New travel film-making setup and pipeline - I feel like the tech has finally come of age

[kye]

8 hours ago, PannySVHS said:

Thanks a lot! That's some seriously extensive testing and great review! @kye

I'd argue that this kind of testing is actually necessary to understand how things behave.  Over the years I have tested a lot of things and it's amazing how many things that "everyone knows" do not stand up in even the most basic tests, but continue to be myths because no-one bothers to even look.

Aristotle claimed that women have fewer teeth than men, which is not true, but he obviously never actually looked to see if he was right - despite being married multiple times where he could easily have tested his claim at any time.

8 hours ago, PannySVHS said:

2x crop looks great. One thing caught my critical eye:) The 2.08x on your second setup looks to be higher resolving than the 25mm focal length on the 12-35.

No, not mixed up, but the 12-35mm has a shallower DOF and so you have to know where in the image to look to compare sharp details in the focal plane.

This is the unsharpened cropped image:

This is the 12-35mm image:

This is the sharpened cropped image:

The sharpening is perhaps a little over-correcting, but the thin edges are still slightly blurred in comparison to the proper image from the 12-35mm.

This is where it is important to know how to read the results of a test.  This comparison of the zoom to the crop matched FOV but not DOF, and while I probably could have zoomed in using the 12-35mm and also stopped down at the same time to keep DOF the same, the lens sharpness would have been reduced so it wouldn't have been a fair test.  To get around that I should have tested using a flat surface like a resolution chart or a brick wall.

The problem with going that route is that now we're no longer testing anything close to real-life, and no longer answering questions about what will and won't work in real shooting.

The test wasn't "what percentage of resolving power is lost using the CrZ function?"...  it was "is the CrZ function usable for shooting with cropped lenses?".  Realistically I shouldn't have included the 12-35mm optical zooms at all, I should have just cropped in using the CrZ function and left the images to be judged on their own merits in isolation, the same way that any project shot using the CrZ function would be.

This is the danger of pixel-peeing - it distracts from the only thing that actually matters - the image.

8 hours ago, PannySVHS said:

By the way, your Cosmicar looks like it is outperforming the 12-35 for 1.4x and 1.5x gate. Impressive.

The cosmicar really is a gem!

There's a reason that cinematographers have relentlessly driven up the price of vintage lenses over the last decades, and why modern lens manufacturers are designing and releasing brand new lenses with vintage looks, and manufacturers are even creating new mechanisms to control the amount and type of vintage looks with custom de-tuning functions.