MatthewP

It would be a shame if they skipped the 4 on the next GH, going straight on to 5. If, for example, it has 4k (which I doubt), they could call it the GH4k, haha.   Better would be RAW video, but that's even more unlikely than 4k. Oh well, I guess we're just going to have to be patient and wait and see what unfolds! :)

With a bit of curves, the highlights look quite nice. When filming it would be good to just keep in mind that you have to expose for the highlights (just like the GH2), and recover the detail from the shadows in post. All of these clips are a little overexposed, really, for the subject at hand (which is why most of the grades people have posted are darker). Anyway, here's my cinamatic take. Grades rather nicely.  

Any mirrors?

  Only $1000 more? Dude, it's 2x the price. :lol:

Sometimes I wonder is anyone will ever be happy with their cameras. I mean, wasn't the 5DIIIRaw enough? Wasn't even the GH2 enough?   There's too much focus on camera specifications sometimes, when it's actually how you use a camera and what you do with the footage in post that makes a difference to the audience's experience.   When you get deep into actually creating with the gear you actually own, you soon forget about camera specifications and it becomes an irrelevent factor - they're good enough already, which leads me on to my final point.   I think the decline in camera sales is simply down to the fact that there aren't dramatic improvements in image quality these days. The 'good enough' bar was hit years ago. I recently bought a FinePix F460, and I was flicking through the images and they look better colour and lighting-wise in the majority of cases than my GH2's JPEG output (RAW is a different story, of course, as is resolution). So for many situations, I can take this £20 camera with me (which was released in 2007), and take photos that are in practicality just as good as my GH2's. There's a £980 price difference between what I spent for them.   How can this be? Well, a photo is only as good as what you're actually photographing, and its composition. No one cares when viewing the image afterwards that individual leaves on a tree aren't as clear under a magnifying glass. They care about the composition, and the colours, and the lighting, and of course, the subject.   Similarly, no one cares if they can't quite see into the shadows because of limited dynamic range when the content draws them into the production. This is why I think, personally, cameras have already reached good-enough levels with the M43 cameras, 5DIIIRaw, D5100, and of course standard camcorders (even 5 year old ones) all shooting [i]exceptionally[/i] good video.   I realise that many here will disagree, but it's important to not get bogged down too much in camera specs at the expense of creativity. It would be interesting to see some articles on how to deal with limited dynamic range, or how to minimise image artefacts, and essentially push the cameras most people have already to the limit, as it might add an extra dimension to the site.   Please, don't take this post personally. :lol:

I made some similar suggestions in this thread: http://www.eoshd.com/comments/topic/2717-alternative-storage-options-for-5dmkiii-raw-video/    I reckon it's possible... maybe not with what's out there though. Shouldn't be too long until some company develops something, now that there's demand for it.

It's part of the excitement, all this discovery to get the perfect image. :) You're doing a great job ploughing into it, Andrew. Keep it up!

  You're right, it's wider than 16:9, but it isn't as wide as you think, and it's stretched. Funny how your brain compensates if you've been looking at it for a while, though (which is something I've noticed before).   Here, look:   Top is the original aspect ratio.   Bottom has the video frame (including black bars) compressed to 3:2.   Blue circle added for easy comparison to the hoops in the background. Speaks for itself. ;) You can't argue that the hoops are at an angle, because they would be taller vertically and they are not. So, the conclusion is that it's stretched ever so slightly, but enough to be the first thing I noticed when I started watching your vid. Shoot a perfect circle head on if you want to see it yourself. Just trying to help.  

Hey Andrew, I think the aspect ratio is off in your video (the first one). It looks stretched horizontally, but compressing it so that the video frame (excluding black bars) is 16:9 fixes the stretch. As you're shooting in 4:3, you will get 16:9 with an anamorphic lens (which was the original use for the Panasonic anamorphic lens - to make a 4:3 camera record in 16:9). Just thought I'd let you know. :) Stunning footage regardless!   Here's what I mean:   [URL=http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/12/80767918.png/][/URL]   [URL=http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/809/65037090.png/][/URL]

    That's to do with h.264 encoding, rather than the RAW mode. Frames in RAW are unrelated to each other, so such an artifact inherently cannot exist in RAW, which is one of the reasons why it's so great.   Using StaxRip to encode the h.264 file would allow you to change the settings and ensure that such artifacts are reduced. (I may do a tutorial on this sometime).

I think the muted response from pros is either one of two things:   1) the current status of the recording mode is written off as not particularly useful due to the current limit on recording time, and also the potential for dropped frames, which isn't very forward thinking as I'm sure these factors will improve over time.   or   2) they've been asked by Canon not to endorse the new hack in any way, as people are likely to follow the pro's opinions like sheep.     Just speculation. Useless. I'm going to sign off and do something productive now.

Andrew, have you seen the suggestions in this thread regarding storage? http://www.eoshd.com/comments/topic/2717-alternative-storage-options-for-5dmkiii-raw-video/       Might be worth looking into if you can't find a good fast CF card.

  Well, I'm sure there's probably an easy walk-around for the door thing, as it's probably a simple catch mechanism. Blue tac would probably do the trick.   That SSD would be a bit overkill speed wise, but the size is amazing! They're really progressing fast!   I think the limits for file writes will lie on the camera itself, and probably be about 150MB/s top. Given that, pretty much any standard low end SSD would be more than up to the task, and even some mechanical HDDs have the ability to sustain writes at that speed, and they're really cheap per GB.     I expect that cards will go down fast, yeah. I second that about Transcend cards, though my experience has been only with their SD cards. They perform much faster than advertised.

Currently, because of the sheer size of the 5DmkIII's RAW videos, many people are writing it off as not particularly useful. I reckon ML will get file spanning up and running, so let's assume that single-length recording won't be an issue soon (I think it's currently 40 seconds).     The FAT32 file format isn't an issue beyond file size, as the maximum size for a FAT32 drive is something like 2TB.     The CF interface is essentially a physically smaller 16 bit PC card interface, and in some devices can be used for other things than storage, even. For use with the 5DmkIII though, we want to 'trick' it into thinking that it's just a typical CF card.   From WIKI: "Since CompactFlash interface is electrically identical to the 16-bit PC card, the CompactFlash form factor is also used for a variety of Input/Output and interface devices; many standard PC cards have CF counterparts..."   Currently, I'm wondering how something like this would work...   CF to PCMCIA > http://www.sycard.com/cfext166.html        (just a pin-rewire, no electronics)   Then PCMCIA to SATA > http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ex-Pro-PCMCIA-provides-connection-Laptop/dp/B001MJPWLU         (max speed for SATA 1 is something like 150MB/s, so plenty of bandwidth to experiment with)   Then to a SATA SSD or maybe a 10,000 RPM HDD for up to 1TB of storage (WD VelociRaptor VR333M). A 1TB drive would hold something like 3 hours of RAW footage.   Edit: even a Samsung Spinpoint F3 would be capable of continuous RAW recording (130MB/s write speeds).

I don't think there are any CF to SATA converters, but the CF interface is fairly standard, so it wouldn't surprise me if a CF to SATA converter popped up at some point, now that there's demand for one. IIRC, CF uses an IDE interface, which PCs have used for years. So, maybe you could hardwire the appropriate pins inside a dummy CF card, then to an external IDE to SATA interface.

It's the way he's managed the footage in post. This is how it should look: No aliasing or false detail there!

Don't use the sharpness settings in Camera RAW, or noise reduction for that matter. Here's what it looks like with unsharp mask instead... (view at 100%) It's stunning! Look at the skyline!

I remember that mod... the sample image I saw looked [i]stunning[/i]. Much more useable than even GH2 footage (less sharp though, and obviously more DOF).

Just so you know, 3D is far more than a firmware update. Whether the technology is passive or active, the displays themselves are considerably more expensive to produce.

Hey Andrew, just a quick note regarding gamma. Note: this post assumes that you think the left image has the 'wrong' gamma setting, and the right one has the 'correct' gamma setting. Are you sure 100% that you're getting crushed blacks and highlights? I did extensive testing some time ago, and have a good method of testing for sure. As you say, the GH2 records in 16-235. The picture you posted before had correct gamma on the left, not the right. The right hand one had, I think (might be wrong), lifted shadows and darkened highlights, giving a pseudo low contrast look, which doesn't actually recover any detail, as black is effectively never truly black, nor is white ever really white. They're limited because 16-235 footage is being shown in a 0-255 space, so black is 16 levels brighter than it should be etc. The way to test is by a histogram. Record some video with the lens cap on, low iso, and fast shutter speed, then record one with 100% blown out sky or something else that's bright. Now, bring it in to whatever editing software you're using, and see if the brighter gamma (the same method you used to get the brighter result on the right) results in a black level that's truly black (looking at the histogram), or a black level that is actually grey (which won't reach down to the bottom of the scale on the histogram). Same for the highlights - see if the "white" you're seeing is truly white, or actually darker. Perhaps comparing it to a webpage window would be easy to spot, too, if you want a visual representation of what the histogram says. All this is assuming that your monitor isn't the culprit of these crushed blacks and highlights that you are seeing... Anyway, if you still don't get what I'm saying, take a look at this modified picture of what you posted... if the blacks were truly being crushed and the whites clipped, I wouldn't have been able to recover that information in the left image. I have literally just lifted the blacks and brought down the highlights on the left image using levels in photoshop. Hope it's useful! I personally just wish everything was 0-255... but anyway :)

Ahh, yes, a few other people have said about it not technically being a shotgun mic... I didn't really know what else to call it. :) But, thanks for your suggestion J, I will look into making an interference tube sometime. Would be a fun project! I wonder how it technically works. Do you know if the capsule is at the end of the tube, or if it is nearer the back with the tube extending in front of it?

Hello chaps :) Ages ago I made a shotgun mic for my camcorder. It has its own wind shield (which works VERY well), and an in-built shock mount. Anyway, a few people have requested that I make a video of how it was done, which I've finally gotten around to doing! :) It's cheap too! It only cost £12 to build, and that's pennies in the shotgun microphone world. I thought I'd share this here (and on a couple of other forums) as many of you might find it interesting (DIY stuff's always cool!). :) Anyway, please take a look at the video and let me know what you think: [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoW5JZexfNE[/media]

Hmm, though the GH2's DR isn't RED RAW, it's much better than most DSLRs out there... better than any of the Canons, I'd say (or not far north or south, either way). Take a look at these screen grabs... if you need more DR then I don't know what you're shooting, lol.  :P

Colour posterization fix. 1080p50/60 MUCH less rolling shutter (perhaps global shutter?) Better colour accuracy on the screen (it's currently terrible). High quality, high bitrate codec. Lots of colour controls. Come on, allow us to tweak the colours a LOT, from low contrast to high contrast, colourful to black and white... RGB curves would be extremely exciting! Colour grading in camera! :D Built in bluetooth to enable remote shooting, monitoring, file transfer, focusing etc... anything to increase functionality basically. Maybe use the USB interface for that too - would be useful for people who do stop motion to be able to capture an image via their computer and adjust focus etc. All of this isn't too much dreaming :) hopefully Panasonic can come up with something really awesome, so that people will still buy it over the still stunning GH2 xD

Sorry to burst your bubble Andrew, but I'm pretty sure most of that video was shot in 720p... so the bad detail is to be expected. I'm not saying 1080p is better than the previous canons, but you should have noticed that it's 720p footage. ;)