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Kazuto Yamaki is admirable. He recently agreed to be interviewed on EOSHD, and I hope to bring you that soon. I think we should think more about the corporate vs private business philosophy of camera companies. Sony just released the 14-24mm F2.8 GM for $3000. At a time when a lot of pros have less work due to the pandemic and downturn in the economy, I think this pricing is sheer greed. Meanwhile Sigma have their own 14-24mm F2.8 of similar or even better quality - $1200. And their affordable 16mm, 30mm, 56mm primes for APS-C - all F1.4 and exceptional performance. Sony and Canon will likely want $4000+ for their latest cameras. A reminder that all large publicly listed companies exist purely for the benefit of making as much money as possible for shareholders, and it's also about moving manufacturing to where labour is cheapest - with all the environmental and social impact that brings to the planet too. Sigma are different and we should support that.

I will put $$ that the new Sony A7SIII coming out in the following weeks will have H.266 in it.

Over on DVX User, John Brawley was suggesting that Olympus might be continuing lens manufacture.

Press release here. I've never even tried H.265!

Here you go, the film has a grand total of 8 views, go make it be 9! Forgot that Jackson was there for of the days! He's "Grip" in the credits, but that I feel is totally inaccurate. General lighting (holding a flecky) / camera assistant is more accurate.

I’ve done a decent amount of front/rear group mismatch pairing. What I’ve found is this: 1. you can often find mismatched pairings that function at equivalent quality to their matched arrangement. 2. mismatched pairings are not able to be focused, meaning that they are in focus only at infinity. (This is different from what anamorphic users refer to as “dual focus.” The anamorphic is infinity only just to be clear.) 3. The maximum angle of view is determined by the front element group, and cannot be changed. (Note a key distinction however that the squeeze ratio changes, which DOES change which taking lens focal length will be associated with the unchanging angle of view. This also means that the vertical field of view changes as well.) 4. the source-point flare comes from the rear element group, the secondary mirrored flare comes from the front element group. To take all of this and give a specific example, let’s say I’m trying out pairings with the front element group from my Kowa 16-H. On my Blackmagic PCC4K, lets say my favorite lens to use with it stock is my Canon FD 24mm, which also happens to be the widest lens I can use if my final delivery is going to be a tasty, vignette-free 2.39:1. Let’s move on now to the (imaginary) mismatch pairing. I have an old B&L CinemaScope kicking around, and I pair the rear grouping from this scope with the front grouping from my 16-H, in front of my 24mm, which is set to infinity. The B&L elements are nice and cozy right up against the 24mm’s front, but things look blurry. I move the 16-H front grouping in and out until I get a nice sharp image. Neat! If I focus the 24mm on something closer, say, my C-stand at 5’ from camera, I can’t seem to achieve anything sharp no matter what the distance is between the Kowa and B&L element groups. Oh well... infinity it is! (That’s what variable diopters are for anyway, right?) Ok, so we have our trusty 24mm. We have a Frankenstein of glass from two scopes in front of it, and it’s nice and sharp (at least at infinity,) so what now? Well, let’s shoot a chart, pull some footage into an NLE, and figure out what the squeeze of our new Frankenscope happens to be. A quick stretch of the footage to where the chart looks normal reveals..... 1.75X! Neat! Now, there’s definitely some vignette, but that’s ok, we’re after 2.39:1 delivery. Let’s crop in until the vignette goes away, shall we? The result? vignette free when cropped to 3:1. That’s cool, we could probably go a little wider with the spherical lens. A quick scour through the camera bag unearths a LUMIX 21mm lens. Let’s ditch the 24mm and try the 21mm. Abracadabra, drop some 21mm footage into the timeline, desqueeze and crop out the vignette: 2.39:1. There now exists a 1.75X scope that can go as wide as a 21mm taking lens! That’s a wider taking lens than the Kowa could handle stock! Or is it? A meander through the maths: 21/1.75=12mm lens equivalent horizontal 24/2=12mm lens equivalent horizontal BUT!!! (You may say, and you’re correct) there is no vertical squeeze factor here, so vertically, the 21mm is STILL wider than the 24mm. Yes. You are using a wider focal length lens, but your horizontal field/angle of view remains unchanged. The two scope configurations both are and aren’t equivalent to each other. Oh the joys of anamorphic. This is why anamorphic lenses are said to have two focal lengths (one horizontal and another vertical,) and it’s why we get oval bokeh too! The final kicker is when we add our variable diopter of choice: an SLR Magic Rangefinder. The stock Kowa is now choked to a maximum of 28mm, and the Frankenscope can only do 25mm. It turns out that in practical application, the limit of all wide anamorphic adapter setups is the variable diopter, not the scope. The new Rapido FVD-35 is right at the limits of the very widest anamorphic adapters. What’s more, a bigger diopter setup to squeeze out those last few distorted degrees of angle-of-view would be laughably gigantic. The FVD-35 is 134mm in diameter. That means it already sits only 2cm above a 15mm LWS rod setup, so unless you want to go full 19mm studio rods and use 6.5X6.5 mattebox for filtration, the FVD-35 will do “just fine.” Why, then, would anyone bother to Frankenscope? Well, because lenses are so much more than the numbers. Even by the numbers, you might prefer a novel squeeze ratio. You might want beautiful mixed gold and teal flares. You might want the thick, lush flares from an old scope with some added sharpness and contrast from one more modern. You might want a unique look, that’s all your own, completely custom. Besides that, the experimentation is really fun! A quick look at remotely reasonable anamorphic offerings reveals: Xelmus has a 40mm and Atlas has a 32mm, both of which only cover a standard 35mm open gate. The FVD-35 is right in this ballpark in any case. Unless you find an exceptionally rare 22mm LOMO, or rent some top shelf glass, you’re not going to go wider... never mind that depth of field becomes so deep when this wide that the differences between spherical and anamorphic are difficult for most people to differentiate. As someone who hacked scopes apart to try and go wider, here’s my conclusion: do what works for you, but you’re gonna need a big variable diopter, because that’s the bottleneck. After that, find your wide scope of choice, Frankensteined or stock, it’s just preference. I had some awesome results from very humbly priced pairings. I bought a half dozen or so scopes off eBay, and did my level best to spend $100 or less on each. A great trick is taking big/long adapters meant for 35mm projection, and pairing their front element groups with rears from shorter 16mm projection scopes. As a general rule, this seems to significantly shorten the scope’s length, and reduces the squeeze factor. There are a plethora of theoretical 1.8X, 1.75X, 1.5X, and 1.33X custom scopes out there for anyone with the willpower and funding to go on a mix and match bonanza.

Weissman score 2.89, highest ever recorded. Amazing.

Panasonic in Japan have agreed to be interviewed for the blog. I'll ask some questions from the EOSHD Forum. Anything GH5 / GH5S / GH6 even. S1, S1H related and more Fire away!

Just finished a first pass on footage from a trip late 2018. Over 18 days I shot 3024 clips totalling 5h37m, but somehow after I've gone and pulled my selects into a timeline I for a minute there I thought I still had 1984 clips totalling 2h35m! Using the Source Tape view in The Cut page of Resolve it looks like I was half way through when I marked an in point but didn't mark an out point and then did an Append to End of Timeline and so I appended every clip from my in point to the end of my footage to my timeline. Oops! After fixing that little surprise, I now have 839 clips totalling 41m - much better!! I was thinking how many of the really cool shots I was going to have to cut and getting quite sad about it! I must say that I am really enjoying the new Cut page in Resolve. Especially the Source Tape view (despite the above snafu) as you can just use the J-K-L keys across all of your footage without having to manually go to the next clip. Combined with I and O and then P to append the range to the timeline I can edit with one hand and have a drink in the other 🙂

How does the situation with Olympus impact Panasonic's commitment to M43? Is there a reason why they've stuck with DFD for auto focus in video, even as competitors have moved away from it? Do they plan to continue to have two branches of the GH series moving ahead?

I'm ready!!! All I need now is a rack mount monitor I can calibrate and I'm good to go! Now, where do I plug my mouse in?

The shortcomings of m43 are the reason it gets less praise. You’re stuck with a couple mediocre sensors and shitty AF if you go Panasonic or mediocre video if you go Olympus, if that’s fine with you great, but they don’t work for me. Photos look no better than a RX100, too much noise and lacking in DR. Every time I see the 43rumors weekly roundup half the images look like phone shots. Those don’t work for what I get paid to do. I shoot FF for stills, to get the reach with with m43 I’d have to carry two kits. So yes this is a big deal. You get the best of both worlds, superior IQ and the reach, the difference between 40+mp and 20 is significant. And now it comes with crushing video specs that makes cine cams well over $10k look like a joke. If m43 works for you enjoy, It just doesn’t work for me. Cheers. chris

This does not do Sony any favours in the good will department. $2999 + tax £2899 in the UK. https://www.sony.co.uk/electronics/camera-lenses/sel1224gm Makes me wonder if they will price the "new flagship" A7S II successor at something equally as daft? $6000 maybe? I don't think there are going to be many people willing to pony up this much cash whilst they have little or no work due to corona rules, etc.

For the S1H it would be nice to ask if they could add the ability to record open gate 5952x3968 (full sensor area / 3:2 aspect ratio) in Prores Raw up to 24 fps on the Ninja V. The data rate at 24 fps would be less than shooting 5888x3312 30 fps 16:9 Prores Raw on the Ninja V, so it should be feasible? The ability to film with the entire full frame sensor area on this camera is unique and it's my favourite feature - I prefer it to the cropped 16:9 look. It's just a shame that the h.265 codec is awful to edit with (on WIndows at least) It's actually already possible to record regular Prores HQ with the full 3:2 sensor area on the Ninja V, the resolution is limited to approx 3240x2160 though, which is ok - but Prores Raw at full resolution would be better!

When are ND filters coming to their smaller camera bodies, this seems like an essential but is strangely being overlooked by all camera manufacturers. Variable NDs are a pain, period

That just goes to show that time can be bent in many different ways. ( : But just to clear it up: I didn't try to underrate his achievements in any way. Like I said - Ennio is and always will be the guru of film score composers in my mind.

After plenty of testing and even more after filming half of a shortfilm with it last week, S1 is here to stay. Here is a sample of lighing test and giving my beautiful 35 to 70mm zoom a good testrun wide open. Awesome lens and fantastic image quality on the S1. Filmed in 2.5 to 3.5 at 800iso, all lit with tungsten and two tungsten flavour leds plus one kinoflo. Filmed in both, full width and apsc mode.

Fair points, but I think the only time that you'll see rolling shutter effects is with vehicles and things like tennis balls in flight and so on. I've used the fp for a few toddler events and kittens and whatnot and haven't seen any rolling shutter, so I doubt you'd see it in shots of a fiddler. The banding issue can be mitigated by using shutter speeds that are multiples of 60 (1/30, 1/60, 1/125 etc) in the States or multiples of 50 in Europe. Gets tricky when you are working with mixed lighting or stage lighting, so it would be wise to test out different settings on site to see how it fares.

Don't worry, The Washington Post are on the case.

Agreed. Love Sigma, both what they make and sell as well as their philosophy. Really hoping they can get those APS-C lenses onto Fuji X. Also would love if they continue with F2 (in the vein of the 45mm f2.8, but faster) primes for the L-Mount and other mirrorless mounts. Love their quality and price, but most of their primes and zooms are insanely large and heavy. And more cameras too, of course.

Its fair to say the electronic shutter doesn't always fair brilliantly. This train was only pulling away from the platform rather than speeding through it and the distortion is obviously, erm, "somewhat" apparent. The bigger concern you might have in your application though is with LED stage lighting as the banding can be pretty horrendous as this quick snap of a sign in a lift shows. Suffice to say, there were no yellow and green stripes on the printed page !

Many many big budget productions are recording directly to ProRes

Canon is obviously going after enthusiasts/amateurs with these new lenses, smaller, lighter and cheaper outside of the 100-500. The first lenses were fast primes and the zoom trinity with the 28-70 halo zoom, the only budget lens was the 35 macro. People complained about the lack of a pro level body or budget lenses, now with the R5/R6 they have that base covered and a few cheaper primes. I'm sure their research shows a demand, otherwise why develop these lenses at all? IMO they will sell well, rumored price is about $1000 for each. There are plenty of people that want reach and aren't serious enough to pay $12,000 for a single lens. Lots of amateur birders and wildlife shooters, parents shooting kids sports and so on. Those long lenses combined with TC's the punch-in capability of 8k will turn the R5 into a telescope. I don't shoot wildlife enough to justify that kind of purchase, but I see a ton of birds, dolphins, gators and turtles while out shooting landscapes that a 70-200 with TC can't reach. I looked at renting in South Africa, but I didn't want to do a round trip to return it as I went from SA to Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Zambia. Plus a 600mm would have doubled my pack size. So I find the small 600/800 lenses appealing, I bet lots will too. As always YMMV. Chris

Really sad to hear this.. He was a living legend. Still being able to produce mesmerizing tunes after having worked almost 50 years in the industry.. Themes from "Cinema Paradiso" and "La migliore offerta" are my all-time favorites. At least his legacy will live on.

Here's some test footage I shot last year with the Tiffen BPM 1/4. As you can see, the look varies pretty widely depending on whether there's a strong light source in frame or not. Some shots are probably a bit too drastic for corporate work. For my taste, I like to see the obvious effect. Otherwise why bother? 😄

There must be at least something of a demand for long-yet-compact primes, seeing how you can still buy mirror lenses - and I'm guessing that people who use said lenses would be willing to pay a bit extra to gain autofocus and lose the infamously horrible bokeh that goes hand-in-hand with them.

I certainly don't think that an 800mm lens of any sort, even a diminutive size as this one appears to be is, the sort of thing you carry in your bag on the off chance. If you need that sort of reach for your subject matter then you'll have spent some time preparing and setting up for shooting it whether its bird watching, wildlife or sport so you really do have to mean it. Logically, you'd say that on that basis you'd be prepared to take the hit weight/size wise of a faster lens to make sure that effort wouldn't be undermined but that doesn't mean there won't be a big market for it. Who knows, there might even be an entirely new market for it as people have never really had a pocketable 800mm lens before so it might usher in a new era of extreme long range street photography.

H266 offers some nice advantages, and has broad industry support with major companies backing it. We want see H266 used by many immediately overnight, or even within the next couple of years, but it likely will happen. I already watch quite a decent chunk of what I download in H265 Does H266 use middle out compression? https://youtu.be/uFYy3oEnzVg

If you fit into this market, chances are you're better off buying something like the Nikon P950, which has a built in 24–2000 mm F2.8–6.5 (35mm equiv). Just don't look into things like the 1/2inch sensor...

Looks legit!

A great composer. Rest in peace maestro

If you have some time and don't mind fiddling around a bit, you could buy some second hand and then sell the ones you don't like. That way you get to test them. I found the primary difference between having one physically and simulating in post was that physical ones flare light-sources out of frame, and also flare more/less depending on how bright the light is, but of course you can't adjust them - it does what it does and you're stuck with it. In post it's the opposite. The other path is to simulate stuff in post and do a bunch of tests and see if that gives you what you need.

Sigma FP caught my attention. It is more compact and has a better form factor than BMPCC 4K. You can add a small lens and put the camera on something like Feyu Tech G6 Max and have a very lightweight gimbal setup. And can take much better stills. It is tempting as a travel cinema camera. As bjohn stated in another thread will wait and see what Sony and Canon will offer, but Sigma FP suddenly climbed on the top of my cinema camera wish list. 🙂 Found a very interesting article by Timur Civan. He proposes a workflow in Davinci Resolve which can extract 1-2 stops more dynamic range from Ciname DNG and claims Sigma FP image quality is on par with Panasonic S1H. And those extra stops are in the highlights. https://timurcivan.com/2020/06/an-examination-of-sigma-fp-raw-workflow-and-how-to-get-the-most-from-the-fp/?fbclid=IwAR3ga9HcmrnVdSr1R9V4Vb18_A5_BUsjeLYIPV33MF-2lic1sdgIDoKrb1U After all both cameras share the same Sony sensor. Basis of Timur’s method is the trick Juan Melara shows in one of his videos: Insider Knowledge - A better way to grade Ursa Mini CinemaDNGs We had a discussion about it in another thread with Kye. It looks my understanding of this video is quite correct. Basic idea is to choose a larger color space and gamma when debayering RAW footage and specifically Cinema DNG in Resolve (camera settings part). For the rest Kye was absolutely right. Once in Resolve any color space transformations have no impact on dynamic range. Having in mind that with SlimRaw you can compress Cinema DNG 3:1 (lossless compression) and even more 5:1, 8:1 with lossy compression (similar to BRAW), all you need is just 1,2 more SSDs in the bag. Blackmagic Video Assist recorders would be useful in a more professional environment. For travel SSDs would be more than enough. Will play with some Sigma FP footage from the net. Would be grateful if somebody knows where can download more RAW footage from Sigma FP.

That's easy! Use a sonar! Just don't come complaining about the resolution... And in this situation you can just hire a lip reader. For microphones, I can think of a better solution than lavs/shotguns mics.

Minimising the cost of media storage and distribution (bandwidth cost) is what has always driven the development of data compression. It is the reason that broadcast TV originally used interlaced image scanning (it halves the transmission bandwidth compared to using 'progressive' frames at the same picture update rate).

A great loss, prolly the greatest music film composer ever. wished I could have seen him live once.

Interesting that Sony was one of the partners. Will it be in phones first or an A7#?

All I want is internal N-log in 10-bit. That's it. If Nikon would just give me that I would be happy, I don't even need 4K 60p I just need an internal log profile or for them to fix their external video delay problem.

The Morricone Duel - The Most Dangerous Concert Ever - Live - The Danish National Symphony Orchestra and Sarah Hicks

Do you mean 10K as in a sensor 10,000 pixels wide? I'm not surprised by 8K video but that's crazy! That would make it, what, 75MP?? Or go cheap and use FF lenses.. I use an FD 70-210/4 with 2xTC on MFT to shoot my kids sports games. Even the GH5 IBIS struggles with that - 840mm equivalent. Or here's the same optics on the Micro: I haven't used this setup yet, but when the sun starts to come around where I can see it hit the horizon again, I might return to my sunset project and record some RAW video. 1209mm equivalent!! At that focal length even the solid limestone wall I use as a tripod can't protect the image from people walking nearby. The GH5 in action.

Which begs the question why is canon now releasing small maximum aperture super telephotos? Doesn’t the market demand that new RF 800mm be a f4 or f5.6 to get that bokeh and FF lowlight ability? Suddenly f11 is “fine”, lowlight performance will be “good enough”. I’m Just tired of this format double standard double speak bullshit. Including the fabulous “ability to hand hold a 600mm+ lens (OMG!) and get the shot without a tripod 🤯...shit MFT has been doing for years and was maligned almost maliciously for it? Because of a “smallish crop sensor”. Yet, the format seemingly had the right features to make it an excellent tool for the job...sounds like tunnel vision thinking to me. Glad to see R6 has the R5 chunky body. Better chance for video performance features. Might be the camera to watch for Canon video shooters. My biggest problem with Canon is the expensive RF glass. $2500 for R6 and $2300 to put a 15-35 f/2.8 on it... Panasonic has the same problem with L-Mount.

The last one I know https://www.eoshd.com/comments/profile/42487-julien416/

What are the odds that Oly sells to JIP in order for JIP to unload expensive assets and employees. Oly can't do this legally under Japanese law. Then, after restructuring, OLY buys back the new company which is more nimble, streamlined, and able to exist in the black? .001%. Wishful thinking?

When you shoot prores externally on Z6 the quality of the footage is remarkable. I don't think that you can get anything better image wise for under 10k.

What is getting ridiculous? There have been so many great firmware updates for the X-T3 over the past two years. At some point you have to expect the old cameras to stop getting new features.

Stunning shot glass wizard.

In my opinion the camera industry could learn a lot from the open source community. Having so many exclusive patents and licenses really hurts the entire industry. Every single company would benefit from an open source compressed RAW codec. I think it is also what keeps us from better integration of the external solutions as well. We are never going to progress from a HDMI cables, because as soon as an external recorder connects more directly with a camera body, it probably counts as internal recording and thus violates the RED patent. It stops more modular designs. I would love to know what ideas and products RED's patent has killed off and whether this actually makes RED money in the long term. I don't think it does. Fair play to Mr Nattress. His work deserves long-term, rich reward. But come on. It's time to push forward together as one industry.

MFT is a great format indeed. When I mean dismiss any of them, I meant to ignore either of both actually. You can surely skip one of those if you have the other one, of course : ) But this camera series is a dream come true, my fav acquisition system ever designed, produced and delivered to my book : -) Mainly shot on P6K, here's a trailer of a feature film co-produced by me currently @ post production:

I mentioned this in my other thread, but in short the GH4/5 are known for HDMI delay, however I get way more delay into Ninja V than with other monitors. And until we get SDI on mirrorless bodies HDMI is the boss the short delay I saw on the Z6 setup the other day would work great for my use-case, where the GH5+Ninja V is unusable for anything than static shots really.

I kind of doubt it is a camera or a Ninja V problem. It is more of a HDMI problem. The Z6 is probably using a newer version of HDMI. There is a reason Pro stuff uses SDI connections, even Fiber for really long runs, not counting a more secure connection.