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I just got back from 10 days shooting in Los Angeles - all done stealing shots using 2 Panasonic g6s on small custom made shoulder rigs I made up - and amazingly nobody said anything to us, we had a crew of 4 and blended in as tourists!! The G6 is small enough not to attact attention at all..... and we had superb weather too 28 degrees C , its bloody freezing back here in the UK now.

You do have a point actually, because most cinema lenses are used stopped down to T5.6!   With 4K I will be stopping down more often than not because if your focus is off even by a small amount, people will notice with that kind of resolution on screen.   But the T2.0 aperture of the bigger S4s is another option, because the look of a fast aperture is quite different still - it's not all about low light. With the Cooke stuff and Hollywood, price doesn't really come into the equation so much as outright performance. Even the most expensive lenses and camera equipment are small change for the film industry as a whole compared to other costs. The T2.0 aperture is the important bit for them. Don't forget in the days of film (still with us) cinematographers didn't have the sensitivity they do with digital either!

  £1250 per lens :) I was just extremely lucky. They are $8k each new. I'd never pay that much for gear. Never.

Christopher Doyle (In The Mood For Love, Hero), Stefan Ciupek (Slumdog Millionaire) and Franz Lustig (How I Live Now) will be at the Berlinale Film Festival in February with a Canon sponsored workshop for aspiring filmmakers. Read the full article here

40 !! thats insane ......Im gonna start making camera Ice packs (Red users will already have one !!)

For making truly "Cinema-Like" images? I don't think it really matters. Having the skill to make those "Cinema-Like" images does. Once you can utilize that skill effectively, then you can use that wisdom to make smart choices. You can't just walk outside and randomly point a camera with an old lens on it and have the lens create cinema magic. There's just way too much more involved with it than that. That being said, yes, all lenses have different characteristics. Knowing which ones to use in order to support the narrative is the key. I've shot an entire film with a cheap uncoated 50mm lens from the 60's because the flawed visuals it created supported that particular story. or...at least that's how I rationalized it. ;-)

Minolta's are much cheaper in general, because they don't fit on dslr's so they are less popular than the Nikkors (that will fit on nikon and canon dslr's). I have a lot of them, picked them up for peanuts. Advantage of Nikkors is that you can use them in combination with a speed booster on a G6. So if you are thinking about getting a speedbooster Nikon would be a better choice.

There are big differences with 4:2:0 cameras chroma quality too. http://video-dslr.slashcam.de/vdslr.html measures cameras chroma resolution and results (at 30% contrast) indicates big differences: Canon5D3 250 horizontal lines Sony NEX7 260 horizontal lines Nikon D5300 300 horizontal lines Sony RX10 340 horizontal lines GH3 400 horizontal lines (theorethichal limit would be 1920/4 = 480 lines) Unfortunately they have no Sony A7R test I think that due to codec limitations many cameras must throw away chroma resolution to maintain some level of IQ with low bitrate and low codec profile. I have GH3 and my eyes say that it has a very good chroma quality for a 4:2:0 camera. Reds are not aliasing so badly like in other cameras. By the way why is it called 4:2:0? That sounds like there is no vertical chroma resolution at all. What I understand it should be called 4:2:1 (proportions of luma res : horizontal chroma res : vertical chroma res ).

  This is from an earlier look at the camera. In my retail camera, which is a final unit (I bought it from a Sony shop), you can't assign the video record button to C1 or any other button.   It's a ridiculous decision by Sony.   Also I don't see the logic in moving the record button to an awkward position AS WELL AS having the ability to turn it off in the menus. Surely the photo-hardcore guys who hate video so much can just turn the damn button off in the menus and not hassle the rest of us with their out of touch stupid feedback they gave to Sony on the matter.

Loving my A7. The Video really is crap, but it's amazing on stills. Currently rocking a 20mm Nikon f4, Super Tak 35, Konica 40 (damn, is that thing sharp) Minolta 45, Nikon pre-ai 50 1.4, and Nikon AiS 85 F2. Still waiting on my FD adapter. If you shoot stills, this thing is amazing. If you want video, get a Pocket Cam.

Sigma 18-35mm on the GH3 is fine. It only vignettes on the oversized mutli-aspect sensor on the GH2. That's a 1.86x crop. It is right at the limit on the GH3 but holds up well even at 18mm.   Yes I agree on 30p to 24p - it doesn't quite work :)   However I must admit to not hating 30p quite so much as I used to. The reason is not HFR in cinemas, or having watched too much 60p and got used to it, or something! The reason is that 30p suits the stabiliser on the E-M1, it makes handheld work look buttery smooth. On a tripod I still prefer 24p.

Great review, interesting discussion! The Micro Four Thirds system makes the most sense to me as a stills + video shooter. Small, well built bodies, good first-party primes, the ability to adapt nearly any** lens, cool features like IBIS, and a much better implementation of video all the way through the range. I have the option of Panasonic, Olympus, and Blackmagic bodies, and can buy at the top of the price bracket for significantly cheaper than I can Canon or Sony or Nikon. In terms of stills image quality, I think sites like guesstheformat.com are pretty telling - people do little better than chance trying to distinguish between M4/3 and Full Frame (when presented with a FF image and given the choice between FF and M4/3, people only correctly identify it 58% of the time - less for APS-C vs. M4/3). Yes, image quality from a D800 is better in absolute terms than E-M1 image quality, but is it two times the price better? I don't think so. The E-M1 is 90% there - probably closer if you don't make massive prints. I really like what Fuji's doing, but their camera's aren't nearly fully featured enough compared to what you can get out of M4/3 for the same price or less. If the new X-T1 had single shot AF on par with the E-M1, a 36 or 50Mpbs 24/5p codec, and a faster flash sync speed, it'd be a much tougher decision (unless you want IBIS, of course). Fuji has made it pretty clear that they're a stills company through-and-through. Shame. Lovely colors. I'm a street photographer, a casual video shooter, a frequent traveler and a guy who doesn't like to hassle a lot with his gear. For that, for me, M4/3 makes the most sense.

  Stop being a twit!   The legal disclaimer was put up after Jim Jannard tried to sue me / silence me over the negative Scarlet articles.   The inconsistencies - i.e. covering expensive gear like the Amira and Cooke lenses or judging a Sony aspiring filmmaker competition - are inconsistent with what exactly? EOSHD is not all 100% coverage of consumer cameras. I have at least 10% reserved for dreaming!!

  Man, one article on Cooke, one on the Amira. And I'm changing direction completely away from DSLRS!? I have D5300, E-M1, A7R reviews coming in a few days. Also with greatest respect Matt you are someone who has joined the forum quite late (and begun reading EOSHD even later?) so you're not in the greatest position to tell me what direction to take with my filmmaking and the site. Would you turn down high end stuff if you had the chance to buy it for a bargain price?   Back on topic and no more reverse snobbery!!

From the unofficial Cooke owners club at NAB: " We did some very critical tests with Leica Summilux-C lenses, Zeiss Master Primes, and the Cooke 5/i. We put them on digital cameras, looked at how much resolution they had. We looked for color fringing and many things, like distortion, and so on. They all looked very good. We tested with the same lens projector we do for film. The lenses were all very, very close. We looked for breathing. We tested for color fringing, because that’s very critical on digital cameras–they see it. We put them all on our M.T.F. machine. They all had high M.T.F. We looked at what I call fall-off illumination, or shading–in other words, how bright it is in the center, how bright toward the edges. They were all very good. Some were a little bit better in one area, some in other areas. They were so close that it didn’t matter a whole bunch. Then we did a film test. We did this on a stage that was very well lit by a very good DP, Isidore Mankofsky, ASC. We shot a grey scale, a color chart, and then we had a set with a desk and a practical lamp. We were looking for several different things, and one of them was narcissism (double image of hot spots) and other things. We tested all of that, and there was a young lady that was supposed to be our model. Well, she got sick. She didn’t show up, and so there was a young woman there on the set. We asked her if she would be our model, and she agreed to that. She was about 27 years old, and she had no make-up on except what a normal lady would use to go out. You know, a little bit around her eyes, and she did have a little blemish on her face. The film stock used on the test was Kodak 5219. The film was developed and we projected it. It looked better with the Cooke lenses. I was trying to analyze why it looked better with the Cooke lenses. All the lenses were so close, the Leicas, the Master Primes, and the Cooke 5/I’s. Why did she look better? I analyzed it more carefully and what it is, the Leica lenses and the Master Primes have higher contrast, and they showed the blemish. Even though the Cooke lens is just as sharp, it’s not that high contrast. And it almost hid that blemish. It was almost gone. So this “Cooke Look†is a real thing. I wanted to say that. We’ve always known that–at least I always felt that–and so many people know that the Cooke look is good." I found this article interesting. The "look" comes from lower contrast and was not mentioned as noticeable except on the film test models skin portion of the test. Also, For those wondering how the sharpness compares, here is a test by lensrentals comparing still and cine lenses in which the 50mm Cooke was mentioned. www.lensrentals.com/blog/2012/01/the-great-50mm-shootout. Congrats Andrew I'm so jealous!

This combo seems to be the sharpest, even at f2.8. I measured the actual squeeze of my Iscorama and it's 1.424, which works out to 2.53:1