much vaunted Sigma (albeit without the ability to do the extra tricks with the speed booster) and has the massive advantage of AF. As you can see on the closeups of the charts, even with relatively short focal lengths like these and even on a crop sensor, you are still looking at a depth of field of around 6cm when you are shooting wide open. The X-T2 has brilliant focusing aids like the split view and really good peaking but when you're dealing with such low tolerances its still nice to have something quick when you need it.



EDIT>>>>>
Mmm.....hosting them on tiny pic has bollocksed the resolution.
Forum was having a lot of problems uploading anything so it was the only way of getting them but I'll try again if anyone feels the need to see a bit more detail

Beautiful music, though the camera doesn't seem to match the 3D audio all the time, and sounds more 2D stereo than spatialized 3D? I see in the comments they used a dummy head & torso. When researching the latest & greatest, including the $8000 Neumann dummy head examples, I found Ambisonics provided a means to get more 'spatiality/locality' since dummy heads are baked in filters. Guess I should try an FPV using the Ambeo and camera up to my eye and walking around...

This video is a great illustration of binaural for music application and illustrates it by starting off in mono and then transitioning into binaural.
Without wishing to sound too fanciful, that transition when the sound opens up and envelops you is actually very uplifting and moving.
 

Yeah, I've seen the ASMR videos- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_sensory_meridian_response. We started down ASMR then felt we didn't want to be in that market (basically just trying to evoke the ASMR or 'the tingles'). Instead we decided to try using 3D audio along with psychology techniques to help access the unconscious mind.
Roland makes good stuff- those headphones along with first-person video could create a very immersive playback experience. However, in-ear mics will work great for you, but may not be as '3D' for other people due to the nature of the HRTF created by your specific ear/head size/shape. In any case, running around with these mics and a GoPro on your head, or just holding the camera up to your eye (and turn with your head) can be a very cool immersive experience for the viewer if watched using headphones (iPhone etc. will work great).
I was going to get one of these or similar: http://binauralenthusiast.com/product/etiam-ullamcorper-dollor-5/. However once I learned about Ambisonics and the post tools I went with Ambeo (tetrahedral 4 mics). The cool thing about the Ambisonic toolkit (free) + Reaper (it's free; I paid for commercial use) is you can start experimenting and producing 3D audio with mono recordings from any source. That is, you can place sounds in 3D space as desired, including animating/moving them using Reaper. A 3D mic is faster for production though- record, load into Reaper, apply filters from Sennhesier (A-B format), filters for Ambisonic tookit (change 3D stage, distance, position), then last filter renders to stereo (binaural with HRTF for headphones) or even 5.1, 7.1 etc. I use a template project with everything already set up- just add the 4-track audio and render it out- super fast and easy.

I had an involvement with Soundfield many years ago and it was one of those products that everybody loved the idea of but couldn't match it to an application that would justify the cost of it. Despite it being reasonable when you considered it was 4 high quality microphones, people couldn't cope with the sticker shock of it being all in one go !
But it looks like its time has now come and with them being bought by Rode, it would hint at a trickle down of the technology at a more favourable price.
In a similar if less sophisticated and certainly less expensive vein for more immersive audio capture, I'm interested in these Roland binaural earphone/microphone combo.
Although they seem to have gained a cult following with an interesting if niche band of YoutTubers who make videos of themselves whispering and stroking different textures for the aural (and I suspect 'other') pleasures of their viewers, there are also some quite impressive demos of it being used for more mainstream recording.
Have you tried them by any chance?
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/687077-REG/Roland_CS_10EM_CS_10EM_Binaural_Microphones_Earphones.html

Interesting if you have not seen or used it.
https://cameramanben.github.io/LUTCalc/LUTCalc/index.html

I've just done a small test if anyone is looking at options in the 28-35mm prime area.
I've got a Sigma 35mm ART 1.4 in Nikon mount (with a Zhongyi Lens Turbo II booster), Fuji's own 35mm 1.4 and for a bit of an older school alternative the Contax Zeiss Distagon T* 28mm F2.8
All collages have the images in the following order :
 
Top Left - Sigma 35mm ART 1.4 with Lens Turbo
Top Right - Sigma 35mm ART 1.4
Bottom Left - Fujifilm 35mm 1.4
Bottom Right - Contax Zeiss Distagon T* 28mm F2.8
 
All shots are OOC jpeg with the simulation set to ProNeg STD -2 -2 with the lenses wide open and shutter speed of the exposure used to compensate.
The first collage shows the full field of view each lens produces.
The second collage is an adjusted matched crop which makes it a bit easier to see OOF rendering etc.
The third collage is an adjusted matched crop of the focus chart to compare sharpness and DOF differences.
For me, if I had to choose one to put in the bag now, then the Sigma and the Lens Turbo combo offers the greatest flexibility. Yes, there is some degradation in IQ with the booster but its by no means near enough to not use it considering the advantages it brings. However, its bigger, its manual focus and the weight of it unbalances the camera completely. Plus, I'd have to carry the dumb adapter with it too.
The Zeiss is small, slightly wider to give a nice 40mm-ish equivalent FOV which I prefer to 50mm-ish from the 35mms and with the extra bit of crop of the X-T2 in 4K its even more important and is sharp enough without having the razor edge that the other two have. I also have the 50mm,135mm and 28-85mm from this range and I'm on the hunt for an 18mm so I'll write something up about them as a set at some point if anyone is interested.
That leaves us with the Fujfilm lens which, to be honest, is probably the one I'd go for if I had to put one in my bag and go out and shoot right now. It's far lighter than the other two, performs as well as the much vaunted Sigma (albeit without the ability to do the extra tricks with the speed booster) and has the massive advantage of AF. As you can see on the closeups of the charts, even with relatively short focal lengths like these and even on a crop sensor, you are still looking at a depth of field of around 6cm when you are shooting wide open. The X-T2 has brilliant focusing aids like the split view and really good peaking but when you're dealing with such low tolerances its still nice to have something quick when you need it.



EDIT>>>>>
Mmm.....hosting them on tiny pic has bollocksed the resolution.
Forum was having a lot of problems uploading anything so it was the only way of getting them but I'll try again if anyone feels the need to see a bit more detail

Just to clarify this again, I'm not advocating mixing on phone headphones or speakers but as a reference check against what someone might be listening to the end product on.
It doesn't have to be literal either but just a typical representation.
No one had Auratone 5Cs in their car or transistor radio and no one had Yamaha NS10s on their hifi (literally, as it was in this original incarnation that it was a monumental massively criticised flop) but both proved themselves a reliable representation of an average. So, whether its an iPhone or a Galaxy or a £30 eBay special, it won't be far off for the same purpose.
And it does bring up an interesting point regarding listening for pleasure in that if the goal is to hear it exactly as the artist, producer and engineer intended it then for a period of about 15-20 years, most enthusiasts could have saved themselves a fortune on by buying a pair of £250 NS10s and a similarly priced amp as thats exactly what most of their records were being mixed on as the tail started wagging the dog and it was the big monitors that were being used more as the confidence check.
 

I'm using the ATH50s at the moment.
Like all the others, they're detailed enough for analytic and corrective work and if you've got some reference stuff that you know on a range of systems and you yourself are able to make that averaging compensation then you can make them work very well for mixing on. It then just comes down to practicality and the ATH50s are comfortable enough to wear all day long and isolating enough to use in the field.
Years ago when everyone used Auratones and then Yamaha NS-10s in studios it was to approximate what people would be listening on. Nowadays, there is a definite argument to use Apple earbuds and iPhone speakers as your reference as it is more like literal representation than approximation of what it is that the vast majority will consume on.

I tend to like more muted colors, but for the people who prefer some saturation, here is one of my first versions of the video with more saturation. On my computer and phone this looks decent, but on my TV it is nuclear... so YMMV...
 

I also have only been able to look at Flog through a monitor. It seems to have up to 2 stops more DR. But you lose the nice SOOC colours. So youll have to decide which is worth more to you. 
Btw theres a recent blog somewhere about a guy who used the original blackmagic video assist with the Xt2. In the comments section he said that it can downsample the 4k signal to 1080p and record it. 

Thought I'd have a look at external recording with it today.
Just a quick test to compare FLOG, a flattened PRO Neg Std and an internally recorded regular PRO Neg Std.
I haven't got a 4K external recorder so thought I'd just plug it into my Blackmagic UltraStudio Mini and record straight to the MacBook and do it in HD.
Well, that was the plan anyway until I discovered it just won't play nice with the Blackmagic and, erm, doesn't output FLOG in HD.
The former I can understand as sometimes it can take specific switch on sequences getting HDMI handshaking working but why the hell does it only output FLOG in 4K??
And even then it won't do it when you are recording internally so its an either or situation.
So I was left with having to make do with plugging it into a 4K monitor and just looking at instead!
I was only messing about pointing it towards a wall in my office that has a window in it and adjusting the exposure manually so that the clouds (against a very blue sky) were just about blowing out. The camera meter was showing this exposure to be +2.0 and even with that overexposure there was barely any detail visible in the rest of the room around the window. Switching to FLOG, the meter was now showing -0.6 and I was able to adjust exposure to bring everything up and maintain the highlights in the clouds.
It was a very rough and quick test and only by eye on a monitor so I wouldn't be too committal about it until I've been able to test it properly and actually record the output but it was definitely interesting.
Anyone here actually recorded any FLOG?

What I'd like Apple to do is produce an eGPU enclosure. Even a ready filled one if they want to maintain control.
There are new thunderbolt docks with gpu slots around now which are less hacky and considering the daft cost of typical thunderbolt docks they are decent value for money.
If Apple did one that was optimised for fcpx then I'd happily hand over my readies to them. It would be a bit of an old school offline/online edit paradigm but being able to do the edit on my macbook and then plug the eGPU in for the final render would suit me down to the ground. As would plugging it into my old macbook air and breathing some new utility out of that for the same purpose. 
But the other back to the old days thing that interests me is this Liquid Sky project branching off from gaming into video applications. In a nutshell Liquid Sky is cloud computing with crazy spec gpu computers. If it's good enough to satisfy gamers performance wise then it looks promising for our applications. For someone old enough to have written code on teletype that was then executed on the regional university mainframe at night so all the local colleges could share it's performance then remote rendering is definitely a nostalgic concept I could get behind! 
And it's that democratising aspect of it that's the intruiging point really of Liquid Sky for me in that it let's us access extensive and expensive back end power through whatever device we have to hand or can afford (playing top end games from cheap tablets while on the go is a major part of its pitch)
Sometimes we might not have access to the grunt we need for financial reasons but also for practical ones. I'm currently on a train and cutting together some stuff in imovie on the ipad for example. It has a two step convoluted way to get its projects into fcpx for finishing ut I'd love to be able to hit a button and be able to hand it off remotely and have it returned rendered to me. Doing the edit on the ipad is the most efficient thing for me to be doing the edit right now but the device lacks the horsepower to truly be an end to end solution but a cloud element would solve that.
Its that sort of stuff that Apple needs to do to keep everyone onside and offer a tightly integrated approach to recognising that we all not only have different needs but we all have different needs of those different needs at different times!
Truth be told, we're not ALL rendering all the time and we're all in different time zones so if 100 of us on here threw in £300 each instead of spending it on incremental individual upgrades we could build our own Liquid Sky render monster that we could share time on!!!
 

I'd vlog but I can't bring myself to say "Hey guys, what's up" prior to opening a cardboard box.
I really admire Neistat to having his production so well set that he can turn stuff out every day with the quality consistency he has. He offers a window into that New York creative character that so many people aspire to and whilst I just can't warm to him I can see why his audience does and good luck to him and them.
Unfortunately, the constant need for content is fuelled by and fuels the short term product cycles and attention spans of manufacturer and consumer alike (with its consequencent product shaming if you don't have the latest and greatest) so it's not entirely healthy.
Having said that, because you can quickly go back over years of content, it can also serve to quell GAS as you can be readily underwhelmed by just how tiny some of the incremental upgrades of products actually are under real world conditions when compared to their predecessors.
It probably needs less unboxing and quick run throughs of a product that came out 30 seconds ago and more "look what you can do with the one that came out 3 years ago and I picked up for peanuts"
In terms of non-tech content, it SHOULD be the greatest source of investigative and niche interest documentaries but you have to plough through so much man in a basement ranting stuff to find anything decent.
Mind you, it's a platform where we get the content we deserve as it's totally in our control to make better stuff so I've got no room to be sniffy about it if I only consume and don't contribute.
 

Ignore me, I was just being flippant.
I meant it has about 8 steps per revolution on that lens and you can feel every one of them.

Half a turn gets you to 1.5m and another quarter turn gets you to infinity.
On the upside the manual focusing aids are pretty good and the peaking certainly announces its presence loudly enough!
Swings and roundabouts I suppose.

Picked up the 10-24mm on Saturday. 
Shot in 4K so its slightly cropped in on these frame grabs than it would be in HD.
 

Some frame grabs from the cheap 50-230mm from the same wandering about. Shooting in 4K gave it even more range !
 

Picked up the 10-24mm on Saturday. 
Shot in 4K so its slightly cropped in on these frame grabs than it would be in HD.
 

Some frame grabs from the cheap 50-230mm from the same wandering about. Shooting in 4K gave it even more range !
 

Picked up the 10-24mm on Saturday. 
Shot in 4K so its slightly cropped in on these frame grabs than it would be in HD.
 

Some frame grabs from the cheap 50-230mm from the same wandering about. Shooting in 4K gave it even more range !
 

I did some vlogging stuff with a G7 on a trip earlier this week and I have to say that it performed really well and the articulating screen and iPad/iphone remote controlling of it was a real boon. 
I actually wanted to take the GX80 for the stabilisation (I could've lived without the articulating screen because of the ipad/iphone remote) but the lack of a mic input made it dead in the water. 
I'm now, of course, spending loads of time stabilising everything in FCPX which is a real pain in the arse and certainly detracts from the immediacy of what I was trying to do.
Clearly, the best solution for me would be to have the G7 with the GX80 stabilisation.
So that'll be the $80 over budget G80/85

This is some great recent footage with this sleeping beastly technology. Imagine the potential once this update comes.
https://vimeo.com/200431612