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kye

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Everything posted by kye

  1. I haven't done that yet, but it's on the list. I haven't even really shot anything with it yet, except some colour tests. Disappointing I know, but covid cancelled all my travel plans, my work went through the roof, and the family wore PJs all day and didn't want to be filmed lol. I was contemplating the GH5 to BMMCC conversion project and was thinking that a more practical pinnacle would be to shoot a bunch of random things with each camera (not A/B of the same thing, just random shots) and grade the GH5 with the BMMCC characteristics and just put up a video saying shot A, shot B, shot C, and then put out a poll asking if people could tell which was which, with options as Definitely BMMCC, maybe BMMCC, not sure, maybe GH5 and definitely GH5, and see if people could pick the shots easily or not. If they couldn't I'd declare victory. The rationale is that when we watch something we're not given another version of the same thing shot on some other camera, so side-by-side tests aren't really needed for a successful imitation, only for a perfect replication.
  2. How many times do you have to stop a shoot in order to change lenses because of the 4K60 crop? How many times are you shooting 120p and find that the 1080p image quality is an issue in post? How many times have you picked up and turned on your camera, or been looking at the files in your NLE and thought "gee, I really wish this brand had more market share". I wouldn't be so sure that they've maxed it out. The GH5 received incremental updates for years afterwards, and they made the original firmware look puny in comparison. I look at the current crop of cameras and don't feel at all left behind - 4K 400Mbps 422 10-bit ALL-I internal h264 without any crop compared to the 24p modes isn't that much lower than the current offerings. In fact, the GH5 wasn't even maxed out. There was talk within Panasonic of a firmware update to have a higher resolution than 5K (maybe 8K?) coming out of the camera - I saw this an excerpt of an interview with a Panasonic staff member, but had a quick look and couldn't find it again just now. I suspect it would have been de-squeezing the anamorphic modes in-camera. It has the capability to write 400Mbps to the card, and it has h265 capability, so an 8K 2.35:1 or 2.66:1 400Mbps h265 mode may very well have been possible. In 2017.
  3. This conversation seems to have wandered into OLD = BAD = DISTORTED and NEW = GOOD = PRISTINE and I think that in many ways this is fundamentally wrong. Yes, a 1080p sensor creates a lower resolution image than reality, which has infinite resolution, but with the greater resolution cameras there are often sacrifices made along the way. Motion Cadence is one of the things that I am thinking of. Items such as a global shutter don't automatically come with a higher resolution camera. In this sense, the more modern stuff is worse. I'm perhaps one of the biggest fans of 'doing it in post' on these forums, but I'm yet to read anywhere about how you can improve motion cadence in post. As someone who chose very early on to get a neutral capture and process heavily in post I've been consuming every camera review, grading breakdown, lens review, technical white paper, codec quality analysis, etc with the single question in mind of "how do I do this in post?" and I have found that most of the time the various qualities of image that are being talked about are degradations of one kind or other, but not all of them. I discovered with my Canon 700D that you can't remove the Canon Cripple Hammer in post, and I 'went 4K'. The XC10 was 4K and high-bitrate (and had those Canon colours!!) but I discovered that you can't simulate a larger aperture (convincingly) in post (yet), you also can't simulate a higher bit-depth in post, and you can't simulate great low-light in post either. I bought the GH5 but had to go to Voigtlander f0.95 lenses to get the low-light and DoF flexibility that I wanted, but even then the lenses are a little soft wide-open and while you can sharpen them up a little in post to do a quick-and-dirty cover up for a couple of shots, you can't simulate higher resolution or higher contrast lenses in post either. Don't succumb to oversimplification - newer is better in ways that sell cameras but not in every way that matters to the connoisseurs amongst us.
  4. In a sense yes, and in a sense no. Things like the OG Pocket probably don't make sense commercially any more, but @Geoff CB gets value from his F3 because it's more professional in form-factor than most alternatives at that price point, rather than more finicky in form factor. Yes, I agree about that. Although that many would say that the motion cadence of some of the older cameras bests some of the new cameras. Certainly shooting RAW on the OG Pocket is nicer than most h264 codecs, and would be more gradable, so if we take character to mean 'distortions' then actually compressed codecs lose out and RAW is actually less distorted as it's got higher bit-depth and less/no compression distortion.
  5. I just watched this video by Of Two Lands, where he talks about why he bought an OG BMPCC / P2K in 2020. Some of his reasons were sentimental, as he owned one early in his career and it worked well for him, but he also mentioned that a lot of people are going back to shooting S16, or are getting sick of a super-clear image, or don't want to have the 'crutches' of AF or slow-motion or the challenges and limitations of an older fully-manual camera. We also had the P4K firmware update that added a S16 crop mode, the Ursa 12K camera has a S16 crop mode, and @JimJones argued that the new Ursa might attract purchasers purely for its S16 mode: @crevice Argued that the BMMCC still matters, and received much agreement. When the P4K first came out there was a lot of anticipation of getting a 4K BMPCC but then disappointment that the image wasn't the same, and that it looked too modern and too clean and too high resolution. After all this I wondered what it was about the image from these cameras that attracted so much praise. I even heard that the BMMCC was a "baby Alexa" due partially to its colour science, but also in other ways too, such as motion cadence, resolution and codec support. I bought one and tried emulating its image with my GH5 (a project which is still ongoing): I had a theory that this interest in lower-sharpness (and to some extent low resolution) cinema was a nostalgic thing amongst those who grew up with cinema being celluloid rather than digital acquisition and distribution, but the " cinematic / film / organic / LUT / hipster " crowd is getting younger and more interested rather than less, so I wonder - is this a thing? Are people feeling a pull to go back? ....to go back to S16? ....to go back to MF? ....to shooting slower and more deliberately?
  6. kye

    Sony A7S III

    Why is no-one talking about the most scandalous part of this leaked image.... that the screen says SONY on it, but it's only the right way up when it's in selfie mode. The new A7SIII. Vlogging camera to the stars.
  7. When you get one I want to see a BTS on your BTS video so I can see the mirror in action. Of course, if your BTS BTS is also shot on Sony with a mirror, I'll need a BTS of that too.
  8. Wouldn't the C100 be Canon Colour Gamut and Canon Log (as opposed to C-Log 2 or 3)? That's what I was using when processing XC10 footage from C-Log. Essentially then you'd be converting from Canon Colour Gamut / Canon Log to Rec.709 / Rec.709 for delivering standard DR, and Canon Colour Gamut / Canon Log to Rec.2020 / Rec.2020 for delivering HDR. After the conversion you'd then be grading the image to get the look you want before exporting.
  9. kye

    Lenses

    I should also add that in the above shot we were about 50m from the shore and there was no lighting in the boat - only those spotlights you can see up and down the banks of the river.
  10. That's my impression - we're still in the early days of h265 hardware support permeating through all the hardware and then that hardware support permeating into all the software so it gets used. It makes sense that h265 would be the topic of the day and we'd gradually get our act together because....... h266 has just been released!
  11. Those mirror attachments are a pretty ingenious device to get a selfie screen when you need it. The alternative is to just go wide (anything under 20mm should be great) and just stare down the barrel. I tried selfie shots (not vlogging I promise!!) with an action camera and the width really made it great - not only because you don't have to get framing completely right, but also you don't have to hold the camera as far away as possible like it smells really bad or something - a 15mm equivalent FOV can be held at about reading distance and you still get a nice frame that doesn't feel too cramped or too intimate.
  12. kye

    Lenses

    Speaking of Voigtlander, I'm (finally) editing the trip we took to India in late 2018 and pulled out a few hero shots and did a basic grade to get a feel for the project and to get some inspiration. That was the first trip I took with the GH5 and Voigtlander 17.5mm and one of the concerns that I had was low light performance as the GH5 isn't known for it, but it wasn't until I got back to the hotel and looked at this footage that I realised how good the combination really is. Here's a sample grab of the tour guide when we went to Varanasi to watch the nightly religious celebrations and see the cremations on the shore. No idea if it was wide-open or not, but this is a basic grade, some NR, and some film grain over the top, no sharpening applied, and it's even got a small negative amount of mid-tone detail. GH5 was in 150Mbps 4K IPB and HLG. I can't recommend these lenses enough.
  13. kye

    Lenses

    It ended up that I couldn't shoot in the ETC mode for some reason - it was disabled so not sure what that was about. Anyway, I just zoomed in post, which is pretty easy to do. I'd zoom in a bit more, or just adjust vignette in post. I should do more tests to see how much it sharpens up when stopped down. The Voigts are like that, two lenses for the price of one basically 🙂
  14. kye

    Lenses

    Just did this Cosmicar 12.5mm C-Mount lens test for a friend and thought I'd share. GH5 shooting C4K in 400Mbps Cosmicar 12.5mm F1.9 shot mostly wide open Cine-D with Noam Kroll settings Contrast 0 Sat -5 NR -5 Sat -5 Hue 0, no processing in post except zoom. This combo is seems like a winner!
  15. That's really useful @Video Hummus. At one point the wife and I were talking about starting an online training platform where we'd sell online courses and content and one of the potential business partners (who is a high-end working pro and a source of one of the first courses) lives interstate and I was contemplating how to set up a kit like this and ship it and have them set it up themselves.
  16. I don't have any real shoots planned for this setup, but was just part of getting to know the camera and prepared in case.
  17. Perhaps a basic question, but how much of what AP does is video vs stills? My impression of AP was for print media - do they have a big video arm too? with journalists reporting from wherever? I only ever remember seeing the old "Credit: AP" "Source: AP" type captions on photographs.
  18. Played around and got this configuration which seems to meet all the criteria... It's a bit top heavy, but it's balanced (it literally stands up on the QR plate when placed on a flat surface). You can get to the handle, at least from the left, without touching anything but the handle, and the big hole in the vertical support even lines up very nicely with the coiled cable for the mic making a convenient cable tidy! It's not exactly compact or elegant though!
  19. @Sage on the GH5 have you compared the 1080p 422 200Mbps All-I vs the 4K 422 400Mbps All-I vs the 3.3k 422 200Mbps All-I anamorphic modes? IIRC you said that the 1080p 200Mbps mode had better colours than the 4K 400Mbps mode, but I don't recall any comments around the 3.3K 422 All-I 400Mbps mode. It has less bits/pixel (2.7x the pixels and only 2x the bitrate) but the bitrate is 2X for the whole image which includes the same amount of tonal variation in the subject (you've got the same FOV and twice the bitrate to describe it) so when watching full-screen the pixels from the 3.3K mode aren't quite as good but they're much smaller, so maybe that offsets it? If you haven't tested it but are curious, I can share some sample stills with skin tones and a colour checker for you to look at.
  20. Haven't had a chance to look at the above links, but I found this recently which is an interesting comparison of two lenses, listing their pros and cons and with comparison footage:
  21. Follow-up question. I have a grey card, so can do custom WB. Is there any way to reliably set the levels with it using GH5? I don't recall there being anything that will tell you what IRE something sits at.
  22. Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking - to design my own view-assist LUT and just be able to turn it on and off. IIRC there are two zebras and you can set them to be whatever you like. I got the impression you could only choose one of them at a time though, so I don't think you could have zebras showing 40-60IRE for example. If I could design my own view-assist LUT I was thinking of something that I could use all the time instead of turning on and off, like making the middle range colour and maybe expanding them a little, the shadows and highlights compressed and B&W, and have bright yellow and bright red as clipped or black. Something to be technical enough to tell you about your exposure, but something that wouldn't make me creatively blind to what I was shooting, considering that I shoot my holidays and family events and have basically no control of a situation whatsoever, so I'd want to be able to react to new things going on, etc. Oh well.
  23. Is there any way other than the V-Log View Assist to get a LUT into the GH5? HLG View Assist doesn't seem to allow external LUTs.
  24. Great job @hmcindie! It's refreshing to see an action sequence without having cuts at a dizzying pace, this seemed much more reasonable and didn't seem like the edit was trying to make dull choreography more exciting, as is often the case. Funny ending too.
  25. Computer vision is about the camera understanding what it is seeing. From wikipedia: "Computer vision is an interdisciplinary scientific field that deals with how computers can gain high-level understanding from digital images or videos. From the perspective of engineering, it seeks to understand and automate tasks that the human visual system can do." It could be about AF, in the sense of choosing what to focus on. In a sense, the logic of PDAF is something like this: Look at all the focus pixels on the screen and go towards the middle / closer objects One things are broadly in focus, employ face / animal recognition to identify faces Identify faces and rank which ones are the most important, and where to focus to (eg, could be one face or many) Use PDAF to focus on that face / focus the best on all target faces The problem with modern PDAF focus systems is that they go wrong because they're focusing on the wrong thing, not having problems with focusing itself. I suspect that Panasonic with its DFD system it hoping to 'out-smart' the PDAF systems by being able to intelligently work out the scene using some kind of AI. For example, if you see a blurry human-shaped blob that is sitting on top of the rest of the image, it's pretty easy to conclude that it's a person (by the shape), relatively how far away from the focal plane it is (how out of focus it is and where the focal plane is now), and that it's closer than the focal point rather than behind (if other things are more in focus but this isn't), and that it's the closest object (because it's over the top of everything else). If it's also the biggest and completely in frame then it would be reasonable to assume that might be the focus of the shot too. I suspect that this is how human vision works, in a way. These things are pretty straight forwards. PDAF is only good for telling if a given pixel is out-of-focus to the front or back, and by how much. At the point when you have an AI engine that can look at an image and understand it, blurry things and all, then there is no advantage to having PDAF. Our eyes don't have PDAF, we have killer AI, and out eyes are pretty good at focusing on objects and basically never get things wrong. I suspect that that'll be what Panasonic is doing with it's computer vision people. If they get it right and get it to fulfil the promise of the technology, then it will out-perform other systems because it will understand a scene even when everything is out of focus. Of course, they're a long way from that being market ready at the moment.
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