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That´s a mini Varicam for 1000 GBP! That´s a steal! @Tim Sewell I am curious to test some primes with it. So far I have used my S1 with little cheapo zooms. The 35-70mm F4 Canon FD is indeed a little beauty. Mechanically it´s flawed. Lens alignment is shaky once the rubber pads inside get worn out. Here is some footage for location scouting with the kewl Tokina 25-50. Sun was very harsh. It was a beautiful summer day, to say it with other words.:) The mellow contrast of the Tokina gives the S1 image nice smoothnes. Anyway, this camera is fun. Hard to believe what kinda quality we get for around 1500EU if bought used. Grading is a bit too greenish. Was trying to built a greenish Lut I guess.:)

Based on the same 28MP design of the S5KVB2 announced in 2014 and used in NX1 camera, but with completely refreshed logic layer. BSI & Stacked All pixel dual cross-type AF 14+6bit readout 100dB single exposure DR Dual native ISO 40 & 160

Yes. Fringing can sometimes be an issue with some ellipsoidal fixtures. Instruments that use lenses made for slide/film projectors usually exhibit minimal fringing. Use an open-face tungsten or HMI source with a snoot. Add a tube of blackwrap if the snoot is too short. That should eliminate most of your spill, and the open-face filament/arc will give you sharp shadows if the fixture is set to full flood. Both open-face and Fresnel fixtures always give their sharpest shadows on full flood.

No surprises here, but I'd say it's the Blackmagic Micro Cinema Camera. A modular cinema camera under $1000 brand new, uncompressed Cinema DNG RAW at 60p, and a beautiful image. The image doesn't look like that second generation iPhone or camcorder that Canon love to imitate when clipped either.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMb6CR781Kc With Resolve it superscales to 4K beautifully too. You don't actually want 4K, you just got trained by the camera brands that 1080 is bad because they compress the absolute living crap out of their images - no-one is rejecting the Alexa 1080p because it's not 4K! With great quality RAW images you can push and pull them in post and they keep on giving and this is pretty darn close to that... Plus it's the easiest camera to grade that I have ever seen. Great images just appear when you drop a LUT or CST onto them, rather than struggling for hours to get good colours.

Thanks for the hint 😉 beautiful result!

From my personal experience it is amazing at around 28-40mm. Its a little wonky on the super wide end like 20mm or less. 50mm is good though iffy for moving shots, past 50mm starts to get iffy in general. The boost mode IBIS works great for locked down looking shots even at longer focal lengths though.

A little off topic, but a while ago I was playing with making an iOS app that would use the phone’s LiDAR and having the app connect to my BMPCC4K via Bluetooth to control focus. I sold that camera awhile ago and forgot about it, but recently I was playing around with a little Apple Airtag, and that thing, with my iPhone 12 Pro, can seemingly measure distance down to centimeters, if not even smaller. Now Apple hasn’t yet opened the Airtag to developers (if they ever will), but if they do I could see an app that tracks the distance of an Airtag and then sends that info to my S1 for focus, especially since Panasonic does already have an SDK for developers to build apps to control Lumix’s. Something like that could help level the playing field for Panasonic camera’s AF woes. Panasonic just switching over to phase detection could also help 😉

If you do use a cookie, try to move it as far from the light as possible (without it being in frame) and having it be as large as possible. The light is probably sharper at full flood than full spot (if you're using a fresnel lens) and you can use black wrap around the light instead of a flag.... maybe.... I'd just get the projector. 😕

I suspect that even a Bowens mount COB LED is too soft a source for a modifier right in front of it to cut a sharp-edged shadow. Short of using a really big cookie just off frame, I suspect the shadow will always be too soft because it's unfocused. Unless you can back it way up. The projector kits let you focus the shadow so distance is less of an issue. Some of the projection kits have chromatic abberation but that's the only way to approach this without going totally crazy imo. The Joleko type light is also SUPER useful because you can cut out a 4x4 piece of foamcore/bead board, angle it however you want on a c-stand or just tape it to the ceiling, and bounce a light into it, cut the edges using the blades in the projector, and use it as a soft light source (assuming no fog in the room). Of course with thin LED flex lights this isn't quite as unique as it once was. Experiment with making a homemade cookie by cutting holes in an old cardboard box. Forget spill or whatever, just see how big it needs to be and at what distance to make shadows that are sharp enough. Maybe it's possible, not sure.

Yeah, I was able to make it relatively easier on myself to switch from M43 to L-mount in part because the only native M43 lens I have is the kit lens that came with my G85. The lens kit I built for myself was comprised entirely of vintage SLR lenses from the M42 and Minolta MD mounts and were easily adaptable to the L-mount. I'm currently unable to autofocus with the S1 because of that, for obvious reasons, but then I rarely ever used autofocus with the G85 anyway. It really is crazy just how much new life Panasonic breathed into the S1 with Firmware 2.0. I've no doubt that we'll see plenty of more advanced models with even better specs come out in the relatively near future, but practically speaking I could absolutely get away with using the S1 as my main camera without upgrading for a good 3-5 years or so. Perhaps even longer once I pick up a Blackmagic Video Assist 12G recorder to utilize the camera's RAW output capabilities.

I'll go out on a limb and say that the Canon R5 is the most underrated HYBRID camera, especially after seeing how the A7sIII practically took over the Youtube circle jerk crowd in the blink of an eye. The R5 got rightfully panned because of the overheating failure and extremely poor marketing, but take another look at it now. It's a brilliant stills camera with great autofocus, colors and resolution and the shutter sound is subliminal. It's also a 10bit 422 video camera that I for the life of me can't get to overheat when recording 4K standard (which I know is softer which I actually prefer) and the s35 oversampled crop mode is rock solid, it doesn't overheat no matter how hot the ambient temperatures are. Still better colors than Sony, very good rolling shutter performance and a huge amount of glass if you are willing to use adapters. And it feels like a camera, the ergos are perfect.

There..fixed that for you 🙂 Am I selfish to wish they had just dropped MFT and released an S5II instead?

The rear LCD is fucked so be my guest and I'll claim it on the insurance ! Being a purist, not being able to chimp with it doesn't bother me and just adds to the retro experience. If I was a completist, I'd probably send the SD card off to someone and wait a week for them to send it me back before I could look at the images 😉

The reason Panasonic needs reliable auto focus is more for marketing purposes than anything. The market has spoken, and it expects Canon or Sony level auto focus and if you don't deliver it most people won't even give it a chance. For me personally I don't need it, but I recognize it's important if the system is going to stick around.

In my point of view, I don't know why the AF discussion have to be so binary. Never use AF x always use AF. Manual focus with a good focus puller will always be preferred in professional cinema. It is a well trained skill from the professional focus pullers, it is cheaper to pay a focus puller (considering all the other costs involved) that have to reshoot constantly because of an unexpected AF behaviour, and it offers somre focus creative choices that you could not have (or that would be difficult to reproduce) with an AF system. AF is very useful in solo shots, low budget productions, solo vlogging, or when you don't have or can't pay a focus puller. Or when your production don't have very critical focus nailing needs. Both are more or less adequate depending on your budget / needs. Hence Alexas don't have AF; and hence solo / action /vlogger shooters wants good AF. Different situations, different needs. But with hybrid cameras, that generally are used in lower budget scenarios, AF tends to cover more use cases. And if you have good AF, you can still use MF - the reverse, not. That why Panasonic needs a good and reliablish AF system. Arri not.