Andrew Reid

Great to see the Aaton Penelope get some use rather than the usual boring choices.

The USB port is under the battery door on the bottom of the camera. Usual mini-USB to full sized USB cable required.

I import each clip, save a grade as a preset and apply it in the Adobe Camera Raw window.   In After Effects I drag the clips to the render queue. That's your batch process.   Then I have a preset for ProRes 4444 which is applied by default in the project to all the clips in the render queue.   Then I go and have a cup of tea :)

  Correct, compared to 8 million consumers we are small.   But Canon could do a Blackmagic and grab a big profitable market under the $6k C100 if they wanted to with DSLRs. Too risky? No incentive to do it? Weird.

Unlikely to be that smooth on your system. Minimum I've been able to get to work well has been GTX 560 Ti and 3x striped RAID 0 HDD array.   You cannot edit raw off just one drive unless it is an SSD.

Adobe have been pretty good at updates since CC actually, and Cinema DNG is a bonus. It doesn't seem like it has been a huge priority but I am surprised it is there at all. If they continue to improve support and functionality like they should do, it will end up very well.   Until then, check out Resolve 10 beta 3. The debayer for DNG in there is supposed to have been greatly improved since version 9.   http://www.blackmagicdesign.com/support/detail?sid=3948&pid=4446&leg=false&os=mac

A great line from 1001NoisyCameras today:   ...as Engadget points out above, Nikon was not as bad as the Canon operating profit outlook, revised downwards, saying that sales of high end cameras (in this context they mean DSLRs and iLCs) will be down year-over-year in unit volume for the first time since 2003. A drop from 8.2 million to 8 million, but it's the trend that is more bothersome than a mere 200,000 DSLRs/iLCs.   Grumpy Photographer Opines: you know, Mr. Canon, if your last three Digital Rebel DSLRs were not nearly identical, and if your first mirrorless camera was a bit less half-assed than a 85-lb supermodel on a celery and distilled water diet, maybe more people would have bought more of your cameras.   Source: http://www.1001noisycameras.com/2013/10/halloween-financial-horrors-canon-nikon-sony-taiwan.html   When will Canon and Nikon stop blaming the economy for their sales decline?   Do they realise that it's the PRODUCTS that are to blame?   Incredibly arrogent to say the least, not to mention dangerous too.

  No. They need to put the ACR controls in there to make it truly useful.   We need to change that raw metadata within Premiere.   Until now it will rely on third party plugins or grading tools designed for non-raw codecs.   It seems like a really half-hearted first effort to me, but great they have made a start.

Adobe have the best debayer for raw around. I still convert my 5D Mark III and Blackmagic Cinema Camera raw files from DNG to an editable format in Adobe After Effects because the end result looks better than DaVinci Resolve. Well as of today Cinema DNG raw video is an editable format, directly in Premiere - dramatically speeding up the workflow for video shot with Magic Lantern on Canon DSLRs and the Blackmagic cameras. [url=http://www.eoshd.com/content/11441/raw-goes-mainstream-adobe-premiere-cc-native-cinema-dng-support-tried-tested]Read the full article here[/url]

GH3 is an amazing bargain for $799. The G6 is in the same league for image quality but it's great to have the high quality body and weather sealing. The HDMI out for recording is no better than internal codec but for monitoring works very well.   Did you see this comparison video in terms of the image? There's not a whole bunch of difference.   https://vimeo.com/70855765

D5200 - better than G6 in low light. Better stills. Larger sensor.   G6 - Better all round video features, 1080/60p useful for slow-mo, has electronic viewfinder you can use for video, more fine details in video than the D5200 manages   Do you need AF? I recommend manual focus for video but if you need AF, G6 will do it best for video.   Regardless of the body choice, Nikon AI lenses on eBay are a great choice as they work on almost anything...Canon, Panasonic, Nikon, you name it! The 50mm F1.4 is a good buy and not expensive. The E-series Nikon lenses are extremely sharp for the money. 100mm F2.8 especially.

I've seen the Canon 1D C go for under £5000 on eBay at the moment.   An absolutely terrible depreciation on the used market from the launch price of double that.   It's for that reason I'm unlikely to ever invest more than £5000 in a camera... That and the fact they become obsolete after a year.   The Sony F3 for example - was £12,000... Now £4000 used! It's perfectly good... 10bit codec, lovely low light, FS100 Super35mm sensor, HD-SDI, XLR, ND, you name it.

And yet it has no 720/120fps and 5 axis stabiliser like the lower end Olympus compact, HS50 http://***URL removed***/news/2013/01/08/Olympus-Stylus-Sh-50-iHS-24x-compact-superzoom-with-5-axis-image-stabilization     You've gotta wonder why!

  Moire is an interference pattern, which happens when you take out pixels and move unrelated pixels next to each other in the 1080p after the pixel binning from 36MP or 24MP down to 2MP.

  Those files are interlaced 60i according to my system. VLC has haircombed playback but fine in Premiere.

Used my FS100 again the other day for first time in ages. It was actually very refreshing to have a light camera body, very long battery life, mirrorless lens mount and tiny file sizes after all this Blackmagic and raw shooting.   However I still believe the image quality of raw is a league ahead. The test scene above doesn't really challenge the camera. Take it outside and shoot something with a wide dynamic range, like some landscape in a shadow against a bright skyline - you will notice what happens for sure.

Thanks prism. Appropriate name :)   The aim of this was to test out a concept on whatever I found on the street that day really. It's already fired some ideas off of how it can be used in a planned shoot. I'm planning two music videos for the Berlin band Bunny Suit at the moment so maybe it will turn up again. That's the great thing about testing out different equipment, it can actually generate ideas in itself.   Got the filter thread adapter for X100S so I can use it on that - video is a little better on that at 1080/30p but in 1080/60p moire and aliasing actually get worse. First camera I know that does that between frame rates.

Got to love Luke's response here.     Luke Neumann is a top guy and big supporter of my anamorphic efforts... I highly recommend you check out his YouTube channel and watch the anamorphic video which is the subject of the NFS post.   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oar3rXa8fXI

  It's understandable. Most people want something they can quantify, take away and do. The creative posts always sink because you can't steal someone's creativity!   Keep shooting guys! It will find an audience, just not in the camera geek community.

  One way around the playback issue (and yeah - that is a pain) is to record simultaneous proxies in ProRes via HDMI to an Atomos or similar and use those to gimp at the footage.   Magic Lantern does do playback, but it's still B/W and low FPS at present time as far as I know. Haven't tested playback on my latest install yet. Recording is pretty bullet proof now though. Card warm up helps. And camera seems to boot quicker too.

There's a lot you're missing, yes.   The whole image is different to a normal lens.   The flare is the tip of the iceberg... And actually, no you can't do it in post. It will look shit.   The aspect ratio is not the main thing either. The way it is achieved is far superior to cropping. You get a wider lens horizontally. With a normal lens, you need to get further away from your actor's head, to allow for the crop of the top and bottom. By coming further out, you lose the intimacy and the depth compression of the shot changes.   By having a lens that is wider horizontally, you also get more leeway to track a moving body sideways. If you imagine a close up of a face filling the screen in a 4:3 box from top to bottom, you'd have no room at the edges... no safety margin in your pan when the person moves. With anamorphic your pans are more graceful and considered, and you are not 'chasing' the moving actor around - yet still have a close up from top to bottom. You see what I mean?   Then there's the bokeh. We're not just talking oval light points. The whole out of focus parts have a different look. Something much more sublime and cinematic, less obvious. Foreground objects and background objects, anything which isn't directly in focus, you can tell there's anamorphic magic at play there.   The resolution gain is very real too.   If you take a 1920 x 1080 image and crop it, you end up with something like 1920 x 720.   Effectively 720p vertically. Not good.   With an anamorphic you maintain 1080p, and can stretch or upscale the horizontal pixel count to 2.5K.   And an anamorphic lens is the only way to make use of 1280p on the 5D Mark III with raw video without the dopy 3:2 aspect ratio making it look shit.   There's a reason top flight productions still spend $$$ renting anamorphic lenses and a reason the Arri Alexa Studio (with 4:3 mode) exists. That should tell you something about the advantages of real anamorphic shoots.   Django Unchained - also anamorphic.   As for the "everyone's screens are 16:9" argument... so what? For me the wider aspect ratio has nothing to do with historic cinema screen standards or current TV standards. Cinema is wider, because it's more artistic and more immersive and better looking that way. That's really the crux of the argument. Anamorphic is just BETTER.

Android is like a PC or Linux, and I switched to OSX and an Apple computer precisely because I was no longer into tweaking stuff and having full control over the OS. I just wanted to get on and edit video.

  Maybe in future DSLRs will be back with new technology - after going obsolete? Maybe one day, something will make them relevant again. Right now, I feel we're moving into a new era of camera design.   I think the Sony RX1 is pocketable full frame, in terms of jacket, though not so much pants.

http://vimeo.com/77825876 The Sony RX1 has amazing stills but awful video! I began thinking how could I use this otherwise great little camera for video? The answer is to rough up the image beyond comprehension, with trick filters. Here's how I did it. Read the full article here

  Dictation or quality control? Have you seen the quality of the App Store vs your average Android one?   I am hardly not having free reign when it comes to how I use my iPhone or what apps are available to put on it. What's missing exactly, due to it being a closed system?