kye

10 hours ago, Phil A said:

I keep looking for the Blackmagic Micro Cinema Camera all the time because it's clearly a bit better than the BMPCC for my needs but I have never seen it below 750€ used here in Germany and that's just not what I'm looking to part with.

Also, and this probably sounds dumb, I am not sure I could ever go to a camera without IBIS again after the GH5. The fact that you can handhold static shots so well massively changed how much I actually use a tripod for casual stuff. That's also the single one grain of salt making me hesitant about the BMPCC4k.

Yeah, I keep telling people that there are two types of cameras, those with IBIS and everything else.  If you can't work with tripods or "professional rigs" then your choices are IBIS, the 1% of lenses that have IS, or making every video with the aesthetic of a 60s 8mm home video.

If it wasn't for IBIS I'd be in the P4K thread hanging out and complaining about how I haven't received my P4K yet with everyone else ?

6 hours ago, thebrothersthre3 said:

I'll probably end up using prores unless I really need the highlight headroom or am doing something crazy to the color in post. Churches can sometimes be a high dynamic range situation with large windows so RAW could come in handy for that. I kind of forgot about the moire issues though can't complain for $300. For whatever reason magic lantern makes me feel uneasy for paid work, I mean if I am leaving the camera unattended to record for an hour. I use slow motion a lot for weddings but for personal work, though I actually love slo mo, I rarely use it.

IIRC it does Prores HQ, which is 10-bit.  Is that supported by P2K?  10-bit would allow a lot more DR than 8-bit, so maybe the DR is ok in Prores?

6 hours ago, newfoundmass said:

I love the BMPCC. I still have mine, though I don't really use it anymore. Once I got the GH5 it just became too much of a hassle to rig it up with an external battery and monitor. But the image and colors, they are wonderful. And it also looks very good upscaled to 2K, maybe even 4K. We used mine as a b-cam for a friend's BMCC and he was able to mix them together perfectly. 

I dunno about using it on weddings though! It's not great for low light and while there are no recording limits it gets warm real quick. 

You could even rig it up with a tiny fan - for a wide shot for a wedding you don't need sound, and this isn't the camera for recording sound anyway!

6 minutes ago, thebrothersthre3 said:

I like that plug. If I just left it secured into the camera with the cage all the time it would probably last forever.

Yeah, and even if you broke it you just replace the cable and the camera is still fine.  It's great to have options like this.

6 hours ago, Django said:

EOS R isn't presented by Canon as a DSLR substitute but rather an addition. That said quite a few 5D/6D series users are switching over. 1DX2 users no way, B-cam at best.

ProAV on YT did an interesting video showing the EOS-R as a B-cam to a C200 and it looked like a reasonable option.  The crop was even a feature as it means you can get a bit of extension on a shorter lens for a tighter portrait shot.

4 hours ago, currensheldon said:

The only big negative upon further review is the battery. Bummer to see a battery that has just over half the capacity of a Canon LP-E6 on a full frame camera that shoots 4K. I'm guessing you won't get much more than 45-minutes shooting on a battery that size. As someone who owns a lot of Canon LP-E6s and has battery life pretty high up on the priority list, that is a bummer.

I'm waiting for the pro model anyway, but love the RP's size and price. If it had that bigger battery it may have made a good B-Cam to the EOS R on smaller, one-man band shoots - or as a camera to always have on a gimbal for quick shots. 

If the P4K thread is any indication, let's reserve the next 80 pages of this thread to BATTERY RAGE!!

8 minutes ago, mercer said:

I do wish it had some kind of Log... even if they had a Flat Profile like Nikon has or a Log-Lite. But all in all, I’d have to say that for the price, Canon delivered here and this could be a purchase for me. 

I don’t really understand why anyone would try and compare the a6xx Sony series to a Canon FF Camera? Even with a 4K crop, it’s still a FF camera for photos and 1080p.

As a consolation the contrast / saturation controls might have some decent leeway in them?

With 8-bit it might be preferable to allocate more of those bits to the middle parts of the exposure range.  I did really like the Normal profile on the XC10 which provided the same DR as C-Log, it just had a knee at a higher point so it was only compressing the highlights.

(From the XC10 EBU Test Paper - Normal = Look1, C-Log = Look 5)

As far as I know the XC10 is the only camera that had this feature - the rest just clipped highlights.  For an 8-bit codec this would be a spectacular gamma curve, and it wasn't something that Canon or anyone else seemed to make a big deal out of, so although I'm not optimistic for the RP, we won't know until someone tests it.

@leslie Wow!

I bet that would have been a pretty nerve wracking few days!

10 minutes ago, leslie said:

that is pretty hard core !!  i usually wait till the camera is well out of warranty and others have trod the path before me  . i pulled my nikon 950 apart to a similar degree to remove the hot mirror.  got it all back together had one tiny little screw left over  ? . been considering doing the same thing to my gopro to replace the lens with a less wide angle. still considering the swap, that and other lens acquisitions keep getting in the way.

I used to be an IT technician for a small organisation with a modest IT budget, so we used to try and solve problems ourselves.  We'd often clean keyboards, printers, and other hardware when they went a bit funny because often a good clean can get something back to working well.

What was quite common was when me and the boss would pull apart a laser printer or something, there were almost always parts left over.  Sometimes they were parts where both of us would look at them and think "I've never seen that thing before in my life!".  Funnily enough we never pulled something apart and had it not work again because we stuffed it up - everything always came good.  

I think they just put spare parts in there so that there will always be parts left over and you'll be less likely to try and service things yourself next time

Hi A1ex!!

Keep up the great work..  we appreciate it!  ???

(https://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?topic=22770.msg211977#msg211977)

I have had a recurring thought that ML would make a spectacular project for someone who wants to work in PR to get real-world experience and actually make some kind of difference by making ML much more accessible to people who don't want to trawl though threads about registers to understand how to turn on crop-mode or similar things like that.
The information is around, and even just collating it and providing some instructions would make a huge difference.

I think one of the main issues is that people want to record in some combination of RAW, 4K, and >30fps so the challenge isn't installing ML, it's installing the right build, installing the SD-Card hack, working out the menu system (that keeps changing faster than the blog posts can keep up) to enable the right modules, the button combinations for preview modes, and potentially other bits and pieces as well.

19 minutes ago, Django said:

@leslie They are actively working on it. EOS R firmware update gave some hope but A1ex from ML posted this yesterday:

"The firmware update... unfortunately wasn't helpful. None of my previous tricks worked with it. I'm still wondering why some of my previous test FIRs resulted in green screen, but I'm now 100% sure we did not execute any code on the camera. The green screen was likely a bug in Canon's FIR loading routine, or something like that.

The good news -kitor identified two UART ports: one at 3.3V, used by the MPU (outputs the log from above) and another at 1.8V, likely used by the main CPU (same voltage level on DIGIC 6). The latter needs some level shifting, but - at least on previous models - it has everything we need to enable the boot flag and explore around.

Worst case - ML on EOS R may require some hardware hacking in order to install it (like in the above picture). No big deal, right? I mean, you need a lot more knowledge to be able to use it "

Magic Lantern Forum - EOS R

He actually linked to a post here by @kye ? 

OMG - that brought tears to my eyes!!  How funny!

Let's hope A1ex has seen the other nice things I say about ML!! ???

21 hours ago, leslie said:

been my experience a couple of times at least. someone from the forum posts a heads up about suspect posts, which i have to thank those people for having such a neighborly watch like attitude. perhaps if everyone in the forum pursues an active approach to announce spammer posts when come across we would deny them or greatly reduce the clicks or whatever their evil machinations are.  most people on here don't seem to have much trouble calling a spade a spade or other names at times so i reckon if someone who's pretty regular in the forum calls out a spammer alert i would tend to side with them  and not click on links until proven otherwise. most if not all the links i click on are video links that lead to youtube or vimeo   camera reviews or the shorts that people make. i don't tend to click on txt links. just my two cents worth.

i have seen alot of tompeter adds in the sale section. it seems unnatural to me, one person to sell so much stuff unless he had a shop.since nothing is stated about a shop or being a wheeler and dealer, on principal i have avoided those adds like the plague.

I agree..  However, in my experience it's sometimes hard to see who is a spammer and who might be a newcomer who is potentially from the instant-messaging generation, or doesn't have English as their first language, or both.  Film-making is a pretty complicated topic and it's pretty easy to ask a genuine question that seems inflammatory or non-sensical, so apart from posting links, it can be hard to tell.

4 hours ago, thebrothersthre3 said:

Just got this camera, waiting on it to come. Interested if anyone here still uses one. Would enjoy seeing work done on it or hearing experiences. 

My reasoning was:

1. no record limits (needed for C cam for weddings)
2. really cheap (350 bucks used)
3.  RAW 12 bit
4. dynamic range seems pretty remarkable 

We're going to try and make P4K footage have the same "look" of the OG Pocket camera, so that should tell you something about how well regarded the images from it are.  I was seriously considering buying one, but I wanted something small and it seems that the P2K works best when you can rig it up with external power and audio.

Weren't you going to stick with Fuji as a C-camera?  Or is this for a different setup?

58 minutes ago, Yurolov said:

People complaining about no ibis clearly have not used canons for video. Lens IS and digital IS work better than ibis from Sony. 

Or we don't want to be limited to minuscule and rather bland selection of Canon-compatible IS lenses.

There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of different aesthetics available from the different lens designs, materials, coatings, and manufacturers throughout the history of photography.  I personally think that the ability of mirrorless to adapt every SLR lens ever made is potentially the biggest advantage of taking out the mirror.  The fact that IBIS gives IS to every lens ever made is a real game changer for those who don't (or can't) always shoot on tripods or larger rigs.

Brandon Li is a famous travel film-maker who has made a number of viral travel films, with all of the special effects we associate with the genre.

His latest project went beyond that and included actors, a storyline, dramatic tension, as well as being a travel film.

Tom Antos interviewed him for a BTS look, and he talks about process, equipment, logistics, editing, the balance of control vs improvisation (there wasn't a script), and other interesting things, as well as showing some BTS footage.  I think it's an interesting crossover between fully planned shoots and completely unplanned travel films.

Here is the final film, and the BTS interview:

Just now, Michi said:

I predict you'll be disappointed. No way 10-bit Clog is going to happen in this camera. 

Actually, no chance of being disappointed.  Since buying my GH5 I haven't been genuinely interested in any of the newer releases.  At least for my particular needs, nothing out there really comes close, and there isn't a lot with the GH5 where you think "gee, I really wish that it could..."

Man, I read that whole thread thinking AA was an Anti-Aliasing filter, which even made sense in the context that it's in the filter stack!!

Too many acronyms! ???

Interesting.

I was just going to say that if it had 4K with only APSC crop, Canon colours, and 10-bit C-Log then it might be the first camera since the GH5 to tempt me....  but then realised it probably wouldn't have IBIS.

For non-handheld shooters though, and depending on the final specs, it might be an offering to attract jaded Canon shooters back into the fold.

Worth watching.  It's partly an ad for his course, but there's also lots of useful stuff in here.

It looks nice to me

To give any criticism I'd have to know what you were trying to accomplish.

14 hours ago, anonim said:

Thanks, it's so nice to hear voice of modesty, out of endless verbal judging what is future or what is dead. Actually, it seems that inner peace and modesty are the most important talents to make a gems such these - with NX1. (And it is great to see that Black Pencil still use NX1... last post is just one month old one).

Wonderful videos!

I know my GH5 is so much better than I am

13 hours ago, IronFilm said:

You can already get 41K120FPS right now for sub $2K with the Z Cam E2 ? 

 41K..  screw 8K!  Wow!!  ???

22 hours ago, anonim said:

@Kye Little bit or little bit more thinking about 3d, microcontrast, blur, creative effects etc. Of course, for video usage order of values might be different. (Story telling greatly benefit from interesting 3d separation.)

Thanks, just got time to watch that.  I like how he starts by saying something like "let's get through this as quickly as possible" but it then takes 45 minutes

I found the Contax Zeiss Survival Guide on Reduser and was heartened when the guy distinguished between "Vintage" and "Organic".  I'd noticed that when people were talking about the lenses they were talking about how that more organic look could be had from certain lenses, and that those same lenses might also be super sharp, whereas Vintage seems to indicate a softness that is at the expense of sharpness.  

To my eye there is something that some lenses do that is similar to the effect of shooting in RAW, or even shooting 10-bit colour instead of 8-bit.  I think whatever that thing is, it's the thing that nasty kit zooms tend to have the opposite of, which is why they don't get a lot of love, despite often being sharp and optically quite good performers.

16 hours ago, Phil A said:

Probably an odd question because I‘m coming the other way around than most people

You mean, you're doing it the right way around? ???

1. Take twice as many batteries as ...   just kidding!
2. Have a checklist of some kind so you don't forget things.  It can be written, it can be filling each pocket of your bag, whatever, but have a system.
3. Have a process when you get back to base (your room, your office, whatever) and be sure to include:
   1. Putting everything back on charge
   2. Downloading and backing up media
   3. Cleaning things
4. After getting back to base take 5 minutes to think about what worked, what didn't work, and what you might change.

1 hour ago, Shirozina said:

I have C-Fast and V90 cards but I find it easier  just to plug in a 1TB SSD . This is an often overlooked factor when comparing it say to the GH5s which needs V60 and probably to be sure V90 which adds a considerable cost to the camera. 

And for people that run it as a studio camera, they could even just plug it into a large cheap HDD, assuming that it could handle the bitrate.  That would make the setup cheaper again.

All new cameras should have a USB port as a media option

52 minutes ago, tomsemiterrific said:

I'm assuming that was on the Nikon site??!? Don't recall the exchange. I do note as a video guy I did not feel well received on the Nikon FB pages. Very different kind of folk from those on the Fuji pages. I actually got IMMEDIATELY kicked off one Nikon site when, after saying how good the Nikon was for video, I asked if any one would be interested in starting or joining a Nikon for Videographers FB page.  Mind you, I had just joined that page and wasn't trying to "steal" any members. I just wanted to find others who shot the Nikon and liked video.

Never underestimate the potential for people to take online comments the wrong way, or just emotional insecurity and immaturity.

One of my favourite things to say to people is that most people don't grow up or become adults, they just get older.  It gets a few laughs normally, often enthusiastic agreement, but it's kind of the opposite of a joke because it's mostly true, and I only say it when the subject of someone being a total !@#%^ comes up in conversation.  I'd rather have a different saying on repeat, but alas..

Works for me..  but if it's a bug and they're doing their software development right then they'll have it fixed in a very short time.

13 hours ago, Xavier Plágaro Mussard said:

For low-mid level works, the more you do on camera, the more money you make. For high-end, it probably makes more sense to do it in post. 

..and if you're an amateur like me, you're budget limited and partly overwhelmed when shooting but have hours and hours to fiddle in post.

If you're able to spare the extra render time, you can create a nice set of preset looks that you can just apply to each project, so post work doesn't have to take a lot of time.

41 minutes ago, thebrothersthre3 said:

I did love my GH5 for family stuff. IS lenses will take its place on the Fuji system but they aren't quite as stable. 

Yeah, IBIS seems to be like IS but can handle more movement.  

Having IBIS to stabilise fully manual lenses gives you the best of both worlds.  I've just registered over at reduser to hopefully be able to see image attachments when they talk about lenses, as they seem to share my taste in lenses: manual, fast, and expensive! ???

9 hours ago, anonim said:

Something more to appreciate in GH5... Recently I had to shot (very fast as always in micro or no advanced budget circumstances) scene of dynamic dialog with two cameras, so I used  GH5 and GH5s - and how much I regretted that I had no just two GH5! Reason is, at first glance, the simplest: fast change from regular to lock IBIS function. Ability to move fast without tripod and with confidence lock 3-5 or more second of steady shot on subject, had, for me at that moment,  the most precious value.... Applied to upper quote, the same function provides great possibility to make fake two cameras angles - because of so fast adaptive position, without too much bothering actor or testing patience of volunteer.

(And people yet claim that IBIS is not useful from professional point of view or that even just ruin shots... For so many more complex or uncontrolled occasions usable IBIS is imo really godsend. Just learn or develop way to make full creative usage of it.)

7 hours ago, anonim said:

Yes, totally steady walking shots is hard to achieve, maybe closer with UW lens as, say, Laowa. (It even be more natural in Dogma manifest sense.)

But, further evolving previous post, I'm close to conclusion that IBIS actually is not at all replace for gimbal (I even see it more as vice versa attempt - gimbal as unperfect substitute for perfect ibis :) - it has its own original using signature, because of psychologically higher level of unlocked free movements. With gimbal I'm still aware of instrument and I'm still greatly depending of its dictating rules and positioning limitations. IBIS is far more to the serve of free gestures, some sort of shooting calligraphy. Of course, to my feeling and eye, which are so often prone to be in mistake 

I agree completely.  IBIS is something that people who don't need it don't understand the value in.  That's like everything in a sense, we don't appreciate what we don't use or don't need.

For me, IBIS provides a nice level of camera movement.  If you hand-hold a camera it's ok for action scenes, but too jerky for anything else and just screams "8mm home video".  Something like a shoulder rig gives a nice level of motion, the extra size eliminates the hand-shake but keeps the human movement, especially when paired with IS in a lens.  More stable than that are the glide cams which are very smooth, but @KnightsFan is right in saying they're still intuitive and can still have that human movement.  Gimbals are very difficult to control to let that human movement through, but I think part of the difficulty with them is that they let basically no changes to where the camera is pointing but still let through all of the changes in where the camera is positioned, and the combination looks odd.

You're absolutely right that it allows something new.  We used to have glide cams or shoulder-rigs to give that level of movement, we also used to have rigs that were very fast to setup and use which allowed spontaneity and life to blossom in front of the camera easily, and we also used to have small setups that you could take into places that don't allow professional filming. 
IBIS brings these three together in a way that we never had before, and for me that's what creates new creative possibilities.  You can use the size and speed to allow filming in situations where there wouldn't have been time, or to allow more movement that would have been very difficult before.  Shooting calligraphy is a beautiful way of saying it, another might be to have a dance between the subject and the camera.

I am attempting to make videos of my family (who don't re-do things and I'm not going to ask them to) in places where there is no professional shooting allowed and I'm carrying around the camera all day, and I want the end results to be as beautiful as I can make them, which hand-shake completely destroys IMHO.  IBIS is what allows me to shoot in places and not get told off or asked to leave.

6 hours ago, KnightsFan said:

I often use a Glidecam. I once used an electronic gimbal and hated it for this reason. It was so difficult to smoothly and accurately pan/tilt, and I couldn't lower the handle too much or the camera hit the motor on the back. And forget canted angles--If there was a way, it was buried in the app. With the glidecam, all movement is a direct, 0 latency result of me aiming the camera. It provides the tactile feedback of a fully mechanical system, like handheld. If I pan too far, I feel it between my fingers before I see it on the monitor. As far as freedom of movement, I find mechanical gimbals to be a lot closer to handheld than electronic gimbals.

I suspect they will get better, and may incorporate additional features that make this easier in the future.  For example, if there was a little camera looking at you scanning your face and you could steer the direction of the camera by angling your head, like those separate controllers do when you tilt or rotate them now.  This would be very intuitive because I know that when I'm watching something and I want the camera to look somewhere else at something off-screen I move my head by instinct as if trying to get the camera to move.