Andrew Reid

The clue is in the term 'LOW light'. You need to test CMOS sensors in situations of under exposure and dim lighting. A well exposed area of the image is much cleaner at, say ISO 12,800, than a shadow area. If the whole frame is well exposed with no shadows, and under strong studio lights, the results aren't accurate.   You can see with the GH2... Set it to ISO 3200 and operate it in day light. Clean as a whistle.

What works and what doesn't. Here it is...   http://www.eoshd.com/blackmagic-cinema-camera-lens-compatibility-list   Feel free to add / edit suggestions below.

The ISO test is insane, but you have to wonder if the lighting was turned down of if the NDs, aperture or shutter was changed to compensate for the ISO increases. Because an ISO test under strong studio lights is the height of bunk.

GH2 is certainly better in low light. F0.95 vs F2.8 for starters!

  Thanks for posting, I am hearing you out but reserve the right to disagree :) That I disagree doesn't mean anything outside of normal debate. No hard feelings (etc.)     I am all for the communal experience....     With the right people.     I absolutely love that. It is how cinema should be and sadly how it mostly isn't today.     The industry is so inflated and spends so much on films that sadly, yes the hyper-commercial realities and need for ever greater profits and marketing spends mean that we need more crowd pleasing bullshit.   However I constantly believe that the industry underestimates people. I want entertainment, sometimes I want it to be simply that. Fun. I don't always want to have to think about what I've seen, and not every film is going to be a masterpiece. But where has the personality and enjoyment gone from these kinds of films? It is all so po-faced at the moment. Even the Bond films are an example of that now. Too serious.   Everything is either too dumb and offensive, or too clever for its own good. Polarised, in other words.     This is truly a shame.     You're right it is a business, a failing one. They've got it all wrong.

No matter what the author or filmmaker says, this story is open to interpretation and therefore is allegory. In the end it is not up to the writer how people interpret their story, not up to the artist how people see their painting, not up to the filmmaker what hidden meanings the audience might read into their film.

I recently picked up the Hero 3 Black Edition. It's a great overall point-of-view camera not just a favourite of sports shooters. The size of a matchbox and it does 2.7K and 4K video all at a pretty high bitrate of around 45Mbit. Since a couple of days ago (Dec 14th) it has a new firmware update and iPhone app which gives you smooth wireless 24fps monitoring on the iPhone so I thought I'd give it a try.

I think you're right Burnet, it is wrong to blame the animators and VFX guys when the overall direction and vision is seriously lacking in creativity.

Caleb there's cinematic gold in everything you describe, instead all of that was handled in a hack like way, giving a roughshod treatment and replaced with 3 hours of waffle and CGI. I've lost faith in Jackson as a good filmmaker. The Lord Of The Rings was obviously some kind of fluke.

Yeah I'm not a big fan of motion capture. Again realism is no good, where is the creative leeway? Suspension of disbelief? I don't want to watch a man in a leotard prance about a virtual environment.

We live in a new world order driven by unthinking godless consumerism, where idiots consume massive amounts and vast industries produce shlock for them.   The idiot industries are incredibly powerful and our future cultural direction will mostly be defined by idiocy, mediocrity and stupidity on a grand scale.   If you look at social changes around the world, the big growth industries are related to serving idiots.

So it is a new processor with a software technique to get smoother colour from 8 bit.   It isn't 10 bit at all.   At a time when Panasonic's pro A/V division should be releasing a 4K cinema camera with global shutter that does AVC Ultra and raw, they come along and do this?? Unacceptable stuff really.

Above: Peter Jackson in the camera department of "The Hobbit" Peter Jackson chose to take a controversial step away from the cinema look and shoot The Hobbit at 48p HFR. I've now seen it in glorious 48 frames per second and that isn't the biggest problem. Jackson is shooting The Hobbit like an epic but the material this time is not of epic proportions, and the action sequences are typical popcorn schlock. The Lord Of The Rings was an allegory tale with the horrors of Word War II echoing throughout, an epic heartfelt piece of art with gravitas (and a huge leap in CGI technology at the time the film was shot). The Hobbit is simply 6 chapters of a thin children's book stretched to 3 hours.

The lens is likely changing aperture as you go through the zoom range. Try not to zoom during a shot.

Cheers Shian. Yeah does look like an extremely wide anamorphic in the perfume advert but I liked the distortion, gives it a less flat more unnerving feel. Very happy with the DR on the BMCC, I spend more time in Resolve now than I do on editing the final piece in Premiere!

Yes but there's hardly any difference between the firmware I had and the final one.

  It holds onto the shadows really well too, which sadly Vimeo doesn't.

http://vimeo.com/55559016 If I were stuck on a desert island with only one lens, I'd choose the $20 Helios 44M-2 and anamorphic adapter. OK that is technically two lenses but I'd fire all my other lenses at a brick wall at 200mph if it meant keeping hold of the Isco CentaVision 2x anamorphic.  

I've booked my seats as far back as possible to minimise the stress on my eyes. There's even a break half way through at the screening I'm going to. This is common in Germany but not in England. The Germans are very sensitive and cannot suffer Hobbits for 3 hours solid and neither will I have to, thankfully.   Full report tomorrow!

The whole point of HFR is to see it in the cinema, in 3D.   We know how it looks on the web. Like 60p or 60i.

Very observant Pixelheist. No I don't shoot skateboarding videos for a living! The focus of that day was not really on making Dogtown and Z-boys. Those few hours at the skateboard were organised as a test session of the pre-production GH3 with a feedback session afterwards. I think Simon has done a good job to edit together various shots from around 10 different people in that video. This isn't what he usually does, he is a filmmaker and here's an example of his main work - [url="http://www.humansproject.com"]http://www.humansproject.com[/url]

[url="http://vimeo.com/53642599"]http://vimeo.com/53642599[/url] Last month I was invited by Panasonic to shoot a documentary for a skatepark in Hamburg, as an opportunity to test out the GH3 and offer some feedback on the camera. Here, thanks to Simon Sticker of [url="http://flowmedia.co.uk"]Flow Media[/url], a filmmaker given the unenviable task of editing together the footage, is the finished piece! How does the GH3 compare to it's main rival in the Canon camp for video, the 5D Mark III? Have a look at the next video for some clues.  

Interesting to hear the costume department's thoughts in that video. A lot of creative people on the film, pushing their hardest - and yet still the leap necessary in the costumes and sets wasn't enough to bridge the gap to 48fps 4K in 3D.

Love the style of the Japanese film Tony.   The problem today is extremely simple.   In the film industry there are too many technicians and businessmen and not enough artists.

There seems to be a huge failure in the technology industry to appreciate beauty. Give me the fine grain in a raw file over noise reduction in a JPEG any day. Another example is excess digital processing on TVs. We all know what the dreaded 200hz smoothing mode looks like. These engineers think they are being clever with their crusade against motion blur, grain, noise and softness. They won't stop until everything looks plastic and shit. Well I am voting with my feet. I am only going to buy the cameras which offer me minimal electric tricks and maximum organic image quality, and clinical modern lenses can remain on the shelves as far as I'm concerned.