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Wow - that's one hell of a sun star! You could use that to gain both power and respect on the entry-level stills photography sites.. they'd fall on their knees before you!! After going through the exercise of seeing what EF glass was out there I didn't see a lot of options that tempted me, so I suspect that I'll just end up leaving it attached to the Zeiss 50/1.4 and that will be that. If the image from the Zeiss is half as good as the lens' physical construction then it would be worth buying the Viltrox just to use with the Zeiss lens alone! Someone else pointed out that the Viltrox is probably only capable of F1.2 at maximum, so that would mean the Mikaton 50mm F0.95 lens is out of the running, and it was the only other thing I was really tempted by.

I'd use a little known plugin called Tilt Shift Blur (TSB), which comes with Resolve but is very special in a critical aspect. Normally if you have a node and give it a key then the node calculates things as normal and then uses the key as a transparency effect, so if you used a large Gaussian Blur and gave it a key then you'd get a huge blur mixed with the sharp image at the level of transparency the key dictated. However, with the TSB, the key defines the size of the blur, so you can vary the size of the blur that way. For this purpose I'd give it a luma key of the image and adjust the contrast and amount to control the relative amount of blur between the lighter and darker parts of the image. The TSB is what I use to soften the edges of the frame in my lens emulation nodes, which allows there to be no blur in the centre and it gradually transition to having a larger and larger blurring towards the edges. The fact that the key input acts as a transparency control really doesn't make much sense when applying most OFX plugins and I'm surprised they haven't made more of them smart like the TSB one where it uses the key as an input to control one or more of the OFX parameters.

Thanks! The colour part of the emulation (which has the rolloff in it) is just a preset in the Resolve Film Look Creator (IIRC the Fujifilm one, but if not that one then it'll be the Kodak one). Other parts of the emulation I've had to go DIY and disable those parts of the FLC, but no-one has said anything bad about the colour profile so that seems to be good. Thanks! I was just thinking about where it's at and next steps and I realised that there are a few things I hadn't done yet, but feedback suggests that it's fine how it is, so that's amusing. One of the things I had noted was that apparently the size of the grains is different in the shadows vs highlights, so I was thinking about different ways to implement that, but maybe I just won't bother!

Got it! It was just quite stiff, and the technique is to take a microfibre cloth and to grip the element from both sides pressing in on the glass elements themselves to turn it. Foolishly I wasn't using the full surface of the glass! I swear I could feel the surface of the glass bend slightly to get enough traction to get the lens to move, but it seems to have worked, and I now have slightly past infinity focus. I can adjust it to dial it in but I'm curious to see if that's enough clearance for the Takumar and M42-EF adapter, so will try that tomorrow and see how I go. Damn the Zeiss is a highly engineered object though!

I watched the same video, but he rotates his with his fingers and I put little dents in the ends of my fingers trying and failing to get it to move. Also of note is he seems to have the EF-M2 and I have the EF-M2II (the second version of the EF-M2).

The plot thickens.... My Zeiss ZE 50/1.4 arrived and (apart from being an incredible chunk of glass and metal) it won't focus to infinity on the Viltrox EF-M2II. The Zeiss is properly seated on the Viltrox, the Viltrox is properly seated on the camera, and it's talking to the camera fine. I'm blaming the Viltrox because both the Zeiss and M42 Takumar both have the same issue, plus, the Zeiss has a hard-stop for infinity so it will be well calibrated and I'd trust their engineering over Viltrox any day! The advice online is that the optical element inside the Viltrox can be rotated to fix the issue, which makes perfect sense, only mine doesn't rotate, and I gave it a good go (with just my fingers) but it wouldn't budge. Do I just need to (carefully) attack it with tools? Any advice?

Version 8. Changes are: Added CA Added film dirt and damage Added diffusion Less blur I've also added a bunch of fresh images into the reel, so there's a wider range of situations, including more real-world examples. The ones I grabbed from previous trips are exposed with SS so the motion might be off on some of them, so excuse that aspect of it (although having a slightly blurrier image does make this less visible). I also backed off the stabilisation on the shots from the previous reel as I think it hides the gate weave a little and is more how the rig actually shoots. Here are a few before/after images, to get a sense of what it's working with as input and how far it's taking the image. This is the setup used for (most) of the images in the reel.. It's tiny, actually pocketable, fits in the palm of the hand, and the ergonomics are just right.

To me the zoom is the most significant function here. This is meant to be a walk-around film-the-surroundings camera and my experience is that everyone who rigs a camera for this purpose uses a zoom with pretty significant zoom lens. The biggest con of this is the fact it's a gimbal, and therefore stabilises rotation but not position, leading to the dreaded bobbing movement and foreground parallax errors. These might be my candidate for the least cinematic image attribute of all time (linked to timestamp): This is why gimbals need the fourth axis for walking, and why people don't shoot gimbal shots with any foreground in them. By applying less stabilisation you end up with a more stable looking shot because the stabilisation doesn't call so much attention to itself.

I look forward to seeing some images.. enjoy, and grab some shots you can share with us!

You know, I don't think that what I said above is correct. If they defined their primaries then maybe the software vendors can adjust WB properly and the spectra doesn't need to be disclosed. It also strikes me that if you have the right equipment, measuring the spectral response is a simple exercise. Maybe better to just concentrate on what we point the damned things at... 😄

I was just wondering if it would make any difference, doing it before or after, but I think I don't know enough about how the debayering is actually done. I suppose that if manufacturers don't share the spectral responses of the channels then no-one can know what the primaries are, so although they'll know the gamma is Linear they won't know the colour space. Therefore if they want to make the image more warm along the neutral axis, they'll be boosting red and green but won't know the correct proportions to move along the right vector (unless they do some testing to determine this). I guess it's a situation where you have all the usual suspects feeding into it, like corporate secrecy and paranoia (in the guise of "competitive advantage") and poor understanding of transparency and the benefits of open standards, but also poor business management and inability to understand how the customer experiences their products. Industrial espionage is also something that happens and there's a balance between being transparent and making it easy for your competitors to undercut you in the market. I think for ARRI the marketplace might be somewhat different, but perhaps not. Then again, ARRI got sold and not all the Japanese manufacturers needed to be put on the market, so maybe their curmudgeonly ways paid off...

Interesting. Makes sense to shoot both so you can review coverage and make decisions on-set rather than waiting days/weeks to see the footage. Of course, their page doesn't get off to the best start..... umm... sure, if you say so!

Thanks! My film nerd friend also said that this was basically there, and that after YT compression it would be indistinguishable. I'm actually really stunned as I figured that this project would end with me being happy I got a film look of some kind and everyone else giving up because I was so far away! I'm also sort-of stunned because the FLC and other plugins don't get this close and all I did was write a random noise generator and then a gaussian blur and we're there. My plan is to keep going and emulate as much as I can, including the full image pipeline, so filters / lenses / film / colour grading / etc. The way I've structured the grain is that it's at pixel-level on the timeline so to go from 16mm to 35mm all I have to do is lower the amount of grain and back off the softening, then back off the halation and bloom and gate weave etc, but if it looks good at 16mm it should be fine at 35mm where it's all much more subtle. 8mm is the same, but just turning everything up. Everything is tuneable, so adjusting things isn't that hard once you know which controls are the ones you want. Top row is diffusion, then 4 nodes for the lens emulation, then FLC and gate weave, then 4 nodes for the grain and softening, then CST to 709 output. I've started making a list for v8: Play with diffusion to simulate netting / diffusion filters Add CA to the lens emulation (already done) Lessen the amount of blur (I have some great S16 samples now to compare with) Add film dirt and damage, like scratches etc. There's an OFX plugin for this, so should be straight-forward and I plan to go subtle with it Really analyse my sources, including comparing the 1000Mbps scan my friend gave me to what I see in Resolve, and also comparing the YT samples I've downloaded to the YT version of my emulation (to compare apples-to-apples). I'll also start using better footage 🙂 As everything is tuneable, making a number of variants makes sense, potentially at 8mm / 16mm / 35mm, but also other variations too. Other things that are on my mind are things like bleach bypass, split toning (which Resolve doesn't seem to have a good answer for), and maybe some B&W options too. The FLC can do bleach bypass and potentially the B&W looks, but the split-toning might have to be another custom DCTL. Thanks! Great to get an additional perspective 😄

There's some truth to that, but I think GoPro are a different breed. Still, it's not a popularity contest. Seems sensible! What sort of shooting would you do with it? My impression is that something like this is best placed to do things that larger cameras can't do, otherwise it'd be better to use those as they'll have nicer DR, codecs, etc etc. It seems like the advantages this might have would be the size, the crop factor (if that's what you're going for), and maybe the slow-motion which some people have said isn't really available elsewhere. I have shot a lot on small cameras and enjoyed trying to push things to their limits, including shooting stills on my GoPro 3, which despite not even having a screen still worked really well for street photography (the secret was burst mode). When you see the camera YouTubers they all have a similar mindset that comes from constantly standing around in public talking to large cameras on tripods (or being filmed by someone else) so size doesn't really matter in that sense and they'll just rig everything up. If, on the other hand, you're going out with a camera for more than a week or two before the NDA lifts, you've got time to learn it and learn how to use it and how it influences you to shoot etc, so you can rig it (or not) in the best way possible for its logical use.

Dammit, v7 had a mistake in it, so re-exported and uploaded it.