Esguelha

Really fun to see the variety in cameras used, and I'm really happy to see I got some votes! Camera wise, I guess went the boring route.


You can just about see in the picture, It was 138€ for the kit if you exclude shipping. This is my first M43 camera, and unfortunately the chinese adapters I ordered didn't arrive in time. I have a nice Zeiss 50mm 2.8 I could have used for some more creative results.
I shot on the Smooth "film mode" with -2 contrast and sharpness, and used a preset "LUT" from Filmora, can't quite remember wich one. I was very happy with the picture quality.

They can try and sue us about the glue.
It'll never stick.

Really fun to see the variety in cameras used, and I'm really happy to see I got some votes! Camera wise, I guess went the boring route.


You can just about see in the picture, It was 138€ for the kit if you exclude shipping. This is my first M43 camera, and unfortunately the chinese adapters I ordered didn't arrive in time. I have a nice Zeiss 50mm 2.8 I could have used for some more creative results.
I shot on the Smooth "film mode" with -2 contrast and sharpness, and used a preset "LUT" from Filmora, can't quite remember wich one. I was very happy with the picture quality.

Turn this:

Into this!

I entered two terrible quality cameras in the $200 camera challenge and somehow didn't come last, so here's what I learned.  In case it's useful to someone
Shooting:
Low quality cameras have poor codecs and low bitrates, which typically have trouble with a lot of movement.  Therefore I used a tripod for every shot instead of hand-holding.  This also gives you more options for temporal NR in post too. Go for the 180 shutter by either using an ND or by simply filming in low light.  How can you tell if it's 180 shutter?  Wave your hand in front of it and see how streaky it is.  or alternatively, if your camera is very low resolution and subjects aren't moving too much, then the sheer size of the pixels will completely obscure whatever shutter angle you have!  Win!! In post:
Edit in your desired output resolution, not the one you shot in..  dodgy 4K image?  Output in 8K today! Think about converting to black and white.  This gives you 4 times the effective resolution!! Camera only shoots 30p?  Excellent - conform to 24p in post and get slow motion for free!!  Most NLEs can slow audio slightly too, so if it works for the vibe of your project then go with it. Digital compression is awful and a give-away you're not shooting RAW or film, so is over-sharpening that you can't turn off.  Therefore, blur the image in post.  You might want to consider blurring only the edges of things, and you should experiment with blur size and blur strength too.  I typically find a sharp diagonal line and blur until it looks like a straight line instead of a jaggy digital mess. Use noise reduction, both spatial and temporal.  It will make the image blurry, but that's also what you want because of above, so go nuts.  The image might look smooth, but we'll add grain later, so don't worry about it. My footage had a bunch of compression artefacts that flickered on and off on each alternate frame and was very distracting (and awful).  De-flicker plugins can work wonders.  Just play with the types and presets until it's gone. Colour will probably be awful, so either make it black and white (which also gets around the awful coloured fringing) or desaturate heavily.  You can also do heavy chroma NR to get rid of colour flickering.  Also feel free to use advanced colour controls such as Hue vs Hue to get rid of nasty colours, or use masks to selectively desaturate colours you don't like. Get rid of digital looking clipped highlights by controlling and artificial highlight rolloff via curves.  Someone complimented me on the highlight rolloff, which was totally created in post. Use music, pick your shots well, and try and distract from IQ by using content, composition, lighting, and other 'tricks' ??? Can't afford a nice vintage lens or camera has a fixed lens?  Add halation by masking only the brightest parts of the image, adding a big blur, then put over the top of the image at a low opacity. Add grain to finish it off.  Film has grain and film is awesome, so therefore....  plus, YT kills grain and will put heavy bands on smooth areas so you really should add some.  I recommend doing a grain test video with different strengths so you can see what YT does it various amounts of it.  It takes more than you think to show up in YT, a LOT more. Here is the curve that gives that highlight rolloff and deep shadows....

Here's another before/after image.


and here's my reveal post with the final and SOOC videos:
Hopefully that's useful to someone!  Feel free to ask questions  
and I still think I can make a P4K look like a BMMCC or BMPCCv1 so if you have both and can shoot something with both then let me know.....

That's genius!! You can, on this occasion keep a hold of your webcam   I do love the fact you have fitted it to a rail mount, I say you build a shoulder rig for this! Extra points for rigging it up haha!
 
Now I loved the image quality on this, for me it looked very filmic, granted its not terribly sharp but much sharper and better looking than I remember from EOS M footage. I guess that is down to a decently sharp lens which works wonders on the Canons. I was half thinking this was shot on a Sony of some kind but the skin tones and colours were just too good   Had you said this was an EOS M from the start I wouldn't have believed you, there appears to be no aliasing and moire from what I can see, perhaps YouTube's compression is hiding some of that. Great job! 
Now for my reveal and I am really surprised to have won the vote for image quality! When I saw some of the entries I was sure I wasn't going to get anywhere near the top. Not that I was aiming to win, this after all was just a bit of fun! Now I will be honest, I nearly didn't enter. I saw the post on the blog and immediately took interest. I thought over it for a few days and done some research on what could be had for the £200 budget. Andrew- as a side note I did manage to find a large sensor, interchangeable lens 4K camera and nearly went down that route!
At the time of Andrew announcing the competition it was peak wedding season for me (my full time job as a wedding and events filmmaker) and that had to take priority. When I checked back a few weeks later on the closing date for entries it was literally a week away! I took the plunge and bought something cheap in order to take part, paid for express shipping and bought a lens adapter via Amazon Prime.
And here she is in all her glory!

£69 body only from MPB photographic in the UK, and probably the ropiest one they had! It was pretty manky, didn't come with a body cap (omg that exposed sensor!! ?) and the SD card door doesn't close properly but I was determined to make this work. 
The lenses I used were two m42 vintage lenses I had lying around, first up a Pentacon 50mm f1.8 which I actually use in my professional work from time to time - its surprisingly good! For some longer shots I used a Carl Zeiss Jena 135mm f3.5 with the aperture blades stuck wide open - again surprisingly good considering the aperture doesn't function and it has been sitting in a bag without any caps on for years.
The eagle eyed amongst you will notice in the above photo there is a Speedbooster attached. This is where I hold my hands up to a little bit of cheating! I bought a Gobe dumb adapter from Amazon as mentioned but knew that for some shots I had in mind the 100mm equivalent FOV I would have would be bit too tight. So for a handful of shots I did run with this - this potentially aided in producing slightly sharper results in some shots. I also used an SLR Magic Variable ND, again not the cheapest of filters! So feel free to disqualify me for this technical infringement!
Before shooting my sequence I done a few test shots in the garden the reviewed the footage on the computer. I knew the AVCHD codec would be a potential struggle but didnt realise how bad it was until looking back on these test shots - the footage was already falling apart before my eyes! 17 Mbps is a long way off the solid looking 100+ Mbps i'm used to off my GH5! Not to mention how much moire I saw in the footage!
Despite this, I found the 720p mode better with it's Motion JPEG codec so considered using this in my film. I shot with the "Nostalgic" setting with Contrast and Sharpness all the way down. For me this looked to have slightly better dynamic range and better roll off between tones than the "Smooth" setting, although the over all colour wasn't as nice.
So, on one of the hottest days of the year I went into my home town and done some people watching. The little GH1 was a fair challenge to use as one might expect with how lucky we are with modern cameras these days. No focus peaking, no zebras, low resolution screen and viewfinder. Despite this, I relied heavily on the histogram to check my highlights, made sure not to film anything with too much motion which would exploit the weaknesses in the codec. I also threw in some 720p shots and upscaled them in the final edit. 
My biggest mistake was not taking my proper video monopod out to film, instead relying on handheld or a basic photography monopod. It wasn't until I went out for some golden hour footage I took along a proper tripod. Good old Warp Stabiliser came in handy!

The edit was a quick couple of hours piecing together the best shots, no real story part from the obvious changing of time and I graded using one of James Miller's DeLUTs as a starting point, tweaking to my own taste.
For me this was a refreshing challenge. Normally I opt to do some photography or go a bike ride to escape from my normal work but this was a cheeky day out filming to keep my creativity going at the height of working season. Filmmaking should always be about the fun and not about the expensive gear and with that I think I will arm myself with the little GH1 and see what we can come up with in the future.
I will be writing a more in depth blog post on my own website so when that is done I will link that back to here.
Finally I just want to say well done to PannySVHS for winning the best cinematography, I love the home video feel about this! Thank you to Andrew for coming up with this challenge and getting this little community together to create. Looking forward to more like this soon!
Dan
 

Really fun to see the variety in cameras used, and I'm really happy to see I got some votes! Camera wise, I guess went the boring route.


You can just about see in the picture, It was 138€ for the kit if you exclude shipping. This is my first M43 camera, and unfortunately the chinese adapters I ordered didn't arrive in time. I have a nice Zeiss 50mm 2.8 I could have used for some more creative results.
I shot on the Smooth "film mode" with -2 contrast and sharpness, and used a preset "LUT" from Filmora, can't quite remember wich one. I was very happy with the picture quality.

Really fun to see the variety in cameras used, and I'm really happy to see I got some votes! Camera wise, I guess went the boring route.


You can just about see in the picture, It was 138€ for the kit if you exclude shipping. This is my first M43 camera, and unfortunately the chinese adapters I ordered didn't arrive in time. I have a nice Zeiss 50mm 2.8 I could have used for some more creative results.
I shot on the Smooth "film mode" with -2 contrast and sharpness, and used a preset "LUT" from Filmora, can't quite remember wich one. I was very happy with the picture quality.

I was surprised to see Nordee come last, I found the footage quite nice, was definitely at the top of my list.

I also want to see what setup Framed_By_Dan and aaa123jc used.

 

Really fun to see the variety in cameras used, and I'm really happy to see I got some votes! Camera wise, I guess went the boring route.


You can just about see in the picture, It was 138€ for the kit if you exclude shipping. This is my first M43 camera, and unfortunately the chinese adapters I ordered didn't arrive in time. I have a nice Zeiss 50mm 2.8 I could have used for some more creative results.
I shot on the Smooth "film mode" with -2 contrast and sharpness, and used a preset "LUT" from Filmora, can't quite remember wich one. I was very happy with the picture quality.

I was surprised to see Nordee come last, I found the footage quite nice, was definitely at the top of my list.

I also want to see what setup Framed_By_Dan and aaa123jc used.

 

Really fun to see the variety in cameras used, and I'm really happy to see I got some votes! Camera wise, I guess went the boring route.


You can just about see in the picture, It was 138€ for the kit if you exclude shipping. This is my first M43 camera, and unfortunately the chinese adapters I ordered didn't arrive in time. I have a nice Zeiss 50mm 2.8 I could have used for some more creative results.
I shot on the Smooth "film mode" with -2 contrast and sharpness, and used a preset "LUT" from Filmora, can't quite remember wich one. I was very happy with the picture quality.

Really fun to see the variety in cameras used, and I'm really happy to see I got some votes! Camera wise, I guess went the boring route.


You can just about see in the picture, It was 138€ for the kit if you exclude shipping. This is my first M43 camera, and unfortunately the chinese adapters I ordered didn't arrive in time. I have a nice Zeiss 50mm 2.8 I could have used for some more creative results.
I shot on the Smooth "film mode" with -2 contrast and sharpness, and used a preset "LUT" from Filmora, can't quite remember wich one. I was very happy with the picture quality.

i got a bit fixated on the losing camera bit, completely missed the fine print about entering just for the judges category. But thats life.
I'm a bit surprised with the amount of entries or lack thereof, as i bid on 3 or 4 cameras but was out bid on everything. I was sure you guys must have been buying everything up  for the competition. The old video camera segment  of ebay must be quite abit more active than one would have thought. Too cut a long story short i ended up using a logitech c920 webcam with a letus anamorphic adapter taped to the front. My reasoning for using the letus was to help differentiate my entry from the others. i figure if speedboosters were allowed if you already had them an anamorphic should be ok as well. Not sure if anyone else shot anamorphicaly. Considering i went to the trouble of using the letus i did forget to get any footage of the lens flaring which was kinda dumb. Since my entry has proved surprisingly unlikely to win the point is moot i guess.
I'm glad i entered i learned a whole bunch of things that i can apply to the next challenge. i am fairly confident i can increase my vote rate by at least a 100% next time round ?
So dan the man pm me your address if you need a webcam for  the odd late night online dalliance. Mind you, you can keep those tips,tricks and footage for your own personal gratuitousness ok ?
 

Congrats to the winners - well deserved!
I figured I would lose the competition so would have some fun with it, so went very very budget.  I also wanted to see how far I could 'improve' the footage in Resolve.
Camera #1:

Fujifilm J20
Point and shoot - 2009 - 640x480 30p (final video was cropped to 16:9)
Price is about $15-30 on ebay (mine was purchased by my wife when new, so has been sitting in a drawer for about a decade)
Final video:
Unprocessed footage:
 
Camera #2: 


Fake action camera
It claims 1080p, but is FAKE and shoots the worst 640x480 30p I have ever seen (final video was cropped to 16:9)
Price was AU$17 brand new on ebay (which included free shipping across Australia - about 5000kms)
Final video:
Unprocessed footage:
 
Camera #3 was going to be a D-Mount lens on my old GoPro, but sadly didn't survive the modifications..

 

Soon I'll put the link to the vote on the front page of the blog to drum up some more people to take part and vote.
Then let's close the poll around Saturday-ish and do the big reveal of gear. Get some photos of the gear and post it. I'll do the same and reveal what I shot. I made two videos with two different cameras.
Then the winner of the public vote gets the last place person's camera If he wants to give it him. We're not going to force it out of his hands  This is supposed to be a bit of fun really.
Then I'll choose a winner of the judge's prize, who will get one of my cameras.

i second the motion. i'm happy i had a go at it, nothing ventured nothing gained as they say. i think i took something away from watching each of the entries. So i'm thinking its a win/win for me even i don't actually win anything. ?

Nearly done putting every video into a poll. Took ages!
Hopefully get everything tied up tomorrow.
Cheers for waiting!

Here is my entry.
Best regards!
 

Going by DPReview's video still comparison, the GH5 still has the best 1080p out of everything they tested, by a considerable margin. The Sony's don't have great 1080p, i'd say second place in 1080p goes to Fujifilm. The X-H1 does have IBIS, and it's pretty good now from what i've seen, probably better than any FF camera excluding the Panasonic S1. The AF isn't bad either, surely better than the GH5. The X-H1 is quite reasonably priced now, so it could be an option.
 

C'mon guys, someone submit a really bad one, I don't want to come dead last. My budget camera is my only camera ?

C'mon guys, someone submit a really bad one, I don't want to come dead last. My budget camera is my only camera ?

They will probably go the Minimag way: pack a Galaxy S10 inside a new shell and charge it triple the price.

C'mon guys, someone submit a really bad one, I don't want to come dead last. My budget camera is my only camera ?

C'mon guys, someone submit a really bad one, I don't want to come dead last. My budget camera is my only camera ?

Just like Dan, I've also been a long time lurker of the blog and the forums, and the challenge seemed fun. I shot this yesterday and edited it in the evening. I think it turned out OK. Unfortunately I didn't have an ND, so that meant infinite DoF and fast shutter speeds.