Axel

Just a few own experiences. 13 stops do not dramatically change the way you expose compared to the 11 stops possible with contemporary DSLRs through curves. You still can't capture, say, the clouds in the sky and the black cat in the deep shadow. In this instance, you'd had to decide for the sky (ETTR with zebra), because clipped skies look really awful. So if there is any chance to bounce the shadows (thus reducing DR deliberately during recording), you should do that. Different with 'practical lights'. Let a light bulb clip. This was ISO 800, as seen by automatic ACR. The lamps zebra-ed with 100%. The magenta cast was because I didn't yet have the IR-cut filter. As you can see, the outlines of the lamps can still be recovered, no terrible blooming, no black dots or the like. Just that it's not possible to extract a natural 3200°K feeling with the cast (caused by IR pollution).

I know filmconvert is considered a great tool, but it doesn't convert raw. It also doesn't really grade, it just applies some retro look combinations (the science of whose is of no importance to any *film* produced within the last decade), and imho it takes you on a meander away from actually developing grading skills. Like it or not, Resolve is a hundred times as powerful, as are the tools in After Effects alone, only that they are not specifically dedicated to grading.

I see a lot of distortion. Very wide lenses shouldn't use shallow DoF. If not extremely cropped, the focal plane is curved too much (three flowers on the window sill, either the one in the middle or the others appear sharp). Isn't there an 8mm Kowa?

The pan head of the ACE is like that of the $3000 + tripods, only it carries less weight.

Yes, the first series had a weak point at the spikes (the structure that holds them is made of plastic), they broke off easily. Not just a few items, hundreds. Mine was broken on arrival: Many parts of the ACE are plastic, that's why it is so light. Of course I got an immediate exchange and excuse. Sachtler in Germany is a company considered No1 for broadcast and film equipment, and they can be very, very expensive. They sit near Arri and 90% of all Arri cameras are carried by a Sachtler. They can't afford to deliver bad products. However, plastic is plastic. The quality of the pan head (very many plastic parts there) was never questioned, and many recommend to use it with (probably heavier) Manfrotto legs. I didn't have any problems since two years now, but that doesn't help you. I have the ground spreader version, which can be operated at lower height. There is also now a carbon fibre version (no double profile on the legs), equally light, but more expensive. Use a good pan head if you plan to pan (and I used Vinten and Manfrotto 501Hdv before, not the same class, only price-wise), if the task is to make a static shot, cheaper and lighter tripods will do. We had this discussion recently: Pans are like zooms, one better uses them rarely.

It depends. Let me share my thoughts in a same dilemma: If you work 90% in ProRes, your iMac should suffice. Bottleneck here could be the disc speed (hence the BlackMagic Disc Speed Test app, you should use it). An SSD, though hypothetically able to run at 500-600 MB/s, is hampered by old SATA-controllers of your motherboard (I don't know about your Mac, check in system report) or by external connections. No USB 2.0. Best are PCIe or Thunderbolt. Raids. Assigning cards for read/write-only, not using the system drive for footage in the first place. For FCP X, disc speeds set aside, more RAM and more graphic power make it faster, but it should run fast enough on your machine. If you use Resolve (lite), then you best have two Nvidia cards, one 4 GB for computing (I know they say 2GB were enough, but I read otherwise), a slower one for GUI (lite can't use two cards in the way FCP X can, you'd had to upgrade to the full version, refer to the system requirements on the BM site, Resolve is touchy with cards and drivers, openGL does, for example, not include Radeon cards which are supported by Apple). Probably Resolve would be the reason to give up Apple, since the costs for upgrading an old machine (if possible at all) easily exceed those for a state-of-the-art PC. I can't tell if the Photon Envy would work, but 16 GB RAM max? ""Photon Envy" wears an intimidating look. Adorned with Green LED fans and lighting, your friends and foes alike will be certainly green with envy!" - or glare red with schadenfreude. This thing (film quiz) is so ugly, it must be a modern masterpiece. The third option, at the same price point, would be a Hackintosh. The $4000 new MacPro can be assembled for ~ $1500, with even faster (but internal!) connections. That's my favourite plan. In the meantime, as others, I see raw as of little if any advantage over ProRes for most situations. More moire, more noise (noise can be avoided almost completely by ETTR, which requires enough light, as should be a matter of course for a cinema camera). The noise can be taken care of by Neat inside the NLE (after i.e. developing the raw with cliphouse), by ACR and for Resolve by the full version or by Neat's own OFX-plugin, suitable for Resolve lite (now also supports AMD graphics) - Resolve again meaning a new computer, especially with Neat, which is famous for slowing down performance, and it'd need to be the first node! The moire apparently is invited by utilizing the utmost lens' resolution and can be reduced or avoided by softer lenses or open apertures. You sacrifice sharpness for a moire-free image, old recipe in DSLR videography (you indeed increase resolution then, because the moire decreases it). This brings the sharpness down to the level of ProRes ... Keep in mind, the new Amira in it's basic version ($ 30.000) has only ProRes (not HQ), and only in Video-LOG (rec709). Why make everything in raw? If it's good enough for Arri, it's good enough for me ;-) (of course not, how can one compare a meager broadcast camcorder with a cinema camera!) The first thing I thought after I saw the first clips from my new Pocket was that I'd never do anything else with it but raw. To grade the film-LOG ProRes so that it looks even as good as GH2 or G6 video isn't easy. And the raw clips seemed to be so much better at once (shaky camera and bad focus ignored - the colors, the nuances!). But the more test shots you make and compare and the better you get at extracting all beauty of the flat ProRes, this view changes. There are situations for raw, but they are rare. You want to make only some beauty shots with raw? You can, you just need to invest some time and round about $50 (for cliphouse), if you have no AAE already (which reportedly has the better debayering method compared to Resolve). What about grading ProRes with the hobbyist tools inside 'iMovie Pro'? Actually, if you take a more scientific approach than just applying looks (I tested and detest Filmconvert), you can build a similar pipeline as in Color ('rooms') or Resolve ('nodes'). Tracking vignettes? You could add the Mocha tracker within SliceX. Comparing and conforming shots in the timeline? Easiest thing: Connect a still from one typical graded shot, shove it over the other shots and crop it accordingly to make a splitscreen. Imho FCP X can be used better for grading than the NLE Premiere, because color is not an 'effect' that has to be loaded, it's an attribute of every clip that exists in the (if you choose so) ever-open info-window. Seriously, I believe Resolve is the best software for grading, but it also is the most expensive, at least for us. I follow the advice of a friend: Either soldier on with your slow and outmoded system (MacPro 4.1 Quad Nehalem, 16GB RAM, GT 120) for now or buy/build a new one with the best specs affordable. But don't invest in any hardware to make your old system faster! Sounds reasonable.

The typical 70's zoom was in cheap horror movies. If an amateur has a zoom on his camera, he's condemned to abuse it permanently. Something strucks him as interesting: Zoooom. Basic reflex. Some restaurants have a fly printed on the center of their urinals, same principle.

The advice 'when you want a camcorder zoom, buy a camcorder' can be taken literally. Indeed, there are decent camcorders that cost less than a decent zoom lens. And there are decent zoom lenses (parfocal, 20x, some even with electronic zoom lever) that cost less than a family sized pizza. They are calculated for SD resolution, true, they will vignette at wide angle and if not proper adapted will not focus on infinity, but for the odd 70ies zoom ... (kidding) Zooms, pans and transitions - these should be prohibited for beginners, but in the right hands, they are fantastic. Vocabulary of film language.

A crop out of the center of a fisheye will still have heavy distortion. Check youtube or vimeo for examples.

I knew a russian teacher, and she told me, German is for training dogs, English is for the stables, French for the brothel and Russian for poetry.

They had'nt tested it themselves. They just evaluate the specs, so nothing you and me couldn't do. Their conclusion: "The FS700 is a solid workhorse, that's best put on a tripod, on which alone it can be operated properly. Unrivaled it's 240p slow motion, very unfortunate that it still is limited to 8-bit. Due to numerous available adapters the E-mount can no longer be called a limitation". Well, not far from the Google translation: "The NEX-FS700 a solid workhorse that feels especially on a tripod well and is easy to operate accordingly. A unique feature is the slow-motion ability regrettable the 8 bit limitation. Thanks to numerous Adpaterlösungen available, the E-mount does not constitute a real restriction more"

An equally unscientific observation: It seems the Sigma is too sharp for my Pocket when stopped down to f3.5 (or so I guess, two stops on the SB): A lot of terrible moire (on brick walls, roof tops and thin lines, all usual suspects, weirdly colored in raw, but also, a little less, in ProRes). This magically disappears once I open the aperture and limit the exposure with the ND fader.

I read somewhere that 1080 was 10-bit, but 4k only 8-bit, due to bit rate limitations of the cards. Limitation everywhere, but 10-bit full HD on a good cam under 2000 a year back didn't exist.

Like me. I analyze the good shots and try to make a method out of it. The bad shots are bad for obvious reasons. Those need to become the exceptions. Know your foes. Stabilization will need better rigging, practice and a portion of Zen, but imho not ultra-wide.

You are right. A good way to protect your expensive lens is to leave on a cheap UV filter. I never did, because I hate to have to permanently screw something, and as Ken Rockwell in his Sigma review pointed out, the filter mount is not that good. So I bought these. I didn't receive my Tiffens yet, but the idea is to leave the IR-cut-filter on (and forget about the shitty lenscap) with a lens adapter in front onto which I snap the ND fader. I suggest a cheaper solution that I bought. With this (or sth. like this), you can add a stabilization point. The description says it weighs 499g, but it's actually much lighter. As soon as the Zacuto loupe arrives, I will have four-point-stabilization (right hand on camera grip, left hand on lens, this support on the breast bone, Zacuto eyepiece pressed to right eye). But it already works now. I have a (very cheap) monopod also, but it will move when I i.e. change the focus. The definite tripod if you are looking for a decent pan head is the ACE.

I think it was a typo. He meant 24p? Anyway, I'm sure you have no affinity to cinema, do you? Then this might sound cryptic to you: All those extreme HFR lovers wish to stop time. Eliminate motion blur and you will filter all life out of your video. Tests with UHD soccer recordings showed, that for 4k higher frame rates are indeed essential, because any camera movement (such as pans!) would else degrade the famous higher resolution. I can't express how much I despise this nonsense.

I liked this because it describes the challenge for me as BMPCC owner. It seems as if the camera was not as unreliable as it was demanding. Got to know your gear. With GH2 and now with G6, improvisation suggests itself, with manual modes being more or less slightly modified automatic routines. Shutter speed? Fixed for most shots. Aperture? ETTC. Focus? Easiest thing to to do, WYSIWYG, with an ideal DoF-ratio resembling that of classic 35mm film. Color style (film mode or scene guide, actually a bunch of baked-in look-variations)? Appropriate for the situation, main goal: True colors with maximum dynamic range. Are those really artistic choices? No, the aesthetic aspects are being offered on top of the camera's excellent automatic features as predominantly intuitive reactions to what I see. Yes, that's correct. But in contrast to my first feelings of success when I saw my GH2 shots out-of-the-box (2 years back or so), where at least 50 % of all shots looked good, my first impressions with the BMPCC were frustrating. I tried to shoot like I had with the Lumixs, but only, say, 5 % of all clips were good. What I realized later: They had the potentional to be very, very good. And in retrospect the rejects were bad because of something that went wrong, stabilization, framing, exposure, focus, sound, sloppy grading. Because of something I didn't know enough about or hadn't enough experience with. So despite my oath not to do any more 'test shots', I did a lot of them during the last six weeks. I was starting to avoid mistakes, obvious mistakes. What I found is, that I did a lot of things off the cuff with the GH2. The place was too dark? Why did I buy these little, handsome LED floods? I even recommended them in ancient threads, said it was ridiculous to carry big halogen or tungsten floods or fresnels with you when your camera was so good in low light. That you just sometimes had to add a little fill, very discreetly and preserve the mood of the environment. But the light is terrible! It's ugly, I don't know why, it just looks like dim nuclear glow, even if filtered for 3200°K. It never occured to me then. Now I see the mixed color temperatures of evening sunset through the windows, only slightly different from the warm halogen spots reflected from my living room wall on the face of my friend - it's still not intentional, it's an epiphany, but no way to see something comparable with the Lumixs. The gradual fall-off on the (concrete) ceiling would probably have caused banding. Since this camera can capture light like this, the next step is to make it happen. This has to do with good exposure, sure, but more than that. The same is valid for all the apparent 'shortcomings' of the BMPCC. To keep this post short, I take only two more examples: Sound and focus. The sound has to be external. And since it is external, it's best not to level it yourself but have someone else care for sound exclusively. Did you ever hear of a cinematographer who checked the sound? Yes, the peaking sometimes outlines good contrasts though they are not perfectly in focus, and if something is in focus, but has no clear outlines, it won't work at all. Question is, if something with so little contrast is lit well enough or worth recording anyway. It's the complaint of a point-and-shooter. Magnifying (clicking OK twice) helps to make sure if the peaking is right. There is another issue with the focus, and it has to do with the sensor size. You often have a deep DoF you can mistake for absolute DoF, misguided by the overall peaking. This is dangerous, because the whole image will not look unfocused, it will look soft. It's definitely easier to focus with a very shallow DoF. What can be done? Close the aperture, if the light allows it, to really get absolute DoF. If you focus on infinity but have people cross the street 20 feet away, it's not going to look good.

Oh yes, only then did we realize that our world was three-dimensional. You're right. I won't see anything in 2D anymore, let alone think about shooting something in 2D. Why don't we just skip all this slowly evolving improvements and demand 10k 3D 14-bit @ 120 fps now?

You asked for a rather general upgrade path. As I see it, there still is a certain aesthetic difference between MFT and full frame, but without any doubt, G6 footage can be cut with 5DMiii (as long as we are not discussing raw, and even then G6 will win if the grading wasn't done by an expert). From a distance, the other competitors become just invisible.

I say, let's wait until we can compare. Right now, the Sonysomething looks desperately videoish despite the downsampling - which makes me think DR doesn't automatically improve just so. And the ol' JVC makes the ugliest images you can imagine, even a soft HDV video from, say, FX-1, looks way more organic. Resolution isn't everything.

Yes, I read this too. The recommended Hoya set, which has not yet been fully reviewed, would cost me a small fortune. The disappointment about the Tiffens (i.e. in reduser and bmuser) seems to be about 'color inconsistencies' and may be the case for the Indie-Pro set. The IR-cut-filter alone (non-dichroic, ideal cut-off-length) was confirmed to be the best (for the BMCC though, but this has practically the same sensor) in at least three rather scientifically performed tests: And an ND fader is a compromise anyway. What is more, as Wolfcrows The Complete BlackMagicPocketCinemaCamera Guide points out, there is no such thing as color consistency if you are confronted with raw. One has to even every single shot anyway, so a minor cast doesn't add much of a problem. But I maybe wrong, as I said, I had no chance to test this combi myself yet.

You need an IR-filter more urgently, because the sensor has none. This one was tested for BMCC with best results by Abel Cine, Shane Hurlbut and Ryan E Walters. Also the Tiffen VariND seems to be the best in sharpness, very little vignetting and very little color cast, compared to Polaroid, Heliopan, Genus and others by Dave Dugdale. There is a recommendation to rather go with these, which combine IR (@ 680nm, best for the BMPCC sensor) with ND. However, I try the IR-blocker (leave it on always!) and the ND-fader on top. Takes approx. one more week to pass german customs, you could wait for my experiences. Or you trust blackmagicuser Frank Glencairn (the DOP of the BMPCC-ProRes-clip THE ONE you linked to earlier), who also uses IR & ND-fader and says no problem.

@BurnetRhoades Interesting. I didn't know. It all comes back to niceties of aesthetic perception, doesn't it? We are becoming modern alchemists, watching paint dry, whereas around us life continues, unbeknownst to us. :blink: Makes sense. You take a single frame from a 35mm release print and see how much it can be enlarged. At 15 x 10 inches (rather sooner) it gets grainy, hard to imagine that it's fit for a 50 feet screen. Next big thing: Sensor offset. Oh really? You're still recording with a fixed sensor? You can't be serious. I top your so-called 4k resolution with my R-O (random offset) 1080 sensor easily. Didn't you study Why I am going R-O and why you should too? Try sell it at Ebay. Yeah, and imagine the first time you power on your new 14-bit, 4-8k monitor in three or four years and watch your 10-bit, raw or 4k video on it, you now deem perfectly graded. Reminds me of Mephistopheles: I am the Spirit that denies! And rightly too; for all that doth begin Should rightly to destruction run; 'Twere better than that nothing were begun. EDIT: Irony of course.

"And, the downsampling is key if you really want the best possible resolution and accurate color for 1080p with RGGB grid array sensors." Well, yes, we had this discussion before. A downsampled image can't by any means increase accuracy. It can have no visible aliasing, and that's a good thing. Done right, a 4k clip downsampled to 1080 will *look* better than a genuine 1080 clip - if there was one, because you simply can't have absolute accuracy. I am curious to see the first few hundred tests. Will they look like Vermeers (I think Jan Vermeer was mentioned somewhere above, a painter famous for depicting details, which in art remained an exception)?

Pfff. An excuse has it's roots in the mind, and nowhere else. Once you got the desired equipment, the bar rises. This is the most funny and sad reason why people want to have better resolution. They are not looking for better quality, they are looking for better excuses. Did you know: Already ten years back there was a White Paper about resolutions for digital cinema, and they said, at 10k presumably all artifacts pointing to the technical structure of the image had disappeared, and from then on an image would not only represent reality, it could then faithfully reproduce reality - only that this never was the goal of cinema! Let me literally quote the conclusion of the lengthy pdf: If you have no imagination, if you are not inventive and are just too hollow inside to produce content, you should subscribe to the automatic resolution increase into eternity. Someone a few days back sold an >Angenieux, saying in the Ebay description that it was one of the two famous Barry Lyndon lenses. Stanley Kubrick had by then made two "UHD"-films already (Spartacus and 2001), but now he cropped the negativ for the sake of this zoom, as much as he sacrificed sharpness and resolution for the sake of his lowlight-Zeiss. > the film was about the same time as Jaws and Star Wars. Those cost below 10 million $ then, Barry Lyndon cost 18 million. > Kubrick spent years to make this film. Does this tell you something?