kye

There is a time for a clean aesthetic. There is a time for a more timeless more filmic aesthetic. There are times for a far grittier aesthetic too. Those who have been following my other thread will know I've mostly got my travel / walk-around AF setup nailed. (GH7 and GX85 bodies combined with the 14-140mm zoom, 12-35mm F2.8 zoom, 9mm F1.7, and 14mm F2.5 pancake lens) This setup will give a relatively clean starting point which can be graded to create a pretty wide range of looks. However, not everything can be achieved in post. I have also collected a bunch of modern MF lenses and vintage lenses over the years and these might be useful in creating other looks that I can't do in post with the above kit. So I'm trying to work out if I should just archive them or if they're still good for anything I want to do, and if so, what might that be? I've looked through my continually growing collection of lens comparisons, but found nothing conclusive. Thus begins a moderately sized lens / camera test... The setups included in the test are below. The details in brackets are the FF equivalents. OG BMPCC + 12-35mm F2.8 (35-100mm F8.0) This setup is included as I think it will be a reference for the rest of the setups (at worst) and might end up becoming part of my standard kit (at best). GF3 + 15mm F8 (30mm F16) This setup is included as it's essentially a modern Super-8mm camera, and considering it is absolutely tiny and takes the same batteries as the GX85 it's almost inconsequential to bring on a trip. GX85 with: Modern: Panasonic 12-35mm F2.8 (24-70mm F5.6) Modern: Panasonic 14mm F2.5 (28mm F5) Modern: Panasonic 14-42mm f3.5-5.6 (28-84mm F7.0-11.2) Modern MF: TTartisans 17mm F1.4 (34mm F2.8) Vintage: Cosmicar 12.5mm F1.9 SB (36mm F5.5) Modern MF: Voigtlander 17.5mm F0.95 (35mm F1.9) Vintage: SB + Yashica 28mm F2.8 (40mm F4.0) Vintage: SB + Tokina 28-70mm F3.5-4.5 (40-100mm F5.0-6.4) Vintage: SB + Takumar 35mm F3.5 (50mm F5) Vintage: SB + Mir-1B 37mm F2.8 (53mm F4) Vintage: SB + Takumar 55mm F1.8 (78mm F2.6) Vintage: SB + Helios 44M 58mm F2.0 (82mm F2.8) Modern MF: Voigtländer 42.5mm f0.95 (85mm F1.9) Modern MF: TTartisans 50mm f1.2 (100mm F2.4) I haven't included all my lenses, but the ones I have omitted have been included in other tests previously and are broadly similar to ones I have included, so if they become interesting as a result of this test I have some more reference materials. I watched a doco on Netflix the other day called Attack on London, and was really inspired by the look of the 'recreation' images they have obviously filmed for the doc, and seem to have used one of the filthiest anamorphic lenses around (and potentially added more dirt in post as well). Here are some screenshots.. These might not have been streamed at the highest bitrate available, but I don't care - they look great and have so much texture and feel. This isn't the exact aesthetic I'm going for, but it's one that I saw recently that has a lot of texture and FEEL. My hope is to work out what the ingredients are to getting this kind of feel and then work out when I would want it and then work backwards to what equipment and processes I'd use to get it. My initial impressions (guesses) are that the ingredients are: shallower DoF lower levels of sharpness decent amounts of grain film colours (especially having a tint and having subtractive sat) The above images have more elements to them than this, but I don't care much for things like CA etc, so I don't think they're part of the minimum required elements. I plan to shoot comparisons with the setups above in a range of different scenarios and then see what I can see, before moving onto the post workflows and what role those play.

Nice images! I feel like you've absolutely nailed the core concept - it's about capturing "the way they felt at the time". This is where the pixel peeing leads the creativity astray, it's not about capturing the way it appeared at the time, it's the way it felt at the time.

Wow, I'll have to look into this!! Sounds super useful if you want to share something quickly rather than publishing a set of finished stills. I have noticed over the years that I tend to continually refer back to the stills I have saved, so I've gotten much more organised in labelling them etc as they're more of a permanent reference than a temporary thing.

What specifically have you mapped to F4? Is it a two-step process to capture a still in the colour page, and then afterwards you have to export all the stills to the disk? or is there now a way to directly save a frame from the timeline straight to the disk? This is something many people have been wishing for..

Makes sense. One other thing I just thought of is wondering if Lightroom can import stills directly from video files? I have no idea, but I remember that Photoshop had integrated some rudimentary video functionality some time ago so maybe Lightroom has some? It's not completely beyond comprehension that they might anticipate solo wedding shooters wanting to pull stills from video files. One thing to keep in mind is the creative impacts of inserting a stills step into your video workflow. On my last couple of trips I worked out a dailies workflow where I backed up the footage, pulled it into a timeline, applied some basic colour grading, and then reviewed it (it's a dailies workflow after all!) but also pulled stills as I went. The creative impact is that while looking for good stills I was focusing on clips that had a single good frame, which is often not creatively relevant for doing a video edit, and could definitely impact your mental inventory of your footage. If you're doing this before you've done the edit, or if the edit is predictable or formulaic enough, then it might not matter, but otherwise it might negatively impact the editing process. Resolve has an ever-increasing catalogue of AI features, but I doubt they'll be sophisticated enough to choose the nicest compositions and facial expressions etc, as making the happiest movie possible isn't really the focus of many film-makers.

The C100 would suffer from the same problem that all workhorse cameras suffer from - the best images from them are made by people who are so good at making images they don't post to social media and/or don't list their equipment if they do post. I wonder how many big budget productions have C100 shots mixed in with the C200/C300 main stuff but used the C100 as a higher-risk or mounted cam due to its size and relatively low cost if something happened to it. I've got the occasional beautiful image from my XC10 when the stars aligned and the location and lighting and composition were all working together, and that had a tiny sensor and 10x variable aperture zoom lens. The C100 almost matched it in pixel-peeing terms despite being 1080p and In similar situations the much larger sensor and ability to have nice lenses would be game over.

VLC has a feature (available via a hotkey) that saves a screen grab as a PNG. It's not a very good player though unfortunately, on Mac anyway. It can't play backwards, and the feature to advance a single frame works at first but seems to get bogged down, and after you've advanced even a few frames it seems incapable of going back to playing again. I know you said you were editing in Premier, but (IIRC) the free version of Resolve does timelines up to UHD and can grab screen grabs relatively easily. It would require a bit of setup where you pull the clips into a timeline, then the grabbing would be like butter, then the export of all the grabs takes a few steps, but the ease of finding the right frames might be worth the 30s to setup and export at the end? Both are options though.

I deliver in 4K too. Just upscale your 1080p project to 4K on export - no-one can tell the difference! Wow - 35-350mm.... now THAT is a lens! That's definitely a lot, and I can understand why you'd feel a bit entitled too, after paying so much. If you're likely to see some animals while you're travelling around seeing other sites then that's probably the best way, as the animals you do see will seem like good fortune rather than focusing on the animals you paid to see and didn't. Those other places seem really cool too. Africa seems like a strange continent in many ways. Of course, in lots of those ways it's quite like the remote places here in Australia, but although I've seen quite a number of them they still seem strange.

Equivalency of DOF is the elephant in the room for sure. In comparison, MFT lacks in the selection of gargantuan lenses with super-shallow DOF and FF lacks in small lenses without shallow DOF. If someone made a FF 28-280mm F7.0-11 lens then it should be the same size as my 14-140mm F3.5-5.6 lens, but of course the internet would go ballistic over it and run whatever manufacturer dared to create such an abomination out of town faster than you can say "grab your pitchforks - the devil has come for our children!". It depends on what you're doing of course, but for me personally when I switched from watching YT lens reviews to watching award winning movies and TV shows from the worlds leading professionals I had the Ah-ha moment when I realised very few shots had shallower DOF than could be achieved with relatively normal MFT lenses. Even when looking at the shots that would have required quite fast lenses on MFT, the aesthetic penalty for the DOF being deeper was very low. I then looked at what potential benefits would be traded-away for it.... lighter cameras that make me more likely to carry them around and use them and therefore get more shots to use in the edit... smaller equipment making me more pleasant to be around and having a nicer trip and causing the people around me to be happier and more relaxed and look nicer in frame... the smaller rig making the people around me less distracted and suspicious... the deeper DOF meaning there was less chance of having one person in focus but the others out of focus or it simply missing focus by focusing on the wrong thing... the much lower likelihood of having a difficult conversation with law enforcement or self-important security staff, etc. I concluded that getting slightly shallower DOF was a very small benefit competing against a significant number of advantages that would make far more impact to the end product and to my experience in using it. The extra cropping potential is one of the only benefits I can see for sensors above 2.5K. I put the cropping modes on my GH5 and GX85 into good use when I was shooting on primes and have been hugely impressed with them with my GH7 + 9mm F1.7 PanaLeica which I'll use for shooting in ultra-low-light. The R5 + EF-RF + 40mm F2.8 would be a great medium size setup. Perhaps the best second camera FF setup I could think of would be your R5 + 24-105mm F4. Like I mentioned above, the flexibility and speed of using a zoom when shooting in uncontrolled conditions just gives you more coverage - there's a reason doco and ENG shooters use zooms! Yeah, that's a real gem, I'm still seeing footage crop up on YT that really shows how much you can push things. I've also noticed it's very popular with the vlogging crowd and it seems to give really good results, similar to those who might use a small mirrorless, which is definitely saying something when you consider the size of it. Nah. Do a complete end-to-end analysis of what gives you the best results in the final edit or final photos, work out what equipment aligns best with those trade-offs, buy it, test it and learn the settings, then shift focus to actually shooting and don't look back. Beauty magazines make you feel ugly, and camera YT makes you regret your equipment. Best strategy is to ignore both. By far the most important skill in uncontrolled environments is being able to understand and predict the behaviour of your subjects. Not only does this matter for shooting people in public, but it matters doubly (triply?) for safari because the biggest struggle seems to be even finding the animals in the first place. A professional animal tracker would probably get better footage with an iPhone than an amateur with all the equipment in the world who spent a week and only saw a few animals the whole time. Perhaps a good exercise is to think about what the total cost will be of the trip, think about how much it would matter if you didn't see any animals at all, and then see how much it would cost to hire a guide or some other service that would help you locate things. There's a reason that people hire a model instead of just walking the streets hoping to find someone to shoot!

Yes, AI is a real wildcard. I see that there are really three fundamentally different groups when it comes to generative content. The first is professionals who create material for the general public, or various niches of the public. This is where AI will have incredible impacts. The second is professionals who create for their clients directly. This is people like wedding photographers etc, where the client is the audience. This has been debated, but I think that there will still be a market here. If I did something and wanted a record of it, I would want the final images to be of me, not AI generated content that looks like the people I know might have looked during the thing that actually happened. The third is people creating for themselves, where there is no client or money changing hands. This is every amateur, every personal project from professionals, etc. The goal is to have a final result that this person created. Amateur photographers take photos and print and hang the best ones, not because they're the best photos ever taken, but because they were taken themselves. Personally, I'm in the last category and I am completely resigned to the fact that my videos will never be great, will never attract a significant audience, will never be regarded as important, etc, but that's not why I do it so in that sense AI is no threat to me at all. I do understand that people are all in different segments of the industry and have very different perspectives for very good reasons..

A phone is always a great second camera in a pinch.. but if there's budget, it's hard to look past the GX85 or LX10. They're comparatively small, especially if you fit the GX85 with one of the pancake zoom lenses. Jeez, it's lenses the whole way isn't it. A sensor size goes up, lens size goes up exponentially... Maybe you should rent an MFT system? I understand that lots of the wildlife is best seen at dawn? Things can be pretty still then, so that works in your favour. Not sure how things go at dusk as the sun shouldn't have been heating things directly for a while and temps could even out a bit. But if you're shooting big cats sitting lazily in trees during the middle of the day it'll be heat shimmer galore. Yeah, these old lenses can be a bit beat-up sometimes. The GH5 does a great job with stabilisation, but there's no getting around the fact that you're trying to hand-hold an 800mm FOV lens, or trying to use it on a crappy tripod where the only thing "fluid" about the head on it is the words in the product description!

Wonderful images... great stuff!

This is my most recent finished edit. I wrote the music for this too. I've shared it before, but some might not have seen it. Shot on the trip I did to Seoul last August where the wife and I got sick and spent most of our time in the hotel. OG BMMCC + 12-35mm F2.8 + TTartisans 50mm F1.2. Graded in Resolve with heavy use of the Film Look Creator tool. Music written in Logic Pro.

This looks incredible! Great images and colour, and I really like the music and edit too. It really is a different world down there isn't it...

That's a hell of a lens! I have a Tokina 400mm F5.6 permanently on my GH5 now to act as a telescope because I looked into buying one and it was cheaper and more fun to buy a super-telephoto lens! It's not super-sharp wide open but in daylight you can just stop down, plus anything that is quite far away suffers from heat haze anyway, so the sharpness of the air is the limiting factor. I've thought about going on safari for years but have never actually gone. My thinking eventually lead me to the idea of having two bodies, one with a very long lens on it, and the other one with a very shot zoom on it so you can get shots of when the monkeys start stealing food out of your van, or the elephants ram you. My impression from social media is that these things are practically guaranteed to happen. I have the PanaLeica 100-400mm on my "when I'm a millionaire" list as it seems it would be perfect for things like a safari where you never know how far away the subjects are going to be.

Ouch!! My GH7 (with battery, card, 14-140mm, and vND) is just over 1.1kg. The 12-100mm is just a hair under 300g heavier, so the GH7 + 12-100mm combo would actually be a hair above 1.4kg by the time it's fully functional, and my setup doesn't even include any audio equipment, so that's also something to take into consideration. I walked around Pompeii carrying the GH5 + Voigtlander 17.5mm + Rode Videomic Pro (1.4kg) in my hand for several hours, raising it up when I saw something I wanted to shoot. My wrist was sore for several days afterwards, just from having the weight on it for that long. It might be something you'd get used to, but having to train so you have the strength and stamina to carry a camera around seems a bit much to me! I agree. The high-ISO performance is actually quite impressive too. For low-light I have the 9mm F1.7 with CrZ and if I want longer range than that I have the 12-35mm F2.8. Probably the only other lens I would get for super-low-light shooting is the PanaLeica 15mm F1.7 because it's small and fast and being a Leica lens should be nice and sharp wide-open so the CrZ mode should be quite usable with it.

This seems like a simple question, but the more I think about it, the less simple it gets. Let's start out with the seemingly obvious answer - it looks like Super-16 because the sensor is literally a S16 sized sensor. End of thread, thanks for coming, byeeeee! Here are some thoughts suggesting it looks more like S35, or at least more than S16. Some are good arguments, some aren't, but summed up I think they're hard to dismiss. It appears sharper than S16, a lot sharper. Without getting overly technical, S35 has around 4K resolution, but the level of contrast on the fine details is quite low, and it's well known that by the time you print and distribute a 35mm film it really only looks like about 2K once it's projected in cinemas. This is perhaps the biggest argument for me - the P2K just looks like cinema did in the 90s. I know this isn't comparing a 35mm neg scan with the P2K files, but virtually all the memories of 35mm film that most people would have are from movies shot and distributed on film, not from viewing modern film scans. Lenses are much sharper now too, adding to it. S16 lenses were often very vintage! We have speed boosters, much faster lenses, and much wider lenses now. One of the looks of S16 was longer focal lengths and deep DOF, but if we were to use the P2K like we would use any other camera, it would be with speed boosters and faster lenses which would have much shallower DOF. The wider lenses we have now would be much sharper and faster too. So the lens FOV, lens DOF, and sharpness combinations would all be much more like S35 was, and perhaps even exceed it. How it's used would be much more modern. The framing, movement, lighting, locations and subjects also play a role in 'placing' a medium. This has probably changed less than the above arguments, and the things that any of us might shoot are more likely to still resemble things that I would associate with S16 (like FNW and TV and low-budget projects). I'm curious to hear thoughts from others. I've been reviewing my equipment and got to the P2K and thought "oh, it's a pocketable S16 camera" but my brain immediately added "that looks like 90s movies" and then I realised that these two things don't align!

Yes, it's the AF that makes me think of manual lenses on the GF3. For stills it's a fully featured camera, but for video it's auto-everything* and so having an AF lens on it is a pain because the CDAF will hunt occasionally. (* actually I recorded some clips with it last night and discovered it keeps the current WB setting - how odd that's the only thing it will let you lock down!) If you don't already own the Olympus body cap lens then perhaps the "7Artisans 18mm f/6.3 Mark II" might be a better choice as it's cheaper and faster than the Olympus.

Indeed! Actually, the killer combo for the GF3, if we think of it like a tiny vintage film camera, is when it's paired with the Olympus 15mm F8 body cap lens. It is truly tiny.... In a sense it's an incredibly synergistic pairing, because it gives a 30mm FOV, which is wide enough to make any micro-jitters pretty minimal (especially if you add gate weave in post) and it's sharp, so the softness is just limited by the GF3, and it's deep DOF which fits with the 8mm look. Without an ND you're also using the shutter to expose, which I understand is also how 8mm cameras worked? However, perhaps the killer aspect of it is the way you would use it. You'd never use this as your main setup, so this would be a carry-everywhere low-stakes camera for having fun with. It would be what you pull out when being silly with friends, or filming random things that aren't so formal. In a way, that's how people might have used an 8mm camera back in the day, because they weren't inundated with video and didn't have the media savvy we all have now, so they would have just pointed their home movie cameras at whatever was happening. It's even got a lever that closes it for use in pockets, but it also works as a manual focus adjustment and close focus is something like 30cm / 12 inches which might even get a little bit of background blur (I can't recall) so it's quite versatile. The challenge is that the F8 aperture means it's basically no good after sunset or indoors, so that's the weakness. Apart from that, this is perhaps the most likely setup I would use this with. There's an F5.6 version from a different manufacturer that is tempting, but re-buying it for only one extra stop is a bit hard to swallow. Anyway, here's a video I shot with this combo quite some time ago.... I can't remember how I graded that, but I think I used a film emulation plugin that added a lot of softening in post, so don't take that as the limits of its resolving power. It also shows a lot of rolling shutter, so maybe the strategy would be to have it on a strap around your neck and pull that tight when shooting to stabilise the camera a little. There is something about the extreme lack of technical performance that makes my brain think "well, this isn't going to win awards for literally anything, so ignore all the rules and just shoot and have fun!"

The elephant in the room is Resolve. As I have discussed and demonstrated in my "New travel film-making setup and pipeline - I feel like the tech has finally come of age" thread, over the last decade Resolve has gotten more feature-rich, but more importantly, it's made it HUGELY easier to use and get good images. People now have a lot more knowledge about colour grading tools and techniques, that's for sure, but things like the Film Look Creator enable you to use a single node, you set your input and output colour spaces, and then you can adjust exposure / WB / saturation / contrast and all sorts of other things in the same tool. You don't even need to apply a film look at all... just select the "Blank Slate" preset, which sets it to have no look at all, and you can still use all the tools to adjust the image without having to worry about colour management at all. Any improvement in your post-processes is a retroactive upgrade to your camera, your lenses, and all the footage you have already shot. Colour grading is such a deep art that I think the average GH5 user back in the day was probably extracting a third of the potential of the images they'd shot, if that, simply because they didn't know how to colour grade properly. I'm not being nostalgic about the GH5 either, the same applies for any camera you can think of. There are reasons to upgrade your camera, for sure, but most of the reasons people use aren't the right reasons, and they'd be better spent taking the several thousand dollars it would take for a camera upgrade and taking unpaid leave from their job and improving their colour grading skills instead.

Thanks! and yes, I also like those particular shots too. Some time ago I invested in a M42-MFT speed booster and since then looked almost exclusively for M42 lenses, except for telephoto lenses where a speed booster isn't required. Vintage FF lenses don't normally get wider than 28mm, at least the ones that don't cost much, and at 28mm the difference between an M42 lens with my SB and an FD lens (for example) without one is a 40mm FOV vs a 56mm FOV. I know I shot the above images without a SB, but mine really steers my buying habits towards that system. I have now fully converted my setup to native AF MFT lenses (14-140mm, 12-35mm, 9mm, 14mm) so I now need to work out what I will use my MF and vintage lenses for. When I shot those images the IBIS stabilised the image but not the flares, so the video files aren't really usable. This means that if I want to shoot with very vintage lenses I need to shoot without IBIS and physically stabilise the camera, either going for a shaky image and embracing the aesthetic, or going for a more stable image and using a heavier setup / tripod / both. Thinking about turning off IBIS and going for a more vintage look, my thoughts turned back to my GF3. So I compared the softness of the image from my GF3 to the softness and grain of film, and depending on the amount of movement and detail in the image it's somewhere between being a Super-8 camera and a Super-16 camera. I am still pondering this information, as I'm not really sure what I would shoot with a S16-like camera and vintage lenses, but I definitely feel some attraction to this concept. Also, there is something super-cool looking about this setup! GF3 + SB + Tokina RMC 28-70mm F3.5-4.5 + vND... giving a FF equivalent of 40-100mm F5-6.4. This is quite similar to lots of S16 zooms back in the day too. For example the S16 Meteor 5-1 17-69mm F1.9 lens is equivalent to 49-198mm F5.5, etc. Part of my is very interested in finding a larger bulkier zoom and really leaning into the form-factor, but I couldn't find any around, and even if I did I'm not sure what they'd cost and if they'd be worth it to me (considering I don't even know what I'd use this for!) This is just wonderful... the trees have a painterly look that sort of makes them feel a bit hyper-real and a bit dream-like at the same time. Great stuff!

I'd argue that this kind of testing is actually necessary to understand how things behave. Over the years I have tested a lot of things and it's amazing how many things that "everyone knows" do not stand up in even the most basic tests, but continue to be myths because no-one bothers to even look. Aristotle claimed that women have fewer teeth than men, which is not true, but he obviously never actually looked to see if he was right - despite being married multiple times where he could easily have tested his claim at any time. No, not mixed up, but the 12-35mm has a shallower DOF and so you have to know where in the image to look to compare sharp details in the focal plane. This is the unsharpened cropped image: This is the 12-35mm image: This is the sharpened cropped image: The sharpening is perhaps a little over-correcting, but the thin edges are still slightly blurred in comparison to the proper image from the 12-35mm. This is where it is important to know how to read the results of a test. This comparison of the zoom to the crop matched FOV but not DOF, and while I probably could have zoomed in using the 12-35mm and also stopped down at the same time to keep DOF the same, the lens sharpness would have been reduced so it wouldn't have been a fair test. To get around that I should have tested using a flat surface like a resolution chart or a brick wall. The problem with going that route is that now we're no longer testing anything close to real-life, and no longer answering questions about what will and won't work in real shooting. The test wasn't "what percentage of resolving power is lost using the CrZ function?"... it was "is the CrZ function usable for shooting with cropped lenses?". Realistically I shouldn't have included the 12-35mm optical zooms at all, I should have just cropped in using the CrZ function and left the images to be judged on their own merits in isolation, the same way that any project shot using the CrZ function would be. This is the danger of pixel-peeing - it distracts from the only thing that actually matters - the image. The cosmicar really is a gem! There's a reason that cinematographers have relentlessly driven up the price of vintage lenses over the last decades, and why modern lens manufacturers are designing and releasing brand new lenses with vintage looks, and manufacturers are even creating new mechanisms to control the amount and type of vintage looks with custom de-tuning functions.

I was just poking around in the menus and noticed there is an option where you can switch between Full and Pixel:Pixel, so that's the same as the ETC mode on the GH5. It looks like you can use this with any resolution. Also, you can record C4K in Prores RAW, which is a 1:1 sensor readout, so exactly a 1.41x, or a horizontal crop factor of 2.934 from FF (the GH7 horizontal crop factor is 36/17.3=2.0809). The bitrates are a bit heavy though at either 1700Mbps or 1100Mbps and it's Prores RAW so you can't import it directly into Resolve and will need to transcode with a third party utility. This thing has so many options, and the more I poke around in it, the more it feels like a cinema camera in the body of a MILC.

@PannySVHS I've now tested the Crop Zoom (CrZ) mode in 1080p. This is the first test, and I exposed for the sky (which it thought was the right thing to do) which meant that the plants were a bit low, so I ended up bringing them up a little in post. The Prores HQ is great at retaining noise and so there's quite a bit visible despite me having shot this at base ISO 500. I've found that ETTR is definitely recommended if you want a more modern looking cleaner image. I also used the 12-35mm lens at F4.0 for all images as that's where it's the sharpest. First is comparing the C4K Prores HQ vs 1080p Prores HQ (on a 1080p timeline): Next we compare the CrZ vs zooming with the lens. I have prepared these images in sets of three. The first is the CrZ image, the second is zooming with the lens, the third is the CrZ image again but with sharpening added. This allows you to compare both CrZ images directly with the 'proper' one, as the more zoomed CrZ images did look a little soft in comparison when viewed at 300%. Around 14mm (1.16x): Around 18mm (1.5x): Around 25mm (2.08x): Once I got those images into Resolve and looked at them I decided to re-shoot it with a better exposure. So I chose a different framing that meant the sky wasn't influencing anything. However, I didn't realise that where I was standing was going in and out of the sun, so some shots were washed out and I had to compensate for it in post, adjusting contrast/sat/exposure/WB to match. Tests are never perfect but are enough to give a good idea of what's going on, and in real use where there is no A/B comparing going on no-one would ever spot it anyway. There's also a slight difference in exposure between the C4K and 1080p modes too, which is a bit odd. I imagine it's due to changing the sensor mode. I compensated for that in all these tests too. C4K Prores HQ vs 1080p Prores HQ (on a 1080p timeline): Around 14mm (1.16x): Around 18mm (1.5x): Around 25mm (2.08x): I am actually rather encouraged by these results, as my previous test was in low-light and I did on something with much sharper edges and that showed differences I'm not really seeing here. However, it's not really surprising that the GH7 did this well, as even with a CrZ of 2.08x it's still reading an area of the sensor around 2776 pixels wide. I say "around" that wide because there is a slight crop when you compare the native 5.8K mode with the native C4K, 4K, and 1080p modes, but I think the 2.08x crop will still be oversampled from the sensor by a good amount. The other thing I noticed was that I couldn't adjust the CrZ function while I was recording, the button just didn't do anything. I'm not sure if that's because I have it assigned to a button and that there might be some other way to engage it while recording. Maybe through the controls that are used to control powered zoom lenses, not sure. Anyway, it looks pretty darn good to me, and the grain actually reminds me of the OG BM cameras which are quote noisy at native ISOs too (and also lots of seriously high-end cinema cameras too).

Thanks! 14-140mm vs 12-100mm is really about different preferences. The most important factor to me is that you won't get the Dual IS stabilisation with Olympus lenses, whereas you will with the Panasonics. You can never really be sure what you'll use and what you won't until you have it, and I was surprised to find that I actually use the 140mm quote a lot, and it's actually usable thanks to the Dual IS.