peederj

Sony already has a full-frame mirrorless camcorder with poor low-light and tons of moire. VG-900.   (Wait...you're gonna say "RAW!!1!")

    Devastating that Our Hero would claim his own patrons are moving backwards.

We have yet to see whether BMD is able to implement more than 10% of the MFT spec (distortion and CA correction?). They couldn't even get flange distance right on the EF mount for a long time. And that may be the answer to your pressing question Andrew. The reason the products aren't widely available is because...they suck.

Grain is a good thing but there is good grain and bad grain. Good grain is largely monochromatic and even, bad grain has a lot of chroma noise and compression artifacting from chroma subsampling and macroblocking. With Neat you can take away the bad grain and then add good grain such as your favorite film scans (Cinegrain being the best but pricey, Film Convert being very nice and fine, and others such as rgrain and Gorilla grain being better than nothing and useful in spots) and/or controlled fine dither noise to break up the blocks and bands.   There is no reason to desaturate your shadows and crush your blacks just to fight noise now that good noise reduction is affordable. If you like the look of those simple measures go ahead but I find it worth the chore to pull noise out as the first order of business once I know what clips I'm using. I bake in NR as part of transcoding, doing my rough cuts with native capture.

It looks like the blue channel got fixed. In general, there is no question, video quality is something being purposefully held back by the big Japanese manufacturers, but possibly 4K will change that if they are frustrated they are not selling sets and players etc. they will think the video enthusiast market may drive the whole 4K transition and decripple accordingly. It may even be they are protecting 4K video from "good enough" 1080p implementations. To ensure there is demand for 4K because everything 1080p sucks much worse than it needs to. DPreview and DxO have enforced that stills cannot be crippled anymore; sadly there remains no equivalent independent testing site for video. Whatsoever. (Yes I know you're all waiting for me to build one. I am too busy with other matters, sorry.) Despite the hopes of so many bloggers, I think right now the Japanese all laugh when anyone brings BMD up at the bar after work. Justifiably.

Learn & use Neat Video. It's worth the $99 and the overnight rendering time.

The awful thing being good and worthy projects will fall unfunded due to the malice of a few scammers and slick operators.

Rainbow moire on the tile edges in the lower left corner at 0:21. On par with earlier BMD cams using this sensor. Not quite on par with ARRI RAW.

  It exists (albeit in prototype form) and is called the "Novo." It will be rental-only if and when it ships.

Well I learned "ring modulator" is the perfect musical companion for aliasing.  :D   That suitcase looks like it's about to say "Parkay."

May I kindly recommend doing strobe effects strictly in post. You will get scan lines on your video if the sync isn't 100% perfect, which is impossible to achieve in practice.   For low-frequency pulsing like that, you can just wave a flag back and forth or ride a dimmer up and down.

  Actually you need a larger and more unwieldy external box: an entire computer to offload to (or if you trust one of those offloader devices be my guest) every 15 minutes. You need somewhere to put the computer, keep it powered, you need to stop the entire shoot or have an assistant for the offloads. With an external recorder like the Ninja 2, you can record all day long, direct to ProRes 422 HQ, without ever changing drives or batteries, four channel audio pre-aligned, with scene and shot and take written directly to the filenames, and you get a peaking monitor thrown into the bargain, for $695 retail with commodity drives (even rotational laptop drives) and cheap Sony-type batteries the only additional expenses. No assistant needed, no interruptions to workflow during capture or post, no transcodes, batteries are even hot-swappable if you do run out.   And they do not smell if kept clean.   As for the perfect camera, Sony F55 + R5 (also an odor-free external recorder, with a handy clip mount direct to the chassis) looks to be quite acceptable if you can't spring for the Alexa atm.

It will probably introduce at least slight aliasing/moire and possibly quite significant. It is not going to be the same as a 14-stop full-res sensor with a modern downsampling technique. But it might be better than chopped liver (certainly will be better than any line-skipping implementation or native res sensor I would think).   Update...yes quite significant, look at the lamp in the upper left corner...awful aliasing in the dual RAW.   https://vimeo.com/70459941   The noise could probably have been swatted somewhat with Neat in the normal RAW. I personally have never seen noise like that out of a 5D3 FWIW...

Wow a $2000 50mm! Although I can't fault your priorities, that lens will retain its value while the 5D3 has dropped in value 40% since I got mine on launch. I myself just picked up the Voight 58/1.4 and that's basically perfect for even full frame video use, though I imagine the Leica edges it handily. The difference might require a 6K+ sensor with uncompressed output to see though.   But if you have a $2000 lens and don't have a handle on color grading then you know what your priorities are. You've already got an unfair advantage in that department as Canon's color is the very best in the biz. Buy yourself some training materials in color and post in general if you can find worthwhile ones and you'll get to the point where the camera doesn't matter so much anymore, you can handle whatever is thrown at you qualitywise, as long as the operator was vaguely competent. And you'll also learn exactly what you're missing that can't be compensated for in post, and it might not even touch the camera (e.g. lighting. Or TALENT.).   And as for Cinestyle, again working with pro cameras will teach you a lot more. Cinestyle is more like what you get from a log gamma on a pro camera, whilst the other contestants are midway between "prolost flat" and Cinestyle. Subjectively, I actually quite like the Canon X-series style they just released if you don't want to shoot Cinestyle, try it out, it's quite classy in the blues etc. But forcing yourself to pull a good grade out of Cinestyle, and understanding how to expose for it, is much more practical training for the real world. It may be 5 years or so before RAW is the dominant format for production, yes I know most RED shoots are RAW, but most shoots aren't RED and most Alexa shoots aren't RAW either. So even when you have it available, and you supposedly have a budget for it, a good codec with a log gamma is "good enough" in practice.   When you cross the professional threshold you realize a lot of the things you thought were really important, ain't. Other things, are.

  I have the Samyang 85/1.4 and I like it a lot. Though it has a lot of flare and needs the included hood or a matte box. I have the stills version and I'd like to make a couple points about "pretend" cine-lenses.   The Samyang cine lenses are all "pretend" in that their designer apparently did not understand why cine lenses are designed the way they are. The Samyangs are just the stills lenses with follow-focus teeth instead of comfortable grips for the focus and aperture rings, and no clicks on the aperture ring. Sure enough, real cine lenses have teeth and declicked iris controls. That is where the similarity ends.   On a line of cine lenses, it's crucial that the follow focus/iris teeth have consistent diameters and distances from the flange across the entire line. Why? Because if you're using primes and need to change them, you shouldn't have to completely readjust your whole rig to do so. They should just snap in and the follow focus and matte box and so on should instantly line up. This was utterly lost on Samyang, or perhaps they are just relying on it being utterly lost to all the hopeful amateurs who might be fooled into paying more for a worse product.   As for declicking iris rings, I strongly do not recommend doing it on stills lenses, even though it became hip amongst certain pretentious DSLR shooters. The reason again is the difference with cine lenses. Those have very long throw iris controls with clear demarcations on a wide-diameter setting ring. That allows repeatability and logging of exactly what the iris setting was for the shot. With the puny rings on stills lenses, you don't get repeatability, you barely even get fine control, and it's a hazard that you might accidentally turn them and screw up your exposure. All the declick buys you is the ability to attempt smooth iris fades manually. How often does anyone a) shoot with a manual focus lens and b ) actually pull a smooth iris fade? And maintain focus after doing so? More likely scenario in such a case would be to use a variable-ND filter that doesn't change the DoF as a side-effect, though it would have side-effects of its own. (FWIW, the C100 electronic iris control is quite smoothly ramped, as is the "silent tap" control on the 5D3, should you ever find yourself wanting iris pulls.)   And your "pretend" cine lens and declicked stills lens will have less resale value due to their not being of interest to stills shooters and suspect due to the modifications. So skip all that, leave the clicks in there, buy $5 rubber follow focus rings to put on your stills lenses and be happy.

All a speedbooster is going to do for you is get you close to what the 5D3 already does regarding DoF and low-light sensitivity. But it won't get you all the way. It's a means of people compensating for their puny sensors.  :P   Plus it's quite expensive at $600 or so for the good one (the cheap fotodiox knockoff got slammed in reviews I read). The one place I think it's useful is on the FS700, strictly because the FS700 offers 240fps overcrank and you want as much light on the sensor for overcrank as you can get.   You can rent a 5D3 of course and try it out and see if that "extra kick" is what's missing from your art. You will not have to rent lenses if you already have full-frame covering ones. I personally find it wasteful madness to have redundant lens systems and I'm not as budget constrained as you are. I just work with EF and a few EF-S and manual Nikon lenses that cover my 5D3 and C100 just fine and won't be obsolete soon. The 4K cameras are likely going to want at least Super35 size sensors and M43 glass will be SOL for them...possible loss of investment for the next generation. M43 4K if it ever is developed is going to have very puny photosites to work with, with physically limited dynamic range...and it's dynamic range that is attracting you to RAW after all.   Part of the problem is online blogs and discussion forums are full of gear addicts (can't deny I'm among them) who obsess over the finest gradations of image quality but who generally do middling to pitiful work. So you get cued into thinking you should be dissatisfied with your 60D. But I imagine you haven't gotten the most out of the 60D...if you like DR, are you shooting in Cinestyle? Cinestyle is terrific, and coupled with Neat Video and something like FilmConvert or even just de-logging manually as I often do you can make your 60D shine provided you avoid bad moire during capture (learn to recognize it in zoom assist and reposition the camera accordingly). And Cinestyle is free, Neat Video is cheap, and pulling an S-curve on log footage is a lot easier than working with RAW. But the gear addicts will aggressively deny this obvious truth because admitting it would threaten the justification for their ridiculous (given their output) investment.

I think you shouldn't buy anything. You already have something to play with that lets you learn film. For the handful of days a year* you need better quality than that, you should rent a professional cinema camera appropriate for the budget of your productions. Working with a professional kit will teach you more about film and what you're looking for than just a notch or two kludges up from where you are now would. And it will authentically deliver the quality you're seeking rather than just get close to it. And it will work out cheaper in the long run.   * EVERYONE thinks that if they only got the camera of their dreams they'd be out shooting every day. That has nothing to do with reality. Professional camera operators shoot every day, and some of them have their own cameras but most use what's provided or rent. But camera enthusiasts are people who rather than take what they have (even a cellphone) and shoot with it every day they sit around and think getting a better camera is what's holding them back from shooting. Sadly no. And anyone who isn't a pro camera operator, but is instead making entire productions themselves, will learn that capture is only about 10% of the process at most. Pre- and post-production in all its forms is at least 90% of your time. So the actual cost comparison of rental has to take that reality, so strongly denied by the ambitious amateur, into account.   Plus you can usually find a friend with more money than sense who has made this error to just lend you a better camera rather than buy one yourself.

That is a pitiful comparison. The exposure isn't matched, nothing's matched. The mkII is flat out out of focus. There should be licensing requirements to post product comparisons on the web (joking, but seriously...).

  I don't view DSLRs as RED competitors (even the 5D3 RAW hack, which embarrasses them to an extent in this example). I'm talking about cinema cameras (not usually covered on this blog other than arguments they aren't worth buying) competing with them. In the last Zacuto shootout the RED was already bleeding (Jannard had veins bursting out of his forehead over it all). Since then there are half a dozen new choices that make both Scarlet and Epic seem long in the tooth and suffering from an overpriced ecosystem. RED's strength was always it was the tech leader within its price range and it no longer has any claim on that at all. Dragon can restore that if it really is 20 stops of DR at 6K global shutter with a reliable production-ready implementation...   And the competition is getting hotter... http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/behind-screen/arris-managing-director-hd-is-578724

  Of course the courtesy of a link (to a reproducible, scientific comparison test of course!) would be appreciated...   I honestly doubt Sony would cripple the video on a MkII edition that added an articulating screen and a pricey EVF add-on that would be of most interest to videographers. The thing already has enough intrinsic limitations on quality that it can't threaten the higher end of the range even if they gave it 240fps 4K RAW.

I don't see why anyone would buy or rent a RED right now...sure they win this particular comparison but only by a nose. They desperately need the Dragon project to yield marketable results this year. Slicing their prices in half wasn't enough.

The lens has quite a bit of distortion on the wide end, which the GH2/3 fixes on its lenses. I don't know if Sony has distortion correction applied here yet...   The other thing is, I have mine on a small pistol grip, which is absolutely awesome for run'n'gun, but in crowds people have come upon me looking stunned, thinking (from the side) that I was actually pointing a pistol! So that takes away some stealth benefits (I was actually worried some clueless cop may even kill me thinking I was holding a gun). Maybe with the EVF to your eye it won't look like a gun so much. But definitely a small pistol grip is the way to go here, I fit the whole package in a small satchel and none's the wiser.

If hard drive access time is the rate limiter on your application speed, cloning onto a faster drive will speed up your applications. Applications don't "think they're on a slower drive." They request information from the drive and operate on it as soon as it gets to them.   Just clone your drive onto the SSD, if it all doesn't fit then uncheck the folders you don't need copied over (data/docs/etc.). See how it goes. I have done it successfully several times.

Since there is a strong code of omerta among those who've handled a 70D, stopping them all from even mentioning "video moire," I would presume it's still using line skipping garbage.   I imagine Canon has a term sheet as to what can and cannot be discussed about pre-production cameras and that would be in boldface on the list. This is among the many reasons one shouldn't pre-order anything other than out of charity, which Canon certainly doesn't need. We'll know the skinny within days of shipment date.

Use Carbon Copy Cloner to copy over the relevant parts of your rotational drive to the SSD (not all the movie/document bulk storage data). That way you shouldn't have to rebuild from scratch.   http://www.bombich.com