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I have one pre-ordered from a place that Aaron Green recommended. I'm most excited by the global shutter option. There is something about the way it renders motion that makes a subtle difference. And of course, I look forward to shooting raw and prores without the need for an outboard recorder/monitor. I've been running around with a GH4 and Odyssey 7Q+ and it can be a bit unwieldy when I'm on my own. I have assembled everything I need to shoot with it collecting in a box. some purchased, most I already had -- cage, cards, cables, 502 monitor, speedbooster, ND, follow focus, tokina 11-16, sigma 18-35 + 50mm, and Rich at Dog Schidt Optiks is crafting a Trump 58 set with the 38 and 88 attachments for me which i can't wait to pair with the bmmcc. Hopefully it ships this month. I also picked up this fantastic monopod by Sirui. bought it for the Micro but have been using it with my GH4 in the meantime and I love it.

BMPCC - definitively better than D5300 (I've done a low light side by side and the Pocket trounced the Nikon). A speed booster and fast lens helps too of course. Also if you shoot RAW you can lift the shadows a few ISO and clean up very dark footage. It all depends if your friend wants an easy life or not though ...

Are we talking about "normal" concerts where normal means that the stage is lighted? Because if it is, i would say the LX100 is a good go, here are some screencaps (4k -> 1080p, fully zoomed f2.8) - at least for me. And if you are lucky, you will find a used one for less than 500 euros, nice stealthy package.

I don't wish to start some kind of argument but from my tests the D5500 has shown to be far noisier at high iso's than my Panasonic GX7 and moreso, the LX100. And Matt's comparison video of last year also proved the D5300 as being inferior to the GH4 and BMPCC for noise. The a6000 is the only non-fullframe camera I have tried that has bested my GX7.

800€ for the body?? If 800€ is for everything, you could probably do well with a Panasonic LX100. It's not A7s, but open at f1.7 it's not bad at all!

Film, Alexa, Red... They can all look thin after numerous compressions. The A7Sii is just extremely thin all around, from start to finish. I really wanted to like it but it's not a great camera at 8 bit via S Log 2/3. It's not a softness or resolution issue. It's a brittle codec.

If you're looking for a good manual GH4 wide, I'd look at the SLR Magic 12mm. I've had mine for about a month, and so far I'm very, very pleased with it.

Having owned both the D5300 and GH4 for an equal amount of time (overlapping briefly before I sold the D5300), I'm certain that the GH4 is not superior to the D5300. In 4K I would say it's about equal all things considered. The GH4 really lives up to its reputation as an awful low light performer. In 4K at 1600 the noise makes detail look like 720p, and colour goes out of the window. The D5300 I was a little happier taking to 1600 but compression artefacts are much worse and the noise is ugly, so I'd call it a draw personally. True the BMPCC only goes up to 1600, but even in ProRes HQ you can lift by about one stop footage that has been unavoidably exposed far to the right and get pretty decent results. The codec means that neat video works wonders too. The other thing I don't see talked about much is the importance of dynamic range for a lot of low light situations. I'm going to be shooting a light festival on Thursday night and when I first took the job on, I was really panicking about the cameras I have and was seriously considering renting a C100 or A7S. But after tests I'm actually glad I have a BMPCC. Because if there are lights in the shot (as there very often are in low light situations), good dynamic range, strong codec and highlight rolloff is vital. With the GH4, such scenes are split into crushed areas and/or blown areas, whereas the Pocket can reveal detail in the shadows (yes it's noisy but the grain is fine and detail is in there) and highlights of a night scene. Also if you know how to extract it you can get bold colours from low light scenes with the BMPCC. This. This is what I've been thinking all along and it relates to what I said above. So yeah the D5300/5500 or alternatively a Panny G7. If you watch The Camera Store's video review of the G7, they show plain as day that it's noticeably superior to the GH4 in low light (making it definitely equal to the D5300 IMO). 4K means your friend can both crop in if lens options are limited, and apply noise reduction if necessary. My lens suggestion would be a Chinese (Turbo or whatever) speed booster and the Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 Mark I (the non-VC version). Though autofocus is obviously off the table with that. The Leica 25mm f/1.4 (which I got for about $300 new on eBay) could be a good choice considering the crop of 4K and the ability to zoom in post. That would give autofocus too. Go to HD for a "normal" 50mm equiv. field of view. In fact the more I think about it the better I think G7 + Leica 25mm 1.4 would work.

Micro studio is shipping now, so I think it is fairly close

Perhaps I should point out the very obvious fact that "concerts, theatre, ballet etc..." all have stage lighting, to varying degrees obviously, but its still there & sometimes it can be very powerful. I've found that I'm stopping down the lens or turning down the ISO more often than not at concerts etc... So it does beg the question of how much of a low light performer do you really need?

wow. that little setup will be killer with the 0.54x sb! pretty much an ikonoskop with the advantage of a speed booster! I'm hoping the global shutter mode doesnt affect iso sensitivity too much. but even if it's one stop, you'll be running an effective 1250base iso:) I'd better get the damn trump24/2 attachment sorted asap!

I suggest distinguishing more between the gamma profile and the color gamut which can be choosen seperately in the PP-settings of Sony A7S / A7RII / A7SII. My personal recommendation is to use the "Movie" color setting together with cine gamma 2 oder cine gamma 4. Red is not purple anymore and green isn't dominating anymore. Even though S-Gamma may preserve some more of the sensor's dynamic range, in a 8 bit corset you get banding too quickly after stretching in post processing. When recording to memory card inside the camera, it is even more compressed (using only values between 16 and 235). Grading from the HDMI output (full using of the values from 0-255 and 4:2:2 subsampling e.g. by recording with Atomos Shogun) may help a little bit.

not worth the huge size and the distortion is horrible on it.

It is a shame they have not done a GoPro style wifi video feed to a mobile app... I'm still trying to work out if it can do raw 60fps.. Data rate would be 130MB/s, so should be ok with the new extreme pro SDs

I agree with you but these damn hot pixels of BMPCC in high ISOs are a pain to remove...

A7S is a stunner in low light, but AF is really poor for stills compared with the 5D Mark III at least, which is my reference for "good" AF. I wouldn't push the 5D Mark II past 800 ISO for motion unless I was okay with things getting splotchy or 3200 on the Mark III. A7S I would push to 20,000 without worry. It's nuts. If you can tolerate dodgy AF a used A7S will really blow anything away. Better low light than Alexa, Red (well, so anything is better for low light than Red), C300, F5, etc. and not by a small margin.

I have created a new set of LUTs for Panasonic cameras. Having spent the last year and a half reviewing footage from my camera (the GX7) and various others, I have become quite familiar with its colour characteristics. In general I do find them very pleasing but in some respects they are quite flawed. And I wish to have pleasing colours without resorting to film emulation. My new LUTs do the following: Fixes the shift of reds to orangeGives greens and blues a subtly deeper and more satisfying colour.Stops the abrupt shifts of orange to yellow (which is generally what causes the poor skin tone rendition)Stops yellow from becoming overpowering.Allows film emulation LUTs to be applied without certain colours going mad The set includes two types of LUTs. One is called “Pleasing” and it gives a Canon-like rendition. The other is called “Neutralising” and gives a RAW photo look (ie. very neutral). Within each type, there are several alternatives. “A” is the main one to use, whilst “B” and “C” are offshoots with slight differences. Each LUT is actually quite subtle in how it changes the image, but its the subtle differences that can change how natural an image looks. The LUTs will also make it easier to apply film emulation LUTs without certain hues going out of control (eg. yellows becoming nuclear). Download now: Inazumas_Panny_LUTs A note on camera settings: Having done a lot of testing of camera profiles, I do believe Standard is the best. Some people recommend Natural but it shifts a lot of colours towards orange, which looks good for grass but is a bit unnatural. It also makes people look orange. Contrast at -5 is good but saturation at -5 is a bad idea if you plan to increase saturation in post anyway. This is because when you increase saturation in post of the 8bit footage, you will get loads of colour noise in the footage. I also have iDynamic on Low and highlights at -5. I use preset whitebalances with the adjustment dot set to M5 (5 points below the centre). I don’t have a GH4 so I can’t say how well it will work for CineD footage. Some images: Without LUT: With LUT: Without LUT: With LUT: Without LUT: With LUT: Original post here

Tugela... If someone's test (that has cost you nothing) is not to your very specific way... Go rent the cameras and do your own. It's pretty simple.

Save yourself the time/hassle & get a good 35mm or even a 28mm. Mir-24M or N (M=M42, N=Nikon Mount) - I've had v.good results with the bigger focus through Isco lens (Widescreen 2000mc) & this lens. Or go Nikon or something similar.

I've opted for becoming a human stabilizer, so I'm currently enrolled in ninja training and I take salsa class.

I already do that sometimes. For stills. There are many fun ways to make images with chemicals from a drugstore.

Canon is selling tons of overpriced glass and outdated sensors, every single manufacturer would love to be in canons shoes. They even have thousand of users on internet forums that are convinced that a magenta cast coming from channel scaling is something positive. A professional canon setup costs the same or more than a professional medium format setup, and it only performs better in sports, for the rest the performance is an order of magnitude worse, but still canon is a lot more successful.