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indeed. speed is slightly different (particularly if uniform sensor coverage is important. Wide open an f2.8 medium format 80mm lens will usually be twice as bright in the corners as an 80mm f2.8 135 format lens. the 135 80mm will show around 1 stop of vignette on the edges. the medium format lens will be a lot less - probably not measurable. I imagine the helios 40 will have almost 2 stops of darkening at the edge of a full frame sensor, though I have not used one, its highly likely. this in combinaton with its over stretched optics are the reason it looks so beautiful.

I've been out in Dubai for commercial work, and in my spare time I used the 5dmkIII + raw to shoot a travelogue. Tried to capture some of the lesser-known parts of Dubai and the surrounding region. Enjoy!

Atomos have just sent me some info on their upcoming 4K recorder, primarily for use with the A7S and GH4. Read the full article here

Hey, I randomly came across this on ebay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Xume-72mm-Camera-Lens-Filter-Adapter-Ring-holder-Pro-kit-Kenko-Hoya-B-W-fit-/171066254292?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item27d457e3d4 Sounds like it would be great for faster Diopter changes. Few of my concerns (besides a hundred bucks for magnets) are possible vignetting? I know I get some vignetting when I stack diopters on my isco 36, full frame. Anyone have any experiences with these?

The tools have gotten so good at the low end that it really becomes not a question of equipment, but a question of ability.

hmmm - this camera is suddenly very attractive.

According to SAR ... $1699.99 / £1299 (body only)

Did you look at the 5000iso footage ???! sooo clean ! Looks moiré free, sharp and clean.... Personally I don't care about 4K. 1080p full pixel readout full frame at 50mbps is perfect for me. With an amazing sensor for stills as well... Can't wait for the summer. Disappointed that they did not give a precise date.. gonna be late like august or something, and no price :(.

I am not disappointed in the S-lightest :)   Just picture the full frame 4K image out of the HDMI on this thing... going to look AMAZING.

IP TV seems to suck :rolleyes:

Your source is wrong on the ISO 80.000... price won't be announced. Mark my words ;)

Doesn't look like fungus. More like dust spots or blemishes on the front element.

I second the above question: What vocas lens support is that?

Here is some of my music, this is stuff I have put up that my friends wanted to hear but I have alot of other songs,

Slightly off topic, but hopefully this means there will be a lot of 3rd party accessories for the a7/a7r/a7s! Cages and 15mm rod mounts. And hopefully some hackers are excited about this camera!

Sorry for the multi-images....I am post challenged...

This is a bit of a misnomer. The fast CF and SD cards required for raw video didn't exist 'years ago', which is likely why the DSLRs of yesteryear didn't have it as an option. Even now with the tech we have in 2014, raw recording is still very hit-or-miss and unstable. These cameras were released in '08. Developed with tech at latest from '07. It's not so much that camera companies were 'hiding' raw video... it's just that there was no way they could make it consumer-friendly. The tech did not exist then, in a stable and economical form. But yea, the rest of your stuff is on point.

it's 4k huehuehue

Never said you get paid to promote, or that you get free gear to test and keep, or any kickbacks or favors or any kind, did I? I said none of us actually know what the real motivation of any person running any site that tests and promotes gear. So, unless it's a user telling us about gear they bought for themselves and want to report how the gear is performing for them in real life situations, then we really don't know much about the gear until it is out in the wild. Andrew, you have a way of turning a perfectly reasonable response into something offensive. Are you aware of that? If so, is it intentional? If so, what is it exactly that you gain from it? Anyhow, if I didn't value your reports and tests, I wouldn't bother with frequenting your site. I appreciate the time you take, but I take all "review/promo" site opinions with a healthy grain of salt until I've read data from users who've spent their own cash and are using the gear in their livelihood. Until then, it's very nice to have previews from folks like yourself who're blessed to have early access to all the gear and evidently don't have to keep forking over their own hard earned moo-lah. Cheers, and thanks for the advance on the GH4. It is looking like what I'll eventually end up with after all the actual user data is in and the other competitors have played their hands.

From my week long experience with shooting GH4, dynamic range is at least a match for the 5D Mark III raw.

Andrew, I really have no words to thank you about all the test and the energy you invested on this reviews, with all the info you give us have made my choice easier, but now the ambient became dark again with the rumored Sony launch of the a7s, just when i have been decided to get the GH4 the shadow of Sony appears ;) Great times ahead.

It does change a bit across the range I think, I usually unstretch to 1.5 regardless and tweak the odd shot. If you are keen for specifics you could do the ball test across different focus points.

As a child, Batman, Jurassic Park and Terminator 2 were the first movies that made me want to make movies (even though I didn't know what that really required and meant when I was that young). But the first films that motivated me to make a movie were Scream and Halloween. I was way too young to watch them, but, nevertheless, I did, and they changed me. There was something so visceral about the horror in Scream (the satire was lost on me when I was 10) and Halloween was the first time I became aware of the camera, with that great steadicam cinematography (in 4:3 on VHS, no less. seeing it on DVD in widescreen years later was an even bigger revelation). At age 12, I finally made my first movie (on Hi8): a parody of slasher movies. Of course, in high school, the first movie that made me realize I could be a filmmaker was El Mariachi. My Hi8 movies looked like crap, I thought making real movies was too expensive and impossible, so I had thought about just being a novelist, even though my heart was really in film. With that out of the way, the films that really influenced me artistically... 2003-2004 were huge years for me. My sophomore and junior years in high school. Earlier that year (2003), Silence of the Lambs opened my eyes to the possibility of genre. It was technically a horror movie and a detective film in a drama's clothes. I think this was the first really artful film I saw, where I was more aware of the craft: the direction, writing, acting, cinematography, editing. I was aware of all of those things before, but this was the first film where I could see how they all worked together as a whole. And I realized film could be something beautiful, even with ugly subject matter. Speaking of which... The summer of 2003 was huge. It started with Taxi Driver. That film knocked me out. It didn't have a conventional plot to speak of. It was more episodic. It was crazy. It was gritty. De Niro, whom I had known better for Meet The Parents at that time, was incredible. THAT was acting. His monotone voice-over, his charmingly psychotic smile, his lack of emotion during the graphic shoot-out. And of course, Scorsese. The slow motion, the overhead tracking shot a the end, the heavily processed footage of the streets, from inside of the taxi. It felt surreal. And the script; the things Bickle said in the voice-over really got under my skin. Later that summer, in one weekend, I saw Rushmore, Ghost World and The Graduate. The Graduate I didn't really appreciate until I was older. I liked it, but it didn't fully click at the time. But , Rushmore was sort of a teenage version of The Graduate. I noticed the influence The Graduate had over Rushmore immediately, but I connected more to Rushmore. I was even the same age as Max Fischer when I watched it. Wes Anderson's filmmaker was so striking and bold. The tracking shots, the sharp, deep-focus widescreen, the colors, the wardrobe, song choices, title cards, curtains with the seasons, just...everything. Much like Taxi Driver, it existed in it's own slightly unreal world. Ghost World I watched three times in a row, in one sitting. Like Rushmore and The Graduate, it was very melancholy, but also, in my opinion, then and now, the funniest of the three dramadies I watched that weekend. The dialogue was so real and so sharp. The filmmaking was pretty anonymous, but the storytelling, tone and mood were part of a clear vision. It felt so real, and as a teenage boy trying to navigate the secret world of teenage girls, it felt like a real window. I knew girls like Enid and Rebecca. I was surprised that the film was written and directed by men. I also had a huge crush on Enid. Not Thora Birch, but the character of Enid. Ghost World is still my favorite film of all time. Later that summer, and into the fall, I saw Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, Jackie Brown, and Kill Bill Vol. 1, which had just come out in theaters. Tarantino was practically all I thought about for a year. I read everything I could about him. I read all of his screenplays, and obsessively re-watched everything. I was an addict. I wanted to keep re-experiencing the high of watching Tarantino's films for the first time. Much like Wes Anderson and Martin Scorsese, the filmmaking was mind-blowing. It was bold, brazen, different. The structure and storytelling choices were unlike anything else I had seen. And that dialogue... I ended up writing a ton of Tarantino-inspired scripts for a year. 2004 included the release of three films that came out in theaters at just the right time: Shaun of the Dead, Kill Bill Vol. 2 and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. Of course, the last two were by filmmakers I had just fallen in love with, but Shaun of the Dead came out of left field. I saw it early, in the summer of '04 at comic-con, with Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright doing a Q & A after (Greg Noctero, Robert Rodriguez and Ken Foree were in that audience too). All I knew about the film was that it was a British zombie comedy. I hadn't seen a trailer, or knew much else. I hadn't heard of anyone involved with it. I saw it totally blind, and it was like walking down the street and finding a million dollars in cash in a bag. It was special. It was one of the funniest films I had ever seen, but it also had very real human issues and character drama. And of course, it was well-made and gory as hell. Earlier that year I had become obsessed with Romero's Dawn of the Dead, which had become more accessible because of the re-make (Romero wouldn't be a real influence, just an obsession at the time). After the screening, I was using the restroom and Simon Pegg peed in the urinal next to me. It was the closest I came to God at the time. I told everyone I knew they had to see it immediately. I don't really need to say much more about Kill Bill or Life Aquatic, since I said enough about Wes Anderson and Tarantino already. Later that year I saw two more important films, the first being A Clockwork Orange. I don't know what else to say about it, other than it was like Taxi Driver all over again. It was one of the most extraordinary films. The opening, with the synth score, the long-zoom-out from Malcolm McDowell as Alex, staring into the camera, immediately put me in a trance that I've never awoken from. That halloween I dressed as Alex. Around close to the same time, a kid name Johnny I knew peripherally, but not well, approached me, wide-eyed, asking me if I had ever heard of Eraserhead. I said I had heard the title, and indeed I had seen the iconic poster image of Jack Nance as Henry Spencer, with the hair sticking straight up, back-lit, with a crazy expression on his face and dust in the background. "You've gotta see it, man." Johnny told me. The next day, he presented a VHS tape to me. The cover art was there, though it was clearly a regular VHS box cut up into a slip cover to fit on a clam shell. I don't think the tape even had a label. It was a copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy, with video static at the bottom of the frame that Johnny claimed added to the experience of the film, and indeed it did. That night, I turned off all the lights in my bedroom and watched it alone. It was the first film I had seen that really, truly captured the feel of a nightmare. I thought about the visuals and sound design for several weeks after. I haven't been the same since. Looking back on my life, those were the films that really had the most profound influence on me.

Wow, that looks awesome! great find! Seb: I'm surprised you trust it to hold a tokina and variable ND, it must be strong! It looks like it adds in total about the thickness of an extra tokina, which is quite a bit in terms of additional vignette, I'd say it would take 5mm off your range on isco + asp-c.

Yes me, it's working perfect ! I have also put it on variable ND, so I can put the diopter alone, the ND alone, or the diopter + the ND. It's enough strong to carry all this, even with my heavy achromatic diopters.

You get a more robust lens but you loose a bit of flexibility – because of it`s design (as mentioned before). It becomes a real "fat lady" after the mod. And with the close focus mod done you'll need a FF with a faster gear ratio (2:1 like the Arri Cine FF). And this FF isn't a lightweight at all!! When I got my ISCO back from VD, I decided to mod the mod. A friend of mine – "SFX Lange" based in Hamburg – did the following: - we made it noticeable lighter (the mount is the heavy part of it) - we've added a solid lens support (Vocas) - we attached a torque motor on the lens support (redrock micro remote) The ISCO is held by the lens support and is just "pushed" in front of the lens (not screwed!) Now I can change the taking lens within seconds, without a recalibration of the ISCO is necessary. Have fun!

There is another tool that is being, or will be marketed by a professional colorist. Shian Storm is also, in a more limited way, doing some empirically derived filmstock transformations in his ColorGHear suite. It may not always be FC but there is a lot of "film conversion" going on, even in professional circles. Film and the way it renders tonality and color will haunt digital acquisition for a long time to come. They've yet to build a digital camera that can hold a candle to the best work being done in celluloid even today. Anyway, yeah, people asked for "raw" but people don't ask for the highly imperfect and incomplete log-to-lin setup that's most commonly being used. There is too much effort spent simply trying to manage up an honest and true rendition of what light the camera saw and the relative values present in a scene. Getting to an appropriate linear representation so that you can then grade from a place of awareness and creativity, a place where you can make meaningful decisions that are more than just trying to get it to not look like shit anymore, shouldn't be an ordeal, it should just be. It should be the first thing you see when you look at your footage. Seeing a meaningful representation of what you shot doesn't mean baking anything in or losing anything in the raw data. I got my first taste of that swapping over to ACES on this short I'm doing VFX for that was shot on the Epic. It's shocking how a manufacturer IDT that's universally regarded as "horrible" is still so much better than their own ability to meaningfully render their own native footage to the monitor. Anyway, the type of techniques that make FC possible are what will make mixing multiple cameras from multiple manufacturers on the same film as close to seamless as you will get until hitting their relative limits.

This isn't correct. You're thinking of something like Magic Bullet Looks. Film Convert transforms the measured response of a digital camera to the measured response of several actual film stocks. It's essentially doing a very specific type of transform that you could do in an ACES color pipeline if you had an IDT for a given film stock. The science being used is extremely contemporary and relevant. It's the kind of thing that's going to eventually make all this sloppy, subjective "LUT jockey" business that's so endemic to raw photography an unfortunate little footnote of the past. You could do a conversion and then consider this your "look", the same as filmmakers have for a hundred years or more shooting film and having it processed. In the digital world the result of doing Film Convert is your inter-positive. If a filmmaker then has more money they could time their film to have a different look, instead of having just a "one light" processing. That is the step that comes after Film Convert. FC gives you your IP, now you can give it an artistic grade or not. They have some very basic controls for doing this but of course a dedicated grading tool will be better. The ideal solution is to do your conversion and then grade. Whether that is done is up to the sophistication of the end user, both their technical ability to grade and their ability to make the distinction between the two operations. How it fits into a RAW workflow is another matter. Their standalone tool, presently, I don't view as anything useful for more than a hobbyist that just wants to play around with it. It doesn't even process AVCHD footage with sufficient accuracy or the quality you get by using the plug-in for After Effects and doing your conversion in a 32bit float environment. For RAW you would definitely want to be using the plug-in and not the standalone, letting the host application handle the log-to-lin conversion (of course successful use of Film Convert is dependent on their "IDT" being based on the same linearized data).