Andrew Reid

It depends how far you want to grade the footage.

  Nice. Hopefully will be better than their 14mm F2.8. I loved the 35mm F1.4 but the 14 I didn't take to.

  Unlikely but worth trying. You can of course use the standard MFT SB on it. Still a good choice.

  Shane has some tougher words for the C500 in the dynamic range test.   The Alexa went to 4 stops to the right before you had a video clipped look to the highlights.   Epic didn't do as well.   But the C500 started to go bad at 2 stops. "The thing I noticed about the Epic", says Shane, "is that it still feels filmic with the exposure blowout but the C500 doesn't, it starts to look yellow (with the skin tones)".   Personally I prefer the skin tones on the Epic. Bit magenta but looks more attractive, less yellowish than the C500.  

  It's good that Shane has gone to the effort of actually sharing what he does in the 'actually doing films' community. Now you have to look at the motivation of Nofilmschool for their posts to get into the crux of what I have a problem with. Here, they are taking someone else's content and selling advertising around it. It takes 10 minutes to bang out an article like that. It takes determination, effort and skill to put together something more hands-on as Shane has done. Politically, there's another reason why blogs post uncritical glowing articles about Hollywood DPs, and that's because they want the hits and they want to curry favour with the industry's leading lights.   Now if people on the comments are questioning Shane's test, saying it shows a Canon bias, then let them say it... I have a real problem with censorship. And that has nothing to do with Shane... It has to do with the blogs. So many of them brown nose people with a rabid furore and it reads like a PR piece rather than a constructive and objective article. It's unnecessary and unhealthy. Everyone deserves honest feedback even Hollywood cinematographers.   I don't think Shane is paid to say nice things about Canon but some of his statements could benefit from being backed up with some more detail. My honest opinion on the video above is it's compelling but doesn't make clear what part is down to grading and how much of it is purely down to the sensor as a 'digital emulsion'. Could you bring the Alexa to life with more energy from the ProRes or raw? The video and voice over doesn't go there.   Or does the sensor just not respond as well as the C500 to colour in very low light conditions? That part could be clearer. The rest I enjoyed seeing... Much more telling than a chart test!!   As it is taken at face value, what I got from it was the Alexa has more dynamic range but doesn't look as good in low light as the C500 and doesn't have the same punch or contrast to the colours in the naturally lit city nightscape outside the car. So maybe C500 was the best choice for this particular scene. That's why tests are useful.

Those write speeds are very disappointing for such an expensive card. Slower than my KomputerBay 64GB cards.   Get your act together Sandisk.

Currently full frame stuff is a good investment as it covers all the sensors on the market.   Lenses tend to hold their value very well.   At the moment small cameras like the GM1 are more of a niche but yeah, the general trend is towards smaller cameras, even with full frame as we have seen with the A7R.   To directly answer your question I'd say at the moment and for a good few years yet, full frame lenses are a good investment and they don't have to be bulky. Look at the Speed Booster with Contax Zeiss 50mm F1.4 on the GM1, it isn't too big, about same size as Voigtlander 25mm F0.95.   The Speed Booster is shorter than a standard Contax Yashica adapter (same goes for the other mounts of SB).

Just to be clear, GM1 is separate class of camera to something like the G6. The G6 is designed as a DSLR replacement. The GM1 is a compact replacement.   The size is the main advantage. It makes all sorts of rigging possible or easier and cheaper. Great for multicopters and ariel shoots.   The GM1 has an electronic shutter at full resolution for stills. Important for street photography or gigs where you don't want a constant KERBANG going off in someone's face, especially during a burst mode shot.   In terms of image quality the GM1 is less noisy and has less aliasing than the G6.   And G6 was already one of the best cameras for the price, around $650.   This is $750 with lens. Very reasonable.   But the G6 has advantage of EVF and articulated screen plus 1080/60p.

Raw would need HD-SDI and those would be expensive to do.   And why go to all that effort in putting the BMCC into a tiny pocket form factor... When have it require a chunky external box?   Compressed raw internally to SD cards is a miracle and worth celebrating. In my view it's easier to buy a couple of 64GB cards for $200 and recycle the card via a Macbook Air when it fills up than it is to use an external recorder. This is no problem on a production and even for a one man operator with a backpack taking a break in Starbucks from shooting, it's perfectly easy to do and takes a few minutes via USB 3.0.

The GM1 is a mini GH3 with some rather interesting new technology under the hood (a sensor that does a full pixel 4.5K readout in silent shutter mode) for just $749 (with 12-32mm lens) - but could the unthinkable be true and it actually shoots better video than the GH3? Read the full article here

Blackmagic CEO Grant Petty has revealed he approached camera manufacturers in 2011 with the idea of producing a DSLR-style model with high dynamic range and increased video quality but was turned down. "They don't care about the product. Their only goal is to extract as much from the business as they can. It's incredibly short-termist, and greedy". Read the full article here

They removed it because they can't be seen to endorse anything that isn't arse licking when it comes to the big names in the DSLR community.

  Proof?

  It depends on what you're interested in as a filmmaker. If you want to leave something behind as an artist, make a statement and make a mark as a filmmaker the 5D Mark III with raw is a good way to do it. The image does justice to talent.   If you want to pick up a cheque at the end of the day the C100 will get you to pay day with minimum of fuss.

True the D5300 isn't great ergonomically. Not being able to change the aperture in live view is a pain. Not many dedicated buttons either. ISO for example requires you to program it to a function key and then press the key AND rotate the dial to change. Archaic. I am sure Nikon stills shooters are used to this kind of thing but I just find it a pain.   Watch out for a shootout on EOSHD tomorrow...   GM1, GH3, G6, D5200, Blackmagic Pocket, RX100M2 all in it head to head. It will surprise you.

It has 24p and 25p in full HD not just 50i.   I have my review coming, it's a pretty special camera and you will see why shortly :)

  Quite true and a fact of life I'm afraid!   Find a set of rules you're most comfortable with, is my advice. I'm not so comfortable with the set of rules at play on other sites. I think they're a bit warped.

  Only when it's degrading the standard

Why don't you go into a store, stick a memory card in a D5300 and see if it is any good?   I did it. Took 10 minutes.   It really ain't that hot. Consider the G6, BMPCC, Speed Booster, GM1, RX10, GH2 and last year's D5200 instead. That's my last advice for this thread. Have fun!

I don't read the site so not sure what's going on there… I do however know we are coming to a point where 99% of the internet is recycled material re-posed and re-posted ad infinitum. My RSS feed this weekend read like the contents of a junk mail folder. One black friday deal after the other, with the occasional cut and pasted news article. Not a good sign for the future of the internet. Censorship? Just the tip of the iceberg my friend :)

Interesting, thanks for that. With the new Speed Boosters, maybe by bringing the glass closer to the sensor you improve efficiency. Or maybe not. Image certainly looks very bright to me. Time to get the light meter out :)

I just did a quick explore of low light between the D5200 and new Panasonic GM1.   The GM1 actually is now on par with the D5200 in low light at ISO 1600 and 3200. An improvement on GH3 to say the least!   It's also just as cheap.   It resolves more detail, has a more flexible lens mount and is more feature packed.   The small size is slightly crazy but I highly recommend it. For those undecided on D5300 check it out. With the MFT Speed Booster on this thing you will be getting a D5200 bettering image for sure.

  It won't go, I just did a little exploratory test and got nowhere - the sensor housing blocks the optics and you can't mount it at all. Certainly not something to try forcing. It's a no-go. Same with the other MFT cameras. What the BMD specific boosters have done here is to absolutely make use of ALL the bigger available space around the sensor and mount on those cameras.   The MFT Speed Booster is not superseded, not replaced, not old… It is optimised for the larger 2x crop and 1.86x crop sensors in the GH3 and GH2 and other MFT cameras so if you have those cameras don't think twice about picking one up. The image is beautiful. Especially with Contax Zeiss 50mm F1.4.

  For depth of field just multiply the aperture by the crop factor vs full frame.   So APS-C has a crop factor of 1.5x over photographic full frame.   Therefore a F1.4 aperture X 1.5 crop = F2.1   There's two ways to think about the Speed Booster effect...   You can either multiply the lens aperture and focal length by the Speed Booster factor, say 0.58x for the pocket camera version...   That turns a 50mm F1.2 into a 29mm F0.74.   Then apply the normal Super 16mm sensor crop of roughly 3x on top of that. So in full frame terms you have a 87mm F2.22 - very shallow DOF in other words.   In terms of actual BRIGHTNESS - a F0.74 is an F0.74 regardless of crop factor though.   And the other way to think about the Speed Booster is to apply the 0.58x, 0.64x or 0.71x to the sensor. So 2.39x crop on the BMCC  becomes 1.53x and then multiple your 50mm lens by that.   Forgetting all the maths, all you really need to know is that the aperture brightens up over 1 stop and your field of view changes to become APS-C on the BMCC and 1.76x crop just a bit wider than GH2 on the Pocket.

  Thank you. The video that is subject of this article was 50% shot in raw on the Pocket camera. The quality is good, can hardly tell it apart from 2.5K raw on the BMCC.