cantsin

Well, I used the same technique in the past with the A7s: If you want to make video in this style, you need two things: (a) a tripod (since camera stability becomes much more an issue with low frame rates) (b) a camera with an electronic shutter (since a mechanic shutter will die after about 100,000 clicks - which would be only 69 minutes of video).

Yes, this is highly competent work with the camera and certainly more than good enough for the client. But still, if you watch it with a critical eye, you see that the video lacks/smears true detail while edges are jagged by artificial in-camera sharpening. (For example, hair is either blurred or, in close-ups, oversharpened.) Harshly blown-out highlights are an issue in the tent - and could have been avoided with more contemporary cameras shooting Log. In addition, a lot of work seems to have been done in post noise-filtering the low-light shots and adding artificial film grain to mask the resulting lack of detail. The GH2 is still a steal and an incredible video camera for the little money it can be found second-hand. (This year, two of my friends bought it on my recommendation as a documentary camera.) It can also make a lot of sense for productions like the one above where spending your budget on, let's say, four second-hand GH2s instead of one more expensive camera means that you will have better coverage of the event (and, in the end, a better edit). Still, you can also see that the makers needed to go through much more work with the GH2 than would have been necessary with a more contemporary camera (with better DR, better low light capabilities, better true detail resolution through 4K downscaled to 2K and less sharpening artefacts). EDIT: I also do not see any "special GH2 mojo" in the above video, but just a video with pleasing colors whose overall look is quite similar to what one could also have shot, for example, with a Canon C100. - Illustrating this with two screenshots where the limitations of the GH2 become over-obvious.

Here's a heretic voice: The GH1 and GH2 looked stellar in their age and price category, and the particular look of the GH2 was perfect for an experimental/philosophical SciFi film like "Upstream Color". But if you look at Musgo again (with its more classical naturalistic cinema look), in full screen on a FullHD flatscreen paying attention to image quality, then the GH2 actually doesn't look that great anymore in 2017: One can clearly see how, even the ungraded parts of the film, the GH2's colors have a bias towards green (which increases sharpness perception since the human eye can see green better) and is weak in the blues. You also see that edges are artificially sharpened (which you can't fully dial out) and that true detail (for example in the leaves) is missing. Dynamic range and highlight roll-off isn't great either by contemporary standards; a lot of blown-out parts in the film's image seem to be hidden in post by tinting the highlights. (EDIT: Blown-out highlights/dynamic range limitations are also an issue in Andrew's black-and-video in the post above. You can embrace them as a visual style, but with the GH1/2, it's a style which you can't choose.) Textures such as skin are smeared by the codec and/or noise reduction, noise looks electronic because the codec isn't strong enough to preserve the sensor's original noise texture. IMHO, this film would have looked substantially better, even with its partially stylized images, if the filmmaker could have had - via some time machine - a GH4 with an external recorder or GH5 to shoot the film in 10bit Log, or a Blackmagic camera. (This is the typical kind of film where Blackmagic cameras really shine, making your film look just as good as something shot on Alexa or RED for a fraction of the budget.)

My 10 cents on the topic: Concerning the question which 50mm lens best matches the Sigma 18-35mm/1.8, the answer can only be the Sigma Art 50mm; a close second is the older version of the lens, 50mm EX DG HSM, which is still a stellar performer and can be found for about $200 used (or $300 new): https://www.dxomark.com/Lenses/Compare/Side-by-side/50mm-F1.4-EX-DG-HSM-Nikon-on-Nikon-D800E-versus-Sigma-18-35mm-F18-DC-HSM-A-Canon-on-Canon-EOS-760D__202_814_1141_1011 My advice to the OP is to forget vintage 50mm lenses, since the Sigma 18-35mm is a modern, high-resolution, high-contrast lens design (using modern types of glass and coating) that can't be replicated with an old lens. (You can do the opposite, make the modern Sigma look old just by screwing a cheap old filter on the lens.)

No, I am not expecting anything from this camera - and I am in no religious camp -, but am merely and modestly putting some question marks behind the "camera breakthrough" headline of this thread and behind the "DSLR quality in the palm of your hand" headline of the Light L16 website which - on top of that - quotes the Financial Times with the statement "The L16, if it is as good as promised, will be as important for photography as the first 35mm film camera, the Leica 1, was in 1925". It's not me who makes pro quality claims. And the producer of the camera doesn't claim, like you, that it is a toy. (I wouldn't even call it a toy, but very clearly said that it looks, based on the images we have, like an early demo of a technology that will still need to go a longer way to mature.)

This is getting silly, sorry. We have sample images, taken in perfect light, probably from a tripod and at high shutter speeds (since there's not the slightest trace of camera shake or motion blur), properly focused (since the detail resolution issues aren't the kind of issues caused by a defocused lens, but the same kind of issues that we know from frame grabs of highly compressed video) and properly exposed. Now you're saying that we can't make ANY statement about the camera's image quality based on these images. Then we can just as well close this whole forum.

No, images are evidence. :-) Just like a sample images of a conventional camera with high noise, lacking detail or blow-out highlights are not fully, but let's say 75-90% reliable indicators of a camera's actual issues with sensor noise, resolution or dynamic range. (All the more when these images weren't shot by someone who's still unfamiliar with the camera.) Yes, but the company's PR that the camera delivers DSLR quality needs to be taken with a huge grain of salt. And relativizing these claims is what this thread is about.

It's actually a good example of current technological limitations that can be solved in the future through AI and deep learning-based computer vision (which currently isn't feasible yet with the computational capabilities of a handheld device, i.e. without tensel co-processors). An AI computer vision algorithm could have recognized the grass leaf detail captured by a tele microlens as grass leaf detail and applied a grass-leaf detail reconstruction model to the rests of the image where the grass had been captured by wide-angle microlenses in lower resolution. Therefore, it would be really interesting to see whether the Light L16 will have a way of storing "raw", i.e. unprocessed microlens image fragments. Theoretically, one might be able to compute better images out of that raw data in a few years with more powerful software.

A bad image stays a bad image. Maybe the camera performs better in some cases - and mind you, those images are demo images cherry-picked by the company, intended to make the camera look good. Your example with the rock image is very likely the result of computing/compositing the high-resolution image from a combination of wide-angle and tele micro lenses (where the people on the beach were captured by the tele micro lens). The sample image with the grass shows that this approach doesn't work if you have high detail (such as the grass leaves) across the whole frame. Here's another example for the limitations of the camera, again picked from Light's sample images. The motif was shot in extremely good light, yet the shadows on the cheek of the model are noisy like a 6400 ISO image. Given the fact that all the sample images were shot in optimum light conditions, this is a strong indicator of extremely weak low light capabilities of the camera. Btw., I'm not dismissing light field and computational photography as such. I just think that the available technology today is as premature as, for example, the Apple Quicksnap digital camera from the late 1990s (which shot 640x480 JPEG). Back then, digital cameras were toys and "Ebay cameras" (for cheaply shooting low-res pics of products) and nobody expected them to ever compete with analog photography. I actually do expect light field and computational photography (along with commodified deep learning AI in consumer hardware) to obsolete most conventional camera designs - eventually, but not today. A lot of hardware and software development still needs to be done.

pixel peeping...

They are quite underwhelming. Shows that even the best algorithms can't get rid of the noise produced by small sensors and the lack of true detail resolution produced by tiny cheap lenses.

It has to do all with that - if you want to record desqueezed anamorphic in-camera, you're no longer recording an unprocessed raw signal. And: You can't record 4:3 raw from a 16:9 sensor.

What's the point of an anamorphic mode on a raw camera? - Besides all cameras listed above are, with the exception of the BMPCC, no longer sold and actively developed by Blackmagic.

I don't think that the above video can be easily made with a GH5, at least not with out-of-the-cam colors. Also, the video has a number of very shallow DoF shots that theoretically could be done on a GH5 with an f0.95 lens - but there are, to my knowledge, no f0.95 MFT lenses which are that sharp at fully open aperture. The video has a very pronounced 'professional photography Canon' look. The postproduction work required to achieve similar results from (VLog) GH5 recordings might be more expensive than the camera price difference.

There's only one camera brand with which this is possible (unless you use small-chip camcorders) - Canon, because of its dual pixel AF technology. But since Canon's consumer DSLRs now lag ten years behind everyone else in image quality and don't even produce a good HD image, your only choice for this type of filmmaking would be to buy into Canon's expensive Cinema EOS line.

This YouTube tutorial really covers all you need:

The F5 and FS700 don't meet the 10bit requirement (that is mentioned below the camera list).

Required viewing for anyone interested in the subject: Steve Yedlin, DoP of among others "Brick", "Looper" and "Star Wars: The Last Yedi", debunks the myth that more camera pixels equal higher perceivable resolution, with test footage he shot with 35mm & 65mm Alexa, RED, 35mm & IMAX film. Using Nuke, he also demonstrates how the imaging pipeline is a comparatively underrated factor for perceived resolution: http://yedlin.net/ResDemo/ (Best download the two videos and watch them, without scaling, in 1:1 pixel resolution in an external video player - from beginning to end, the full 1 hours and 15 minutes with all slow-paced, detailed explanations.)

Novoflex are the best, but also the most expensive.

An interesting question is whether it will be optically better than the Voigtlander 17.5mm/0.95 (or a 24mm/f2 lens with a Speed Booster, for that matter). And whether it will be optically corrected or rely on in-camera software geometry correction. (The latter might rule out its use as a standard prime on the BM Pocket and BM Micro Cinema Camera.)

...and just to mention the obvious for any owner of the BM Pocket: getting an IR cut filter for your lens is almost as important as the lens itself.

Panasonic is, to date, the only manufacturer of stabilized MFT lenses. The only Panasonic primes with stabilization are the 30mm and 42/45mm lenses, i.e. tele lenses. If you're looking for a stabilized normal or wide angle prime, your only option is a Metabones EF Pocket Speed Booster with stabilized Canon primes (such as the 35mm/f2, 28mm/f2.8 and 24mm/f2.8).

A high-quality alternative to all the lenses mentioned above is the old Panasonic-Leica 14-50mm/2.8-3.5 with Four Thirds (not MFT) bayonet. It's better than its MFT equivalents because it's fully optically corrected whereas the MFT zooms rely on in-body software geometry correction (which is neither available on the BM Pocket, nor makes sense on a native 1920x1080 sensor). Four Thirds lenses are electronically fully compatible to MFT, and cheap electronic adapters are available.

A budget alternative is the Panasonic 12-32mm/f3.5-5.6 (which can be cheaply found second-hand since it's the kit lens for a number of smaller Panasonic MFT cameras).

Postscript: Max thinks that I am misusing this thread and posting off-topic. So I will quit from here.