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I agree. I have two sets of lenses: Travel and general stuff: 8mm f4 // 17.5mm f0.95 // 40mm f1.8, which gives equivalents of 16mm f8 // 35mm f1.4 // 80mm f3.6 Sports and wildlife stuff: 135mm f2.8 // 200mm f3.5, which gives equivalents of 270mm f5.6 // 400mm f7 I'm missing a 80mm lens which would sit in-between the 40 and 135, but I haven't really had the need for one yet. Maybe for sports, but I'll only consider getting one if that happens. If I am travelling I don't think I'd take either of the longer lenses, just the main three lenses.

It also lowers (disables?) the sharpening, enables h265 200mbps codec which reduced file sizes and SD card costs (the 400mbps codec for 4K requires UHS-II cards that cost a fortune), so there are tradeoffs in both directions. I'm not convinced I'll swap over permanently, but folks who do anamorphic shooting may be very interested in the GHa LUTs combined with that anamorphic look. The GH5 is great value for money, but if you want to shoot 10-bit anamorphic with de-squeeze and without an external monitor it becomes the bargain of the century, and the Alexa colour combined with the big-screen aesthetic would be a spectacular match.

Those are some very impressive looking stills indeed! Beautiful tones, and the motion blur of those birds is just great

I remember something from my stills photography days that went something like "An image should only be in colour if the colour ads something to the shot. Colour is like everything else in an image - if it's not helping the image then remove it".

Yeah, I've seen some interesting attempts at 360 video, 3D video, and VR (which can be either of those, or interactive) and we're kind of yet to really crack the basics. I've seen a few VR 3D films where they're attempted to move the camera, to varying effect. The main challenge for content creators is that we can't make sure the person is pointing the direction we want them to be, or noticing what we want them to notice.

Just found this huge and very thorough comparison of 50mm lenses... http://hispan.hu/50mm-lens-test/ It's in Hungarian, but is well worth translating different sections. There are test charts, sharpness tests, bokeh tests, flare tests, etc for every lens at every aperture. Very impressive and useful

I'll pick a few lenses and go out and shoot something, so I'll try and get some lights into the lenses when I do. I was going to have a light in the background for bokeh but ended up with the specular highlights on the plastic bag in the background instead.

That looks cool, I like it being on that line, it integrates it in a funny-sort of way. I'd move it to the left so it's not crowding the guy, although it does have a bit of that person-looking-straight-at-edge-of-frame kind of trapped vibe. I really like it as the frame for the poster too. @mercer is really getting good with those 28mm lenses!! (I'm assuming that's a 28 shot?)

My thoughts: The Takumars have a distinct look to them. The colours are kind of like adding an instagram filter over them, but they also add a kind of filter over the 3-dimensionality of the lens too, kind of giving it a 'look'. I think this might be quite cinematic for some people but to me it removes some of the vibrancy of the real world. I've eliminated them from my options, partly because their focus rings work backwards, but also I want that 3D pop. This is evident even when you compare all the lenses at 5.6 and all of them (except the kit lens) should be in their best aperture range I am eliminating the Mir too. Looking at all of them, the Mir at 2.8 seems to be more stopped down than the others at 2.8. I checked against a few lenses and it appears that the other lenses are consistent with each-other so it doesn't look like I've made a mistake, but rather that the Mir isn't as fast as other lenses at 2.8 (notably, the Konica 40mm with its very similar focal length). Even just looking through the Konica and Mir side-by-side when wide open, the Konica looks closer to double the diameter rather than the 1.4x it should be, so I think the Russians might have been bending the truth a little The Mir is really soft at 2.8, especially compared to other lenses that are stopped-down by a full stop already. The Mir at 2.8 is a lot slower than the Konica or Helios / SB combinations. A normal exposure with the Helios / SB combination at ISO 100, requires ISO 160 from the Konica and ISO 400 from the Mir. Combined with the GH5's ok-but-not-great low-light performance and my shooting in natural light even at night, it's not a good combination. I read that the Mir is Apochromatic and it may well be, but the other lenses are fine on the 2x crop of the GH5 so I don't really see that as being that critical. It's also worse in the corners at 2.8 than the Konica is at 1.8, and also less halation too, so that's more reasons. The m42 speed booster I have seems fine. The Helios SB combo is very smeared in the corners, but the Takumar 55/1.8 doesn't have that problem, so it's the Helios lenses not the SB. Unfortunately if I want the extra performance of the SB I'll need a 50-60mm lens that isn't the Helios or the Takumar. The Konica is an absolutely stunning performer. It has great contrast and sharpness wide open, corners are still sharp (on MFT) The Voigtlander is my main lens and the purpose of these tests are to choose the lens to go with it and my 8mm lens for traveling. Out of the other lenses I have here, the Konica looks like the best overall performer, the Helios+SB combo is one-stop faster but soft in corners, and the Takumar+SB combo leaves me cold and focuses the wrong way. I think it's really a choice between the Konica, buying a fast 50-60mm m42 lens for the m42 SB, or buying a fast 50-60mm lens and a SB for that lens mount. No. Fixed WB on all shots. I just did a little test and you can see the colour shift on the LCD as you adjust the aperture back and forwards.

I added this to my above post after you quoted me: I agree about it being invasive. My dad thinks that smartphones are invasive. My daughter told me that she is happy to be born in the best time to be alive for all of human history, both past and future, and when I asked her why she listed a few things, but the first one was having a smartphone and internet. The times, they are a changin'.....

VR is gimmicky. Just think about who would want to sit down in comfort and have images shown to them that make it seem like they're in a different place than where they really are, and doing things that they aren't really doing, and with people that they don't know. I tell you what, you couldn't even make people sit in a big room and watch such fantasy images, let alone make them pay for it! Not to pick on you or anything, but I think this is an example of someone not getting it. People didn't want to be taken into a large room of dubious cleanliness, they came to cinemas to be transported to a world of the writer and directors vision, and be told amazing stories. If you can't see that VR has the potential to do that in an amazing way, then I guess you'll be surprised by the future. VR is escapist entertainment where you stop being where you are and will only be somewhere else. People probably won't be watching VR on the train for example. AR is to take where you are and to also be somewhere else as well, or at least add a layer onto the place where you are. People will absolutely do this everywhere they go. AR will be a Pokemon Go, your phones notification screen, these forums, and a complete heads-up-display for your entire experience. If you have ever wanted to know something or been bored with something then it will be just great. The thing about VR is that we just haven't worked out how to do it well yet, and VR has a limitation because not everyone wants to stop being where they are. VR will come first and AR will come later, but AR will come in a huge way. VR is like having an expensive home theatre - people will like it but not everyone will have one, AR is the future of the smartphone.

Comparison images. These are high-res so be sure to zoom into them. All lenses fully wide open: F2.8: F5.6: If you want the super-high-res versions that wouldn't upload to the forum, they're in the original link.

Added the Super Takumar 55/1.8 lens, both on SB and without. Files are in the original link shared above. Now to do some analysis.

@Sage I have swapped over from the 4K modes to the 6K Open Gate mode on the GH5 as that mode has some great advantages, including less sharpening. Are you planning to update your instructions with new 'softening' parameters to match the sharpness of the Alexa? This mode seems pretty great (h265, 5K 4:3 image for anamorphic or cropping in post, less sharpening) so it would be useful to have those settings as a reference ???

Did a quick test with the Mir, all shot wide-open at 2.8. Mir-1B 37mm f2.8 lens at F2.8 (no SB) GH5 6K 10-bit Open Gate mode with crop in post GHa Alexa LUT pack I don't think I'm a fan of that combination of settings.

There is a way of thinking that I find particularly useful for this stuff: Think of a company / industry / or whatever that is/was big Think of the problem they solved or the value they gave customers Think of how you'd solve that problem with todays (or tomorrows) tech Think about what that means for that company / industry It sounds simple, but you'd be surprised how many Wall St big business folks can't do it. A few examples: Newspapers They curated and delivered content to people The internet now delivers content for free, but doesn't do a great job at curating it (fake news) The result? Newspapers are all screwed. Completely predictable, yet most didn't predict it. Record labels and record shops / motion picture industry and cinemas Curated artists, invested in making big budget productions up front (taking on risk), marketed the results, and distributed them Three scenarios: Don't curate or invest, just distribute = YouTube Curate and invest and distribute via internet = Netflix Curate and invest but attempt to monopolise distribution = illegal file-sharing Perfectly predictable (and the RIAA are basically just making tits of themselves fighting a non-winnable battle). The musicians YT was Mp3.com and the musicians Netflix hasn't been worked out yet, but big companies are fighting over it (apple, amazon, etc) etc etc. In terms of the motion picture industry, the major innovations go like this: invention of motion pictuers Addition of sound Colour Home theatre (no longer only in cinemas) Virtual reality Interactive VR Interactive AR Potentially some kind of direct neurological connection after that, but it's still a kind of VR/AR

YT and cinema are different, but considering that "cinema" doesn't mean "big room" it means "video with your favourite famous people in it" or "video with your favourite stories". Considering that Pewdiepie has 20 billion views on his channel, and many kids watch hours of YT a day, you can't say that this isn't having an impact on what they think. My daughter doesn't care about going to see Rhianna in concert, but she just about turned herself inside-out to see Shawn Mendes (who got his start on social media) and when he came on stage she cried like people did when they saw The Beatles. Source. Peoples music tastes tend to be most heavily influenced by what they're consuming at 13 (for women) and 14 (for men) (source) and the same mechanism is likely to be the same for other content. Source. We don't have TV in our house, and we don't listen to the radio, we have Netflix and YT and that's how the kids consume content. Their heroes are youtubers and YouTubers aren't filming with Alexas in RAW or on film, they're filming with RX100s and GH5s and their phones. Some are doing it with great lighting, nice production design, nice lenses and the rest, but not RAW, not 12-bit colour, and not with filters and careful adjustment of digital sharpening.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of that font either. I used to be a designer making websites for people in the 90s, and font choice is difficult and takes a lot of time. They have so much influence on your design you really need to take some time with it. If you can, try and use the software such that you can just change the font on the actual poster by just using the arrow keys on the keyboard to cycle through the list of fonts on your computer, that saves a lot of time. (It's normally something like highlight your text, click into font drop-down, click on one font, hopefully the "cursor" stays in the list and you can use up/down arrows to cycle and it updates the writing on the actual image.)

There are two ways to deal with a power failure - either write the file continuously in such a way that if power is lost you can recover the file (or at least all of it except the last few seconds) or to monitor the power and when you're about to shut down then close the file nicely. Considering the issues around detecting battery levels with third-party batteries it would be great if they could just make it so that the files were all recoverable. That way it would work when something else goes wrong, like there's a problem with the card, the camera crashes, someone disconnects the media unexpectedly, or whatever.

Lenses are: 14-42/3.5-5.6 Panasonic at 17mm 17.5/0.95 Voigtlander 35/3.5 Super Takumar 37/2.8 Mir-1B 40/1.8 Konica Hexanon 14-42/3.5-5.6 Panasonic at 42mm 58/2 Helios (x2) both with and without SB and lol, I just realised I forgot to test the 55/1.8 Takumar. Oops!

Posted!

I've just shot part one of this lens comparison which is the ~70-80mm equivalent lenses for MFT. https://app.sugarsync.com/iris/wf/D8480669_08693060_6019565 Notes: It's a mixture of cheap/expensive and vintage/modern lenses, and my goal was to see how these lenses compared aesthetically and to choose which to keep All shots were taken with my GH5 which has a 2x crop compared to FF, so your FOV may vary, and remember that the edges distort more than the centre part which is what we're looking at This isn't designed to tell you how good each lens is, but more how good they are compared to each other - google has many great examples from each of these lenses All shots taken in RAW and converted to JPG but with no other processing so this is almost SOOC I tried to match FOV for lenses with different focal lengths, but it's an imperfect test I started with each lens wide open and then stopped-down, some lenses have more photos because they have half-stop clicks, some have full-stops, some are click-less (in which case I did full-stops) but they're not exact so some exposure differences are in there, I also noticed that exposures were often off so I'm not confident that all the clicks were accurate on all the lenses (some are vintage after all) The electronic shutter only goes up to 1s exposures, so some of the lenses didn't get tested at their smallest apertures, but diffraction just kicks in so I don't feel like we're missing much Apart from adjusting aperture (and shutter speed to compensate) everything else was manual, ISO 100, and identical WB and lighting, so colour differences are the lenses I focused each lens on the marks on the little white card in the centre and normally stopped the lens down a stop or so to help with manual focus, I've heard some lenses change focus as you adjust the aperture but I didn't allow for that so the focus might shift a little perhaps Unless noted the lenses were used without a speed booster, and the SB I used with the two Helios lenses was a cheap Chinese one from ebay. I also shot the Helios lenses without a SB so you can compare and see if the SB is good or not. My next step is to test the 135-200mm lenses (270-400mm equivalents) which I can't test with the current setup because my room isn't long enough. I'll add these to this same thread when they're ready. After that I'll narrow the field down a bit and go shoot some real-world video to see how they go. Happy to hear impressions about what you see, what you like and what you don't.

I figured it was probably sensor distance, so I calculated it all, set it up, then the first lens I put on had too large a minimum focal distance - doh! Still, I've shot the first round of it and will post soon

The cinematic look is defined when you're a teenager by the attributes that your favourite films had and the camera that your dad had didn't have. All the millennial on YT wanting that cinematic look aren't romanticising the film look because they're too young to remember it - it was already digital when they were teenagers. In 15 years time that cinematic look will be the 80D with 10mm lens because that's what Casey Neistat was using when they were growing up.

The golden age of cinema was truly something to be admired. Here are the TOP SECRET insider settings that will MAGICALLY turn your camera into a CINEMA BEAST. PROFESSIONAL CINEMATOGRAPHERS DO NOT WANT YOU TO KNOW THIS We all know that you can't get cinematic video straight out of a camera, so most of these are in post. Camera: Shoot in NATURAL or the default style (LOG profiles are a trick to fool the try-hards) Set your aperture to F8 (that's why the most famous photographers say "f8 and be there") Film had a wonderfully organic resolution, so It's important to get the highest resolution camera you can - shoot 8K RAW if you can, 10-bit is barely a minimum, but 12-bit or 14-bit is better Depending on the aesthetic you want you can film at 23.976 fps, or less. Ideally you would film at a rate that varies to simulate the camera operator turning a handle, but even the most expensive cinema cameras still lack this feature, even in 2019, it's madness but it's reality Post-production: Set your Saturation to zero Lower your contrast until the whites aren't white, and the blacks aren't black, you want that soft look Highlight all your audio tracks and delete them, if you want you can add a single track back in and put in a single piano soundtrack, but silent is the most 'pure' Whatever frame rate you recorded at, you must play it back at 23.976 fps - this will give that classic "people walking as fast as ants" look Add noise, film grain plugins that have real digitised film grain are best - DO NOT GO CHEAP ON THIS When you output your footage it's important to get the settings right - the most important is to output in 1080 as a MAX (4K is totally out) Yes, I'm taking the piss, but actually if you want to replicate the silent film era then these are good instructions. My point is that there is no 'cinematic' look, so the only place that you can be sure of that won't help you is anyone using the word "cinematic". Seriously, cinema looks so great because it's a combination of every department doing their job really well. We've been making movies for long enough to work out what matters and what doesn't, and anything that doesn't matter has been cut from the budget of film-making since before any of us were born. What you really want is to make great looking films, which is really a personal thing that only you can find out what it means to you, and the only way to do that is to learn every job in every department of a film production and do them all really well. Film-making is art that uses enormous amounts of technology - that's why is SO DIFFICULT IT'S NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE. Welcome to our pain, and our pleasure.