Caleb Genheimer

Hey, @Illya Friedman! You gotta hit up the LA rental houses and get one of them to buy one of your tuner S-kits. I was in LA last semester, and I advised (I still stand by this advice, it made the film) our director to use PL mount SuperSpeeds. So our DP rented the 18 and 50mm, and what he thought was an S-kit from a rental house where I was interning. I stopped the presses on the supposed "S-kit" when I discovered it was being sub rented and was actually an AF100 kit. Long story short, after hours of phone calls, nobody in town has the S-kit AFAIK. Thank God that I rented the adaptor for my GH2 just for the heck of it, (Who wouldn't with two unused SuperSpeeds), and that I was smart enough to look up M4/3 and E-mount flange distances. With a little gaff tape to block light and a lot of careful setup, we got the AF100 kit in front of the FS100 (I think think in the end what had happened was the similar names confused the rental agent over the phone).

I say wait and see on the BMC, or even wait till the 3rd generation. The important thing about the BMC is not necessarily the cam itself, but what it is hopefully going to push the whole camera industry to start doing . . . move to the next level (RAW). I hope it is an amazing camera, I really do. But it is a first product, remember that. I suspect it might have its fair share of shortcomings. RED did when those first started, and look where they are now. Wait, trust me.

Yeah, a lot of those guys have their heads lodged fairly far up somewhere or other. I completely believe the guy about it not being well received in Hollywood. Not everyone but a lot of people there (I was only there for a semester, mind you) had some pretty serious BS spewing out their mouths on many things. Many don't pixel peep. It goes something like "well my friend (so-and-so) worked on (big name project) and he (only uses/hates/made love to) the (C300/Alexa/RED), so I prefer (to not listen to anything you say about codecs because I don't know anything about them)". Pretty hard to convince some of these d-bags to even unstop their ears for a GH2 discussion. I own a GH2. I know what it can do, and they're placing it in third exactly where I would have expected it to land in a fair test. The FS100 is very good too (shot our short film on one . . . with 18 and 50mm SuperSpeeds. Looked incredible.) The F65 at least on paper quite frankly looks to be in a completely different league from anything else in existence, and for the most part, I trust Sony's paper, they make good stuff that does what they say it can. Truth is, any of these cameras can look good if you know how to tailor to it. The big differences are in noise/compression, resolution and color. Unless a camera's DR is terrible, you should be able to light for its needs. The thing with the GH2 is, it womps most stuff besides the big boys on the resolution/noise/compression front thanks to the hack. I really am interested to hear specific reasons why they think it has the edge on RED, though.

I have a 37mm MIR, but its f2.8. The more I shoot, the more I realize that I don't even want to bother with any lens slower than f1.8, or anything much longer than 50mm. I'm sure this is just the crop sensor limitations that are bothering me. Really, a 35mm 0.95 from Voigtlander would cure all, but that's going to require some patience and a chunk of change that i don't have  :)

Hi, all! Looking for suggestions on a good 35mm lens for use with GH2 and Kowa 8Z. Looking for fast. f2 or faster. Looking for hard stops, no focus by wire mumbo jumbo. The more aperture blades, the better . . . I like my bokeh round (albeit stretched). I was thinking maybe Nikon ai or ais? The color rendition of these I like a lot.

Andrew, one anamorphic film that is really growing on me and is now on my short list of all-time favorites is Hunt for Red October.

I for one am holding judgement until after I see the completed film in theaters. I suspect this could be a case of them showing stuff they're not done touching up.

This keeps the MFT fire burning VERY bright. Canon and others have a lot of catching up to do. If the GH3 and the next AF-whatever are anything as good as the GH2 (and why would they not be?) . . . MFT will be leading the pack.

I agree also, give them some time. If it works on other cameras, how hard can it be to get it working in those two? What they have done is very tricky to do. Give e'm props and some slack.

I would assume that these lenses are in mm according to a 35mm camera. I have purchased a MIR 37mm, and when it arrives, I will certainly let you know.

I think soon enough, we will start seeing some really good stuff from the "DSLR" crowd. It is getting to the point where the world will be saturated with great gear. It soon will be easy to get a set of good cameras together, and make a film. Those of us that are truly passionate about filmmaking I'm sure will start to do some high caliber stuff once the dust settles. I for one am still in school, so I'm learning a lot of storytelling and technical stuff. I also see this as a time to collect a set of tools and learn how to use them, so when I'm done with school, I can take a crack at  my own film.

For GH2? I use two of the 16GB Sandisks. [url=http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/90/sandisk-extreme-sdhc-cards/p1]http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/90/sandisk-extreme-sdhc-cards/p1[/url] They are some of the only cards that work with the high bitrate GOP1 patches (which are the best patches IMO).

At that length (quite short), there is no reason not to use the best. Venture on to the Personal-View forum, and check out the latest LOW GOP thread, or the patch vault thread. User Driftwood has various flavors of GOP1 (i.e. AVC INTRA) patches that are simply the best. You will need Sandisk Extreme Pro class 10 cards IIRC, but it is 100% worth it. Other than that, user Cbrandin has excellent long-GOP patches (which should work with a variety of cards). Not as good IMO, but still very solid patches which significantly improve upon unhooked image quality.

I have been unable to get 5DtoRGB working correctly. While it is not free, it is cheap, I use: ClipWrap (quite speedy at rewrapping .mts files in a .mov wrapper, AND excellent for converting to various ProRes flavors). 5DtoRGB seems to be generally suggested for Adobe suite users, as it converts to DNXD or whatever its called.

LOVE your patches! They make the GH2 a surefire lifetime member of my arsenal.

This is some of the best news in YEARS. If I had to pick ONE lens that I absolutely wanted a manufacturer to make, it would have been an all new anamorphic. If I had to pick ONE company to make it and do it right, it would've been ZEISS. I hope these lenses confirm the large interest in anamorphics among the DSLR crowd, because if there's one thing that confirmed interest seems to do fairly quickly, it seems to create lots of new interest-satiating products. A healthy plethora of new-generation anamorphics would be amazing, especially with the GH cameras' 2x crop making "wide" a bit difficult to pull off at times. GOP1 on the GH2 already has buckets of tastiness that I'm absolutely satisfied with, but I can tell that the right lenses would make this tiny camera unbeatable for what I'm after. while Zeiss can be a tad on the clinical side of things, I think the very nature of anamorphic lenses will provide the user with ample means of combating their surgical aesthetic. I have no doubt that, should the Zeiss sharpness be what you want from these lenses, they will deliver. But any anamorphic, if provoked (especially with aggressive light sources), WILL show organic character. If I had to make one prediction, I'd say Zeiss will probably offer them with "flare" and "Zeiss look" coatings (if not right away, further down the road).

Holy Sweet Mother of All Things Glorious! Too bad they're only rentable, sounds like . . . but still . . . They'll be on the budget for any films that I plan to do, that's for sure! And "compact zooms" oh, savory goodness. I hope  there's something from WIDE (16/17mm) to out past GH2 "normal" (25mm) . . . if there is, and it is under f2.8, I'll buy it, however much it costs. Zeiss seems to be pretty committed to nog going stagnant