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There seems to be various pissing matches concerning specs of this camera and that. At the end of the day, does it produce an image you like and how useable it is? I'm in prep for a movie I start in a few weeks. Intended for theatrical release we need IQ that'll hold up to the big screen. So we tested F55 vs Dragon vs Alexa. The tests were precise and extensive: ISO, over / under exposure, all with people and Macbeth Color Charts. Because of the tight schedule, I wanted the smaller cameras (f55 and Dragon) to be as good or better than the Arri. So we graded and projected the results at a full on commercial grade suite with a 15' screen. The producer and director immediately felt the Arri was a hands down the better image. They couldn't quantify it. Being a tech, for me and the colorist, it all came down to flesh tones and color grade across the entire exposure range. When we wrestled with the F55 to get a rich honest flesh tone, the color chart was completely off (read: extra time in post keying and windowing that no one wants to pay for). The Epic came close, having quietest noise at all ISO's, but it too had some flesh tone issues as well as color aberrations in clipped areas. Worth noting, we shot the Alexa at 444 Pro Rez, not Arri Raw. How does it retain its amazing colors? Trading pixels for color space, instead of spreading your butter too thin. Why do I bring this up? Because much of the conversations here obsess about pixel count, DR and other specs but few mention how well it grades the human face and how the grade effects your back ground colors. When I compare cameras, it's the first thing I look at (and what audience's pay the most attention to). The F55 despite it's stellar specs is dead to me as a feature film camera. We don't make movies for techs. So I'm holding my judgement on the GH4 until I see some footage, not of rocks, bridges and buildings at night, cars, aggressive music video LUT's but just attempts to shoot faces, graded as naturally as can be. This is what attracted me to the BMC line up. I felt the colors were honest, requiring little work out of the box. I believe this is much of the success of the C300/500 line (see Hurlbut tests) despite being 8 bit and clippy on the high end. The F55 held highlights 6 stops over key. Insane DR. But specs do not a great image make. We also tested Scheider Xenars vs Cooke S4's vs Super Speeds. The sharpest of the bunch, the Schneiders were the F55 of lenses. Soulless paperweights.

I am in talks with some professional musicians and film scorers here in Berlin and have discovered some real talent... The average quality of their work far exceeds the current music licensing libraries and it is more original, more interesting.   I am thinking therefore some kind of music licensing service might be useful to offer on EOSHD especially with the Vimeo copyright problem filmmakers are facing. I don't want to see people sued for copyright infringement when they are just trying to express themselves and their art.   Some of the pros I know here are doing really high end audio - we're talking Hans Zimmer & feature film standard. However these are professionals and we need to pay them. It is simply not going to wash using a track for free that took them 6 months of recording time in studios that charge $400 per day.   I'm wondering what a fair and acceptable rate would be for licensing? I want it to start low to be accessible to artists but scale up to commercial work in the right way. Typical prices at the Music Bed range from a minimum of $50 for non-profit to $399 for commercial work and for larger scale commercial work custom quotes are required.   EOSHD music licensing would be different.   For personal work or zero budget short films on Vimeo / YouTube (non-commercial) $19 - 1 track $50 - 5 tracks $99 - 10 tracks   For commercial work - small clients (<10 employees) and non-profit organisations $50 - 1 track $99 - 5 tracks $199 - 10 tracks   For commercial work - large clients (>10 employees) and advertisements $199 - 1 track $399 - 5 tracks Custom quote - 10 tracks   For features, documentaries and short films with a crew $199 - 1 track $499 - 5 tracks Custom quote - 10 tracks   Of course before you buy you can play all tracks in full on EOSHD to see if they are what you need.   I'd like some feedback on this first before I decide to go ahead with it or not as the amount of work involved here is very significant.   In particular what do you need from such a service? What projects do you need music for... And what do you think of the pricing?   Cheers!

Excellent article. I occupied myself intensively with the correlations of resolution, image size, perceived sharpness and - to introduce the Holy-Grail-term that combines all those parameters - glory, both professionally and personally virtually all my life. There was an ancient german textbook on cinematography, considered The Bible at german filmschools, but I always found it to be unbearably dogmatic (it recommended, for instance, never to use sDoF and always to use 3-point-lighting). But it had a good, an indeed very good chapter on framing, on composing an image, using the french term cadrage. Good framing, according to the book, always results in an image that has great *pithiness*. This was illustrated by putting grids over great, well-known paintings, thereby retracing the way the artists guided the viewer's attention from there to there, creating either harmony or dynamic (or, for that matter, a tension between harmony and disharmony). Furthermore, there was a debate on how detail contributed to pithiness - or on the contrary, confused it. And there was a crucial distinction between texture detail and motif detail. Texture detail will always need sufficient resolution (relative to the image's size) to depict the pattern (grass, skin, fabrics), but it has no postive effect on pithiness (but may interfere with it). Motif detail is not so much about resolution, it is, interestingly, about *time*. Because to take in important motif detail within a film frame, you need time. Take this painting from Pieter Brueghel the Elder (The Procession to Calvary, 1564): (EDIT: Resolution is about size. You can't recognize all the interlocking scenes, because the resolution is 800px) Polish filmmaker Lech Majewski made a feature-lengh film of all the little actions put into this painting (which clearly is meant to be watched for quite a while), The Mill & The Cross: Every single of the awesome GH4 demos we saw so far either have no pithiness of the image (users are tempted to 'show off' meaningless High-Res and shoot the naked chaos) or they are resolution-independant. One could as well say, higher resolutions don't add any information to the image, they just allow to blow it up more. But then again, as the article says, we saw the latest blockbusters, including Godzilla, in meagre 2k (856 x 2046 pixels), and nobody complained.

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The Canon C100 (and Sony FS700) 24Mbit/s H.264 codecs are on par with the GH4. It's not clear if the 50Mbit/s GH4 1080p can provide better quality vs. the 24Mbit/s codecs, however the image quality won't be as good as the other two cameras can produce higher quality at 1080p than the GH4 (GH4 needs to shoot 4K and downscale in post to match and possibly exceed those cameras (but won't be by much: the C100 is near the Nyquist limit for 1080p, the FS700 just a bit less). In my tests to far, it looks like the 24Mbit/s FS700 codec is doing a better job with color (and certainly dynamic range (14 stops for FS700 vs. 10-11.x for GH4)) than the 100Mbit/s GH4 4K (which provides more luma-edge resolution). The Canon DSLRs are limited by low resolution images coming into the compressor (5D3), and aliasing (most of the other Canon DSLRs). Coupled with low CPU/ASIC power to perform high quality compression with H.264 and not-as-sophisticated-noise-reduction (as with the GH4), the final result from Canon DSLRs is comparatively low compared to cameras with better pre-compression frames and more powerful+modern compression and NR. 14-bit 11.x DR 5D3 RAW slays all these camera for final image quality, especially skin tones, at the cost of huge disk space and lots of extra work. If Canon were to release a new camera with modern CPU+ASICs and C100 level H.264 or better, they'd easily be competitive again. Apparently Sony is going to give it a go with the A7S (only issue noted so far is RS, which probably won't be any worse than the 5D3).

Your steadicam frightened the Chihuahua! Very nice footage. Some of the shots (particularly at the beginning) are tastefully soft. Did you accomplish that in-camera or while grading?

This is bullshit. We need a shrink to analyze all those continuity-peepers. They didn't get the first thing of what cinema is about. Every great action scene has to cut out the joints of a sequence in order to boost the speed and to make the audience a complice by actively filling the gaps. Wait: There are multiple car chases from multiple views. Haven't we got the goddam right to stay oriented? Shouldn't we know exactly about directions, positions and frigging road maps? Everything should be clearly followable (as for the participants in this chase, they know everything, they see everything, they foresee it). Quote from Wikipedia on 'continuity': There are such unwanted, annoying continuity errors, the new Carrie is full of them, where someone raises his hands, cut, akimbo. And they can destroy the magic. But, Mr. Emerson, Sir, you chose the wrong example. Nolan clearly is a master of 'prestige', he knows what he is doing and why. Go see a doctor, have your anal fixation fixed.

This was my first time with the Pocket cam & it was probably too soon to use it, having only had it a couple of weeks. This is an extended sequence from a doc i'm making about the band, so there are shots in there that won't be in the final cut - just thought it was a shame to loose some of them & others i'll be glad to see the back of. NB. The original venue for the shoot was an old dance studio, which had lots of mirrors & tons of light - my heart sunk when they changed venue the morning of the shoot...

Honestly I think none of the recent 4k cameras can hold a candle to the image of the BMPCC and the BMCC.

Hey everyone, I got my GH4 the first week of May here in the UK and so far I've been blown away by the image. I came from a 5D MKIII and I can't say that I feel like I'm missing much at the moment. Although I did shoot ML RAW on the 5D, I can't say I miss the workflow and the occasional camera crash... its so good to be shooting 4K without worrying that its going to crap out during a take. I think I will add a Speedbooster and Sigma 18-35mm next! Anyway, here is my first few days out with the GH4 around some famous London landmarks. Hope you are enjoying your GH4's!

there are some good articles over at no film school and especially this one at Redshark http://www.redsharknews.com/post/item/1710-how-to-make-hd-look-like-4k I love my BMPCC and I can't imagine moving away from it anytime soon. Like you I moved from 550D (euro name) and have never regretted the decision

Thanks for the review Andrew, great read! Really excited to see what June 3rd is all about! An EF Speedbooster with electronic connection would be amazing. I've had my GH4 for about a week now using a focal reducer that does the job, but aperture control and IS would be nice. Here's my first test, shot the day after I got the camera and could put a lens on it with the focal reducer I got off of Ebay. Tried out the VFR mode and I must say I'm really impressed. My expectations were a lot lower after reading people's opinions and watching their tests. So excited to see what this camera is capable off

First off, I'd either remove the feet or tie them up. I'd say what you show in the video is pretty normal. The reason it keeps swinging is because you have it well balanced (like a gyroscope). If you want it to stop naturally faster you can speed-up the drop time, but there isn't any need to do that really. You just need to do what you do in the video - stop it with your hand. But grab it gently, just below the gimbal between your thumb and forefinger. And keep them there, barely touching it - that's how you keep it steady and "aim" it. Just very delicately encourage the position and movement you want with your fingers. Don't worry, I had the same reaction when I first got it. It takes quite a bit of time to learn how to balance and fly, but I can balance it easily in 5 min now. Flying it just takes a lot of practice. Check out Nitsan Simantov's YouTube channel (also an EOSHD member btw). He has a few MonoCam videos (below), but he does good tutorials on flying other Glidecam type stabilisers and they all work the same. He knows his stuff. The most useful thing I can tell you is don't expect to use it all the time. It's only appropriate for certain shots (mainly because you can't control the camera or lens while flying it). I'm very pleased with mine though ...

Can I get a can opener on there?

Especially since he doesn't light, generally speaking. Being able to see where he can use available light to artistic effect is some kung fu he's really strong in.

There's always the risk of feeling buyer's remorse with technology but, realistically, your film won't be any better or worse off no matter the decision you make. 4K isn't something most folks should be concerned about. It's no guarantee of a better looking film if it was projected in a theater and if it's not being projected in a theater it's pretty much a waste of money and resources and effort that could be used elsewhere. Most theatrical films are still finished 2K (regardless of origination) unless a director has the juice to force production to pony up for a 4K finish. You would think that for $100+ million dollar blockbusters this would just be a given, since they're already spending a mint but that isn't the case. It's still quite rare. Not as rare as even a year ago but it's not standard practice to finish 4K. Making your own feature, either putting up your own money or getting some from investors, you should save yourself the headache. Spend the money that might be needed for extra storage or an upgrade to your editorial on something like catering, being able to bump your key talent's per diem a bit or the wrap party (or wrap gifts...I didn't understand the importance of these my first indie). And make sure you even really need to upgrade your camera, considering it's an asset you already own. $1500 goes a long way on an independent feature. I admit I never thought much about the T2i but that was before seeing Kendy's stuff... ...I'm a GH2 guy and know it's technically a better camera but operator talent (along with the quality of the content) can render technical jibber jabber and megabits rather meaningless.