Axel

This is the point where you either put a makeshift bigger eyepiece around the existing EVF of the GH2 or buy an external monitor with a big and clumsy sunshade (or the new OLED smallHD for 1200 bucks) or buy the Zacuto EVF, which is not sharper than the built-in one, but has the, er, advantage of being independently positionable. The display has not enough resolution to focus properly, so forget this. This is an option forcthe GH3.

I think there is nothing to justify. One needs at least the three classical lenses to choose from in a given situation. Wide angle ranges between 7 and 17,5 for MFT, standard between 20 and 25, 35-50 can be labelled portrait lenses, and 50 and above tele. From the good and fast wide lenses suitable for MFT, the SLR magic is still the least expensive.

  Yeah, I know. For cinema, it is still a novum, unless you count Trumbulls Showscan (70mm @ 60 fps) from the seventies, which for one or two decades was used in amusement parks. I compared The Hobbit to a DSLR test on youtube, because I found it equally uninteresting.

I agree. I would have enjoyed any film with an interesting story in 4:3 and black&white. This was the longest HFR test shot, and it wasn't the framerate that made it bad.

The built-in EVF is the best. It is even better than the Zacuto EVF, and way better than the EVF of the GH3. But:    > the eyepiece doesn't cover the eye. > you can't press the camera close enough to the face to get extra stabilization during shooting video.   My self-built solutions were:   This is a rubber piece you put beneath your bathroom sink and the tube (I didn't know the correct german name, let alone the english name). It costs cents and needs to be cut at the backside to fit over the GH2s eyepiece. However, the rubber is not very soft, so it doesn't feel comfortable. Later I did this:     This is the eyepiece of an ancient Super 8 camera that was sold on ebay as defect. The camera was 1€, the shipping 3€.

I already begged for the GH3, an unreasonable wish, but Santas sleigh was manipulated by he Grinch and the polar express is late too ...   As a compensation for that they have to deliver me this.    I saw Steve and Jens chatter about it here: http://vimeo.com/49470691   They say, it's a good idea, and who am I to disagree? Now, holy workshop, get on with it!

  Yes. I know Premiere and FCP since eleven years, and you are right of course - with the second part of the sentence! The old Avid-like NLEs took film and tape editing as models for their GUIs. The design of an applications surface is just a simplified visualization for the user to reach his desired results. But there are no more 'tracks', let alone independent tracks, with file-based video. And also, the complicated paths between files are not necessary to browse trough them, they must have been invented by some clerk. On the harddrive, video never was 'in' folders, bins, like film-reels were in cans and the cans on shelves, and film-strips on the lightboard. So the model started to be unnecessarily complicated, but cutters were used to it, and they never questioned it.    I was at first disappointed by FCP X and didn't like it at all. I thought the magnetic timeline prevented me from having full control over my edit. It's the other way around. There is absolutely no reason to stick to unintelligent tracks, whose only connection is the rule, that the highest track covers the ones below. This rule makes sense for compositing, but not for editing. If I assemble images, I don't want to have to play Tetris, right?   Think about why you use more than one video track, think about why you shove certain clips around (and need free space to move them), think about how you keep things in synch. You may know answers to these questions, but a newbie, who just spent a few days with FCP X and then was confronted with Premiere ... - 'er, what the heck is this supposed to be good for?'   FCP X is good for multicam, it automatically synchs external audio (which Premiere promised long ago, you still need plural eyes with CS6), and - since 10.6 - it allows as many compound clips, nested in newer (or older, try this with older applications!) compound clips as you like, it has two playheads, which makes it veeery fast.   Premiere, on the other hand, needs paths to navigate to the footage folders, it forces you to scroll down lists, it puts clips into unintelligent subfolders, and they can't logically be in two (or more) different folders at the same time. Needless to say, you have to double-click a folder, you have again to scroll the list of clips, and to play one, you have to double-click again. Now if all this doesn't sound like a 20th century GUI!   That said, you can do (almost) everything in respectable ol' Premiere, and you can't yet in FCP X ...

'Does anyone have thoughts on Apple Color?'   Yes, very good programme, I still use it. You need FCP 7 to feed it (which is 32-bit and old-fashioned like Premiere). But: You can use FCP X to make simple cuts (this is the important part!), export an XML-File, and open your project with X27 (that means, your projects opens as FCP 7 timeline). There you don't need to toch the timeline, just right-click on your sequence in the browser and <em>'send: to Color. Good solution.

The 'popcorn' discussion above: If you exchanged the giant Hollywood-letters with E=mc², people weren't getting smarter. The masses are dumb, it's the individuals who count. Many of the arthouse cinemas survived the digital revolution. They are still there to show The Master and other, er, masterpieces. Go there, support them, it's for your own health of mind. It's a parallel culture. Nobody keeps you from publishing your own anti-popcorn films, even if they never can gross enough money to break even. Artists and art lovers meet in smaller circles, unbeknownst to the mainstream. Cinema is bigger than all of us, and ars gratia artis. Enough of the platitudes, you got the picture. Just stop to compare yourself to Jackson, Cameron or Spielberg.

  You are talking about the latest FCP X vs. Premiere CS 6?   Knowing FCP X and Premiere until CS 5.5, it is quite clear that FCP X is the better editor. But in version 10.7 it still has bugs, and there are some things you just can't do. You can't, for example, change the project settings to cinemascope. Not yet at least. For 300 bucks, it is more than useful, and many find it sufficient. It's strenghts are the organisation of your footage, the speed with which you can edit and how well it responds (granted you have a fast machine and enough RAM).   Adobe has the integration of After Effects, Audition and the new Speedgrade on it's side. High price, and the editor is outmoded with it's track-bound timeline, which many experienced cutters prefer nonetheless.     For Adobe, you can rely on the said Speedgrade, for FCP X you would export XML for the free DaVinci Resolve Lite or buy the Magic Bullet Looks Plugin (there is a high quality color corrector integrated, but it's tools are limited, i.e, you can't keyframe grades, which is a no-go for serious colorists). In any way, buy tutorial DVDs (not books) for the application of your choice!     Not the cheapest, but the best in this price range is the Sachtler ACE.     New is the Eclipse as an ND-Fader. You heard, that you need a bigger diameter than your lenses filter mount? Or a set of NDs like 2,4,8. 

  That's it! Jackson, with his brand new 48 Epics, didn't read the manual in advance, where it says in menu 'Picture Options': *avoid soap opera effect - Well, practice makes perfect!

Read 'The Golden Bough', 'The Hero With A Thousand Faces', or other literature dealing with the roots of mythology, and you will find, that every story, if intended as allegory or 'mere' fantasy, uses the same archetypes and talks about the same things. Start with the first words spoken in Fellowship, watch the last 45 minutes of Return (considered lengthy, but seldom seen through the hero's, Frodos, eyes. What happened at the vulcano really?). I think LOTR is underestimated, because Jackson was aware of the meaning and depth of the concept of initiation. This is what moves us, with us in the world, the world is changed.

  I saw most of the 3D movies (I hesitate to call them 'films', as, not sure about idiomatic niceties of english language, I feel that the term 'movie' refers to a clichéd genre piece, like in 'scary movie'), and I never loved the technique. We will overcome the need for glasses in the not-too-far future, and we will use vector data for compression, allowing to embed parallax-shift instead of primitive stereoscopy. Meaning, that when you move your head, the vanishing point in the screens (or displays) image will shift ever so slightly. 3D will have depth, but no 'layers'. No objects will jump off the screen like in the Harry Potter living paintings. 3D will be nothing sensational, like surround sound is nothing sensational, but as with better sound, it will get you involved faster and deeper. Perhaps.     Or the other way around. Download the comparison of the same action scene, once in 24p, once in 60p, from the RED site here (right click safe as, small zip-folder). In my view, though the 60p version seems to run faster, it looks lame. So this is a big jump, as scrupulously recorded by the camera. Sport coverage, so what?   EDIT: The 24p version is not typical for 24p, since the exposure time is too short, and there is less motion blur than usual, yet imho it looks more dramatic.

I saw it, and I say, much ado about nothing. No one is forced to use HFR, and yet he can do. He can also use HFR and LFR in the same film. It has advantages in 3D (but honestly, I never liked 3D). It has advantages for pans and the like.   Here it says:   'Over the past 80 years, viewers have grown to associate 24 fps with the familiarity and feel of traditional cinema. This typically includes its more pronounced motion blur and choppier cadence, along with the types of camera movements needed to avoid motion artifacts.'   True for the magnificent landscape shot. And also for pans. But, as I see it, a pan makes no sense at all at the speed shown on the RED site. There is a good reason not to change anything as far as camera work is concerned. We can't pan with our heads, and a middle fast pan like this looks extremely unnatural, like a Ken Burns pan with linear key framing. Pans need to be fast or slow. Full stop.

Wow, jg, this is great (like the music too)!

Much more simple reason. During the intermission, the per-head-sales of popcorn rise ...

  You got me wrong. I don't say that the next generation won't be able to immerse themselves completely in something, be it a PC game, their facebook second life or what have you. I know for me that I can get quite obsessed with the intricacies of filmmaking (self-evident, no?), among other addictions.    There is no arguing that modern cinema knows everything about sensations for the senses (the first and major mission of cinema) and what is paradoxically called 'virtual reality'. Film consumers of today expect to be overwhelmed. Not - never! - by a controversial story. On the contrary, everybody wishes not to be surprised or challenged, neither emotionally nor intellectually. The second duty of cinema had always been to allow utopias and dystopias, giving the supressed fears and wishes a voice.   What is getting lost is the willingness to question ones own view. I know that this is of course a cultural phenomenon, but I'm prepared to answer that cinema is still the flag of our western societies' culture. The wind of change that blew away a lot of stubbornness and prudery and contradicted the demands to obey to the rules of the sixties and seventies (when people actually read books, novels! - [u]new[/u] stories.) has calmed down.    On this background, the problem of a cinematic framerate looks rather irrelevant. And it is. With a new, fresh look only independant filmmakers can provide, HFR could well be the mark of a new cinema, where the 'postponement of disbelief' is left to the genre old hands and the provocation of disbelief is introduced.

  Why a narrative? Didn't you hear the term 'narrative exhaustion"? The kids of today have an attention span that's measured in seconds. They have no patience to follow a 'narration'. Why should they? Every story has been told, this is getting old. They need to be fed constantly with new things. Not only film as an analog technique is dead, storytelling ceases to attract the masses. 

  It was shot at 270°, 48 fps. No, I meant that you can project 48 fps with actually 48 motion phases, for hyperrealistic, constant movements ('flowmotion', haha) that don't require motion blur to look fast and if no heroes are exposed as mundane actors with everyday faces. You could shoot 24 fps for the rest - especially, I am convinced, for the [u]very[/u] fast movements like they are seen in Transformers, because in 24 fps things look way faster, [u]if[/u] they are fast: [img]http://content.gcflearnfree.org/topics/203/motion_blur.jpg[/img]   The 24 fps frames would be two identical 48 fps frames in the same DCP.

    Of course I'm suggesting the shutter speed fit for the current projection framerate. 180° aka ¼₈ for 24p, and the look is unaffected despite the actual 48 fps.

I saw the trailer and a few test shots a month ago, when my cinema got the 48p firmware (and often since). I think 48p should not be dismissed in a bulk. The landscapes (camera flew over mountains) looked indescribably - well, fantastic! The movements of the actors, on the other hand, looked slightly sped up. It looked like bad acting. The converse suspicion would be, that 24p adds a very subtle slomo-feeling, making creatures move and mimic with more gravity. What we realize here is, that these aesthetic subtleties are hard to nail down. Could this really all be about (too much) fluidity vs a viewing habit where we read poorer rendering of movements as 'cinematic'?   Surely HFR doesn't fit the story. Let Michael Mann use it, and it will work.   48p swallows 24p. So within the same film, the look can be adjusted (By simply showing the 24th of a second twice, nothing else happened in analog cinema). I think we will have both, the best of both worlds.

You can find technical specs at imdb.com [url="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2106476/technical"]http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2106476/technical[/url]

I first thought, my god, another cheap effect. But I have to admit (and I'm happy to learn) that it looks fantastic. Thank you for the examples.

In theory, the 17,5 Voigtlander is the dream lens. But watch example videos on youtube or vimeo. A wide lens with an aperture that wide produces unnatural bokeh gradients. This is so, because the depth of field of a wideangle is a narrow circle, whereas that of a tele looks like a pane.    I think the 25mm, which I own, is better in a way. But don't take my word, check it on youtube.

Sure thing. I ordered the GH3 also, but will probably keep the GH2. As it turned out recently, the reported moire issues of the GH3 were due to the use of oversharp system lenses (avoid them, and you won't see moire). Direct comparisons often showed, that the GH3 has actually less moire problems. [url="http://vimeo.com/54863241"]http://vimeo.com/54863241[/url] To make a long story short: The only real drawback of the GH3 is, that the new EVF doesn't have the good resolution of the GH2's viewfinder. It has 1,7 million pixels, but being OLED technology, this has to be divided by three, so less than 600.000 pixel remain, which isn't enough to judge critical focus without peaking.