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Y'all know what Darias Khondji and Dean Cundey, Kovaks, Carpenter, Storaro, Toland, Conrad Hall, Harris Savides and pretty much anyone you can think of and dozens you can't, guys who shoot great looking stuff on purpose, not by accident, not because they got lucky but by design and through their own effort and expertise, either for the selfish benefit of the image itself or in service to the story, you know what they did so that they could do that stuff when it count, when they were getting paid to do what they did, when dozens if not hundreds of people were depending on them, waiting on them, when possibly millions of dollars were on the line or potentially rendered forfeit, you know what they were doing so that they could do what they did?   They were shooting tests.   Every camera.  Every lens.  Thoroughly.  They didn't waste other people's times learning what they could and couldn't do under a variety of common or unique circumstances on-the-clock.  They're smart enough to realize the occasional "happy accident" of a flare or focus pull or color combination or Golden Triangle configuration that just happend to occur at just the right time such that a most amazingly emotional chord is struck when the image is viewed by most humans is great but discovering that that last take, the one where the set/car/character/town is destroyed by fire, the giant monster is blown up, the command shuttle breaks apart the rented helicopter is finally, perfectly aligned with the setting sun to create a perfect silhouette through rippling heat refraction in some exotic locale on their last day of access or visa or the last raw nerve of some local potentate or executive producer isn't wasted because they didn't know WTF they were doing and just hoping for the best.     They weren't satisfied knowing the stuff they were using was expensive, or from a well known pedigree, or supposedly crafted by Santa Claus's most talented, clever elves, or promised in some way to never fuck up, under any circumstance, with any other combination of previous, contemporary or future widgets made by Satan Claus or the Easter Bunny or Baby Jesus.  They had to know.  So they could do it.  On purpose.  On demand.  Repeatedly.    They shot tests.   What they likely didn't do, for all sorts of reasons, is share these tests with the world, in a public venue, so that others at, below or above their stature and experience could comment on, learn from, share, ridicule or improve upon.  (this last bit was my maybe cryptic way of saying we should be lucky we're in a community where ideas and techniques are shared openly and not hoarded.  I'm not saying "stop posting tests" and non-narrative videos)   edit: TLDR version -- y'all stop marginalizing folks posting test videos because that's how you familiarize yourself with your gear enough to be useful to yourself and anyone else.  It's what the  name brand pros do so snarky comments about yet-another-boring-test-video are really just ignorant.

Geez, why so offensive about a little feature request. It is not a bug, it is just a very simple software feature that is not there and should be pretty easy to add. Just like a smartphone, the standard camera app doesn't have exposure lock most of the times. Many 3rd party apps do. Most GoPro users won't care for exposure lock or don't even know what it is. They just want to press a button and end up with a good looking video. Which is what the GoPro does. But if you want to mix GoPro video with your dslr footage it would be nice to be able to lock the exposure. That's all what's being asked for here. With adding exposure lock GoPro is not going to cannibalize any of their own products, it would just make the product better and they'd probably sell more of them. To me for example...

  This here's Sheriff Reid's blog, folks, and his reputation for being a serious shooter is well earned. Tip of the hat, Sheriff. And to you, deputy Rhoades.     THAT just caused a large laugh to roll out across the high Nevada desert. Can never have too much humor on a camera tech blog. Or on a high desert plain for that matter. Also makes the Sheriff metaphor work. Anyway... back on topic...   On the road back from Sundance. Must return to editing. Will respond more when I'm back in the home studio. My curiosity about the 1 degree of vertical slant on two particular shots in the trailer is growing. It's an easy enough fix, but was the camera just not quite level, or is it something else? Will carefully check other shots when I'm back. I may shoot a test pattern too. I'm not a test-pattern kind of guy, but they have their place and I'm open to find out. As Burnet pointed out, there are a lot of variables, so I appreciate the community help.   Meanwhile, my producer is obliged to keep me on edit and on schedule, but I will get back to the discussion as soon and as often as I can. Hopefully in a day or two.

Hi all, please join us to improve GoPro 3 with our GoPro 3 exposure lock petition. Thank you. Text of the petition: We, the GoPro3 users, would like to ask you if you could enhance the GoPro camera with exposure lock functionality. GoPro is a wonderful camera, however, inability to lock exposure can cause side effects that can be noticed in the following video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFMCWAqY_Io. We would also appreciate full manual control over ISO and exposure, but we all hope that you could add at least the exposure lock function. Thank you very much. http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/gopro-3-exposure-lock/

I am sure many have had their heads turned by the Metabones Speed Booster. Some of the many have wondered if this concept could be adapted to scopes.    Out of respect for the two forums, rather than paste a link I have reproduced my info below.     It doesn't mean anything but it might mean everything  :P       ============================================   JohnBar wrote: Hello Brian  I completed an inquiry form at your website in connection with an anamorphic interest.  1 Did you get it? (I can resend if you did'nt)  2 Am I likely to get a response?  best  John I've been swamped by email lately, and yours may have been lost in the shuffle. Sorry.  Anamorphic is something we are thinking about, but I can't say anything beyond that right now. _________________ Brian Caldwell

I love a good test! Actually i'm testing my brains out at the moment just to get the last shots for a short, which has been in the works for nearly a year now - time, money & re-adapting the original idea. I joined this forum because people seemed nice & friendly, handling out advice/tips that were really helpful. It doesn't matter whether you are a professional or an amateur, as you can & should be learning things all the time, regardless of where the information has come from.   I love learning stuff, which is probably why I did a doctorate in film & then taught. But after a while i just wanted to put all that learning & theory to the test - no matter how unsuccessful.   HOWEVER: In recent months, the "Trolling" has really hit a peak. This seems to be a trend on a lot of forums & is just getting worse & worse. If you've got nothing nice or constructive to say, keep it zipped - you just come off looking like a real wanker!   There's a good saying: "No one can ever presume himself to be so erudite that he can do without a dictionary."   And forums like this have been my dictionary! So, thanks for all the tips, advice, help & especially those TESTS!

A change to the effective F/stop that would affect the DOF means a physical change to the size of the opening created by the shutter blades.  Nowhere in the documentation does it state or even suggest that this happens.   If you were to take a picture, print it out and hold it up to your face close enough that you couldn't see its edges, that represents pre-Metabones or how your smaller-sensor camera sees the scene depicted in the photograph.  Now, hold the photograph out further, far enough so that you can see all the way to the edges or close.  That represents how your smaller-sensor camera sees the scene depicted in the photograph after installing the Metabones adapter.     No change in DOF.  The optical reduction doesn't alter the FOV of the lens it alters how much of it your sensor can see.  This isn't a wide-angle converter that also makes the image brighter.  The effective T-Stop difference is from the compression of the light meant for a large aperture imaging layer into the space of a smaller one.  Light is additive.   In image processing terms, when you scale an image from 2K to 1K the brightness of the image doesn't change because neighboring pixels from the 2K source are averaged to create a new pixel for the 1K result.  Light doesn't work that way.  Resizing would do something similar to what this adapter does if, instead of averaging, you were scoot neighboring pixels from the 2K source inward such that the 1K final still contained all of the original pixels from the 2K but some of them were now stacked on top of the other and their values were now added to each other rather than averaged.     The Metabones adapter doesn't stack the photons of light on top of each other because it's not limited to the spaces available in a fixed grid like an image but they are hitting the imaging surface much closer together now and so they produce an image that's brighter.   Like how a magnifying glass makes the light passing through it brighter when focused.

I think most of the people who complain about people doing tests rather than narrative work is because these complainers are annoyed they aren't shooting anything at all. Often you see the technical driven guys spending more money of equipment (which could be used to create films instead of doing tests) but usually these guys can only afford the gear because they do a day job which pays monthly. usually these jobs are less creative, working amongst uncreative people, meaning they might not have access to a load of friends who are also interested in hooking up and making a film together. The 'creatives' are often failing/struggling artists who struggle to hold down well paid jobs, due to a lack of ability to stick with menial duties before the good, creative and well paid stuff comes along. due to this lack of career building they cant afford the gear, and when they have that crazy cool idea thay want to shoot they dont have the glitzy dslr and set of lenses and audio recording to bring it to reality. Their response is to start researching, get hooked in, join some forums without understanding forum ethics and then question the people who have the gear in an ignorant and jealous way by trying to undermine them.

We are producing slow motion video portraits for a large public artwork and need a recommendation on cameras.  We are shooting closeup faces in a portrait setting and then slowing them down anywhere from 2x to 6x.  I am finding that having 60 frames/sec is massively helpful when using Twixtor/AFX motion blending.    Our current tests were produced using a d800 at 720p60 but I am finding that the video quality is weirdly low, and it looks like an encoding issue.  We also need to deploy this as a photobooth rig and the d800 is a) expensive and B) has shallower DOF than I would like due to FX.   Can anyone recommend a camera that does good 60fps at 720p or higher resolution?  We would ideally like to use HDMI and encode to disk but other workflows are considerable too.   Thanks

Thanks for the tests JCS, good info.

overcranked donte go on my parts eye just a losum cowboy on the trail wid no grits. whisky or girl for cumforts is all damn aint even got a dwalf small mini fella to kick you have to drink sum floride tea and start watchin fox and der bbc. start beleefing in alqueda and bee scared like all der normal uk and american folks. der floride makes you nice and calm less overcranked and makes yer nots tinkin so much. get wid der chemtrail programme ands takes a chill zomby pill but donte go runnin from der forum dats for chicken hawkes stay awhile darlin om gonna be russlin up some beans,grits and coffee reel soon : ) butt while yer waitin how abouts my frend johnny vegas sings us a song to calm us all down sum dis is sum of me best work took me a month to gets the kitchen sealing nice smooth. not to mention paintin out the blood stain evidance from all of johnnies innocent victims. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChyuY_11sZE

Why not rent some and find out? Since you shoot GH2 you can adapt anything to it. They have macro lenses as well.     http://www.borrowlenses.com/

I am totally with the op. This is absolutely the most glaringly offensive lack of a feature on this camera. Is there seriously harm in asking for a simple feature to be added? This is the 3rd overhaul of the camera, still no exposure lock

If you needed to start shooting quality macro footage for a short film, which would you choose...   1. Hoya or Marumi macro lens filter ($50) 2. Extension tube from amazon ($10) 3. Tamron SP 2.5 macro lens ($200) (or something of this quality.. budget is $200 max.)   I know the tamron would be the best choice out those but is it worth trying or using the macro filters or extension tubes? If so, can you recommend a good brand and/or method?   Thanks for the help.

  Anything that adapts to EF mount works. I've tried M42, Contax Zeiss (CY), Nikon, OM, etc.

hi guys   i need an expert eye on that...   what do you think about this lense? i mean could you see problems? those photos are not telling me much.. thanks for any help  

"In no way is the Metabones adapter giving us a poor man’s full frame image here."   Uh oh... just wait for it. :)  You know this is going to be the talk of every indoctrinated 5D fanboy on the planet. "Don't let those speed-booster shooters fool you... they're not shooting on REAL FF cameras!" Anyone want to take bets on when the "real full-frame look" cine-meme will show up? I say 2 months.

There is no ADR, as ADR is usually a process after picture editing is locked. We are editing the film now, and this is a working trailer. It is also, as the article's title clearly states, about a very specific type of anamorphic lens, which I find provides a magically slight distortion to reality. A Frazier (correct spelling) lens allows the foreground and background to be in focus, and is great for wildlife shots. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frazier_lens Anamorphic and Frazier are very different animals. This is also not an article about acting, and having seen all the footage of this film, I find the acting to be very good, very natural and real. I see the written story coming to life through the characters. Other professionals in this business, one with two academy awards, feels the same way. His name will be in the final credits. Something else should be said here. Most filmmakers I know salute any filmmaker who goes through what it takes to get a feature film in the can. Whether it was shot on an Alexa or an iPhone. For anybody else reading this, if you have a passionate dream to tell a story in moving pictures and sound, GO FOR IT!! Know the difference between constructive, well informed, and useful criticism, and destructive, sour criticism, which should be ignored. Brush it off and move on.

Is the iOS version also shutting down the live-video of the Hero3 Black while the camera is recording like the Android version?