kye

19 hours ago, deezid said:

It bypasses NR externally? That's good.
The A73 sadly does not. Ghosting is almost as bad as the S1H was before the update.

I was going to say that the reviews I saw of the a73 said it had as good low light performance as the a7s2, but I guess if you're going external then they're not equivalent.

3 hours ago, BTM_Pix said:

In light of what has been going on covering protests recently, I think ENG cameras might have to have secondary dash cam type of units onboard to provide both the broader context and provenance of what we are seeing through their main lens.

If I was out there covering the current protests I'd have a 360 camera in the hotshoe already.

There's definitely a use-case for having a camera to capture a signal as evidence, but I'd suggest that one with a wireless connection that is continuously uploading would also be handy.  People that do the wrong thing aren't afraid to confiscate the evidence of it.

What's that saying...  once you've crossed the line it's hard not to go all the way.

On 6/2/2020 at 7:47 AM, FranciscoB said:

Yes, it isn't for me. When did I suggest otherwise? 

People overthink and overpraise raw format for video. 

For photography? Great. For video I think is overkill for the majority of us. Log and 10 bit 422 is a great compromise for quality and space. 

But anyway, to each his own. As I said before, no thank you. 

You didn't, I was just having a little fun while also making a point.

I think that the RAW vs compressed comparison doesn't align with still images at all because of the way that compressed stills handle DR.  Compressed stills clip the DR of the camera, which is why many people shoot RAW.  Personally I think that's blindingly stupid when it's just as easy to make a JPG from the whole DR of the RAW image, like any free image editor can do but somehow cameras costing thousands of dollars can't do.  If shooting log h264/h265 cut off a couple of stops of DR then we'd all be lusting over RAW and having t-shirts printed about it as well, but thankfully, we're not.

8 hours ago, Andrew Reid said:

Not quite my point. With the original film negative, you have the proof (of untouched "real" scenes).

Doesn't matter if the edit is digital or not.

If somebody questions if what they see is real, unaltered, the proof is there in the background, on a reel.

That reminds me of (IIRC) National Geographic which doesn't permit any manipulation of the content of an image.  To verify this you would submit your final images (with all the cool colour grading, cropping, etc you did) and also the RAW file and they would compare the RAW file with the edit to ensure you didn't photoshop out powerlines or whatever.

It makes sense that the edited version would be the one published but the RAW capture would be retained to prove the content of the output.

I definitely agree that digital video will gradually descend into fakery, in much the same way that photography has done with things like Mariah Carey being photoshopped to basically be a different person.  The only difference between still images and video is processing power, and things like Resolves Face Refinement is just the beginning.

It's interesting to use film as the proof, although if digital is the source then the manipulation could be done before printing to the film, so tech like @KnightsFan mentions would be required.

35 minutes ago, Andrew Reid said:

It's not going to be treated like film on a shoot, because with digital you can quickly offload a reel to affordable storage via USB.

However it is treated like film in the way you archive 8K RAW material. After a few years you will need a building the size of the Paramount studios lot to put the hard drives

I have no idea what you're talking about...

I was once waiting for some friends outside a movie theatre and a couple of people walked in carrying something that looked very heavy, and after walking over to the front desk and very carefully setting it down they had a quick chat with the staff before leaving again.  A couple of the rather young staff then tried to lift the object, but one girl wasn't strong enough to lift her end, so got someone else to come and help carry it inside.

Bored and curious, I went and asked the staff what the box was, and it was a roll of projection film being delivered for a movie that was about to be released.  I remember it being about 1m tall, 1m wide, and about 30cm thick, with very sturdy looking handles on each side.

59 minutes ago, FranciscoB said:

Well 1tb for a roughly 70 minutes of 5.5k 25p raw... No thank you. 

Many years ago there was this thing called FILM.  It came in rolls that only lasted for MINUTES.  You paid to buy it and paid again to develop it.  It wasn't even REUSABLE.

Madness!!

But seriously, if you're having a hard time with RAW file sizes then RAW isn't for you.  In fact, RAW isn't for most of the people on this forum.  A blind test comparing RAW to Prores would pretty quickly show that compressed formats are good enough for almost everything.

As affordable cameras continually raise the high-waterline on bit-rates, are we getting to the point where the cost of media necessitates bringing back some of the frugality of film?

I crunched some very rough numbers, and the cost of SSD is about 10% of the cost of 16mm film for 4K30 in 3:1 RAW, which will be more like 40% of the cost for 8K, but that's re-usable so it's not that direct a comparison.  Of course, CFast and other media is more expensive, but you can dump footage to a cheaper storage medium every few hours on set, so that's relatively re-usable too.

How are you folks shooting 4K RAW or 6K RAW and salivating over 8K RAW approaching your media management?

12 hours ago, IronFilm said:

Matthew Duclos has a great write up about the history of Veydra, which touches upon Meike as well:
https://thecinelens.com/2020/04/18/rip-veydra-2014-2019/

Cool article.

One part that stood out to me was "During my initial tests I found that the Meike primes performed better optically in almost all areas."  That's quite encouraging as the Veydras was optically excellent.

I'm happy to upload a couple of random C-Log shots from my XC10 if anyone is interested....  

Nice work on your edit.  The image holds up quite well, and the music was definitely a good choice  

12 hours ago, heart0less said:

Those were quite gorgeous 10 years..

 

Thank you.  That's probably the best source of high-quality colour grading reference images yet posted online!

3 hours ago, HockeyFan12 said:

I read some stuff on RedUser that I should know better than to blindly trust, but the impression I got there was they were probably the same, but possibly manufactured by a different OEM? I'm not sure. 

I suspect they're the same too, but my point was that I couldn't find any evidence either way.  It does make sense though, considering the various commercial aspects and the timeline.

2 hours ago, IronFilm said:

Those lenses were however MFT Mount, thus no chance these new PL/EF mount lenses will be the same optical design. 

Ah, good point.

They were for MFT mount, but that doesn't mean the optical design isn't compatible with a larger flange distance or with larger sensors.  Other brands like Rokinon make the same lenses in MFT and DSLR mounts, essentially just adding a spacer the same way a dumb adapter is just a spacer.

This is the 85mm Veydra:

The coloured parts are the MFT sensor and the grey is the extra size of a S35 sensor, so that optical design appears to cover S35 relatively well.  The other focal lengths aren't as high performance but they seem to cover it.

This is a comparison between a Zeiss and the Veydra:

Note that the Zeiss is graphed over a FF sensor (the X axis goes to 20) whereas the Veyrda is only S35 (X axis goes to 14).  However, of note is that the Zeiss has degrading performance out to 10 (MFT sensor size) but then stays a lot more constant out to FF, and is of sufficient performance that these are actually used on FF sensors by real cinematographers.  Extrapolating this principle, the Veydra may or may not have performance beyond the S35 sensor, so it may cover FF?

The other Veydra focal lengths have significantly worse performance at the edges of the S35 sensor, so aren't as likely to cover FF, or at least with any quality:

Regardless, the S35 Meiki lenses may have the same optical formulas, although the FF ones probably don't.

3 hours ago, KnightsFan said:

Locking your focus while vlogging can be useful, but I have yet to see anyone vlog with a follow focus.

Hahaha, yes, that's true lol.

2 minutes ago, HockeyFan12 said:

+1 for EF and PL.  

Aren't the Meike M43 lenses based on Veydras? Which are optically superb? If these are even close to as good, they seem pretty disruptive. Nice selection of focal lengths, too. 

When I was looking at them some time ago the theory was that they were the same designs, but I couldn't find any real comparisons where someone had both of them and shot the same scene or compared them directly.

Maybe there has been some new stuff since though?

3 minutes ago, BTM_Pix said:

You certainly had a busy day on Thursday joining EOSHD and all these other forums and asking this exact question :

https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/threads/how-to-remove-shadows-on-dslr-sony-a5100.18888587/#post-33640493

https://www.cnet.com/forums/discussions/how-to-remove-shadows-on-dslr-sony-a5100/

https://forums.tomsguide.com/threads/how-to-remove-shadows-on-dslr-sony-a5100.468121/

https://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1648443

https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/709844-how-to-remove-shadows-on-dslr-sony-a5100/

Have YOU ever had corner shadows??  I don't think so!!  IF you ever did then you'd understand the IMMEDIATE REQUIREMENT to get AS MUCH advice AS POSSIBLE!!!  This is a COMPLETELY NATURAL RESPONSE!!!  THE HUMANITY!!!!!1!!!1!!

6 hours ago, KnightsFan said:

Gotta love the #vlogger on Meike's tweet about manual focus cinema lenses though.

I still see focus issues regularly on youtube channels that feature vlogging type content.  Sure, we have DPAF and PDAF, but if the camera decides to do a beautifully-smooth speed-controlled phase-detect focus-pull to the wrong f*cking thing, then it's still a wasted shot.  Watch some of the reviews of the new Sony vlogging camera to see people talking about how it has a new focus mode that is far better for things like product shots, and remember that when someone says that a new product is better then it means that the old one had issues that they wanted to be fixed.

Luckily, if you're holding the camera while filming yourself, manual focus combined with an aperture setting that isn't too ridiculous can fix those focus issues!

Besides, at this point if you're a vlogger who only cares about content and want the filming process to essentially leave you alone, then there are many smaller sensor cameras to just crank out content.  The vloggers that want to have larger sensors and larger apertures are also somewhat likely to be interested in the MF aesthetic.

23 hours ago, Anaconda_ said:

All good ideas. For my project, I'm mounting the camera and a Pi inside a Bolex. Essentially, the sensor will be more or less where the film would run past the lens.There will be a small difference to ensure infinity focus, but the theory is still the same. the 1m marking on the lens will still focus to 1m away.

Mounting it this way means I can keep the turret system, as the lenses screw into the body, not onto the sensor. It'll work much better for maintaining the whole look and feel of shooting on 8mm film. Of course, the files won't act or look like film, but using the camera will feel similar, and onlookers will think I'm really artistic.

The only difference, in usable terms, is the winder on the side, and the frame rate selector won't do anything. Everything else will work as it once did with film.

This is currently not working. I put the pi and switches inside the case to see how much room I have to play with. To give you an idea, I could probably put 2 more Pis in there. That said, this does not yet have the sensor or a battery in the case.

Before that though, I need to find time to mount the sensor and have it lined up. The weather here is too nice to be tinkering with that, but hope to have it done in the next few weeks. Once the sensor is in, it's then a case of securely mounting the pi, battery, LEDs and switches.

(the switches in the gif are only there for testing. I have smaller, more subtle ones that I'll mount onto the camera. From the outside I want it to look as original as possible.)

That is super cool!!

I'm really looking forward to seeing you get this up and running

It makes sense now why you said you'd be mounting the sensor onto the lens.  In this sense, maybe your mounting method could be to mount the mount to an adjustable setup, so you can easily and accurately adjust the sensor to the right flange distance.  Ie, if you put a couple of nuts on the opposite side of the board to the sensor, then had the thing mount onto some bolts, then by rotating either the nuts or the bolts (depending on how you built it) then you could screw the sensor closer or further away to lock it in.  This could be a relatively easy way to have a secure mount that is easy to get exact infinity focus on.

Do you know how good the RAW signal is?  If it's a half-decent sensor and the RAW is RAW then it should be pretty close to the RAW from any other camera with a half-decent sensor.

I've looked at the filter range (although I haven't actually shot with one) and thought that they all seemed quite strong.  Maybe it was that the sample images all have direct light-sources in them.

Anyway, depending on the shot I would have thought that you'd want the freedom to add more or less to kind of balance out the look.  Especially if you're using a lens wide-open as well as closing it down, which can provide a wide range of contrast and resolution.

In this sense, getting a 1/8 might be a good investment as if you later added a 1/4 then you could use 0, 1/8, 1/4, or 3/8, making it a very flexible setup.  

I think if we're talking about guerrilla film making then it could also be Han Dheld.

7 hours ago, User said:

I didn't inform that nation's government of what I was doing, otherwise they would have simply refused and I would be forever marked as a journalist (which has consequences). So shooting the doc wasn't really the problem - despite continually being taken off the street for police questioning (where I would feign ignorance, silly tourist etc). The trick is going to be releasing it and somehow remain 'anonymous enough' so that I can continue to travel there after release. How that will be done, I've haven't quite worked out yet. The easiest path is to just use another name, but the weird part is that part of me wants my work to be correctly associated with my name and perspective... because like you've mentioned, this has a certain 'brand appeal'. However, one thing for sure is that I ain't no big brand... so what to do? I wonder what Banksy or Josh Oppenheimer would say?

Yes, how to remain unscathed after it is released is the challenge, and Banksy did come to mind when I was reading your post.

I guess there's a few options:

• Use your real name, go under the radar while filming then risk the fallout after it is released
• Use a production company / name and don't put your real name in the credits - they might still find out who you are but you can always deny it while people you know and film circles can "all know it's you"
• Use a production company / name and take measures to ensure that no-one can trace it to you, knowing that ultimately the fame and glory associated with that name will not get added to your own

Obviously I don't know Banksy, but my completely uneducated guess would be that he/she/they would suggest that you create the alter-ego with as close to zero links to yourself as possible, and use that anonymity to pursue as honest and uninhibited an agenda as you can, and take payment from the work in terms of reward for authenticity and contribution to humanity.
Of course, Banksy is also very likely a hugely successful individual independently of their Banksy persona, so they don't need the money or fame, whereas I'm sure you probably could do with a bit more of that (unless you're secretly a famous rich person hanging out here talking about consumer cameras for some reason!).

Of course, there's always bitcoin....

1 hour ago, no_connection said:

d-mount is 12.29mm and cs-mount is 12.526mm.

Yes, the difference isn't too much, which should be doable, as long as you don't do it however @BTM_Pix is thinking about that leads to total destruction!

I tried to make an adapter by buying a cheap low profile plastic C-Mount body cap and cutting a D-Mount into it then heating it up and bending it by pushing on the D-Mount to adjust for the smaller flange distance.  IIRC I stuffed up the D-Mount so it didn't work as a mount, but I think the idea is sound.

21 hours ago, Anaconda_ said:

Thanks Kye, these .rgb files have been around since at least the first Pi camera, so I was hoping there would be something out there. Happy to wait though

As for glass... I'm building this to use D-mount lenses, of which I have a few. For now I don't have a way to mount them though, so all testing is with my funky 25mm, until I get my mount sorted out.

I've looked into C-Mount to D-Mount adapters and the challenge is that they aren't normally made as D-mount has a shorter flange distance than C-Mount, but having said that I've seen a few solutions, so they are out there.

One of the challenges is that often the control rings on the D-Mount lenses are quite close to the body of the camera, which if the lens is recessed into a C-Mount mount then it makes the lenses all the more difficult to adjust and work with, although still possible for slower shooting situations.

One of the things that I have read time and again is that creative people need to form a "personal brand" and then stick to that brand.  I've read this in the context of photography, film-making, music, art, and others.  I get why that's the advice that's given (people go to mcdonalds to get something familiar and reliable, not the best food or the most experimental new ideas) as that's how people want to get sold to, but from a creative perspective it's ridiculous.

The reason I mention this is that, naturally, many successful creative people get around this by having lots of pseudonyms which all have different brands.

To certain extent what you're talking about is having a duplicate brand, which comes with all the overheads of maintaining that brand.  Also, you're talking about being distanced from that as a person (in terms of blacklisting etc) which I guess can range from obfuscation to deliberately hiding your identity.  I have no idea how you would film a doco and hide your real name to the point that a government couldn't find out who you are, but I guess if you want something badly enough then sure.

To me I guess the question is if the costs are worth it, and only you can really weigh up that equation.

3 hours ago, thebrothersthre3 said:

I am a fan of a camera that needs no additional stuff to use. It just doesn't really exist yet.

Of course it exists.  Maybe it doesn't do exactly what you want it to do at the levels of performance that you deem to be a minimum standard, but they do exist.

You can pick up a GoPro or DJI Osmo Action and just go shoot, and with their stabilisation you don't even need any rigging or even a handle. Many people do exactly that.  If you want a more serious image then many of the cameras mentioned are suitable.  There are many times I have just picked up my GH5 and apart from adding a lens and putting on a wrist-strap I haven't added anything.  Oh, a memory card.  ...and a battery.  Oops!  So many additional things required!!

Of course, if you deem that you absolutely need directional audio then no camera will ever be without needing additional stuff because the idea that a manufacturer is going to make a camera with a shotgun microphone built in is just silly.

Wanting a camera that can shoot a Hollywood movie that comes complete out of the box is like wanting a car that can 4wd on the weekends, beat a Lamborghini at the lights, bring home a boot full of building supplies from the hardware store, fit in all your mates to go to the game but park in a small space when you get there, and get 50 miles per gallon.  The only way anything could do all those things is to be modular, and thus, would require "additional stuff to use".

2 hours ago, Anaconda_ said:

After doing some testing, I've recorded some raw rgb video, but have no way of viewing it. Does anyone know what to do with this kind of data? 

Over on the RPi forum they suggest this software, but it's only for viewing. You can't export, so you can't use the files with any other software, which seems a shame. (It's also €30 for mac. I don't want to pay anything if it doesn't help me actually use the footage) 

https://www.offminor.de/

If anyone's interested, there's a few samples below. They're shot with my 25mm cctv lens, which on this sensor is very tele. It's the only c-mount lens I have and until finish my project, it's the only lens I can use... It's a soft lens at the best of times so keep that in mind when viewing.

FYI:

The .rgb file is raw data. I'd love to work out how to view this in a coherent way - or convert it into DNG frames.

The .264 files are straight out of the pi before any wrapping. You can only view these in VLC (as far as I know)

The .mkv files are unadjusted conversions to h.265 - this is only for viewing the files in an NLE

The 4x3 file was a stress test for how large a frame I could make using the basic settings. (1600 x 1200)

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/seddezwwymwnh4v/AAAU5es-RCWOXCj1Fpkbz3Dba?dl=0

Thanks for sharing.

I'm guessing that this thread will be a slow burn as people gradually build the software required to actually use it.  ML was the same, but now the tools for converting the raw files are a joy to use and have heaps of great features.

C-Mount lenses aren't cheap, but there were some absolutely excellent ones made, so if you can get a raw workflow working then just open your wallet and pour the contents into an ebay auction for some old cine glass and then you should be able to get a great image from it.

3 hours ago, Amro Othman said:

Ok nobody guessed and maybe I was being a d*ck by playing a guessing game- so the lens is a Zeiss Distagon ZE 35mm F2.0 ❤️

Not a d*ck, but it's a tough ask doing a blind test online because:

• people getting things wrong is embarrassing and this wasn't anonymous and the internet never forgets
• lenses are a lot more similar to each other than any of us would like to admit so its actually a ridiculously difficult thing to do (don't tell anyone.....shhhhh)