gethin

the camera store TV video guy (I quite like him, he always seems a bit uncomfortable in front of the camera), was bitching about the quality of the viewfinder. anyone else heared anything?

Dying dell 27" = new monitor time. I currently have 2 monitors - 4480 pixels wide in total. I'm thinking about moving to a single 4k display. Thing is to get the same dot pitch, thats a 40+ inch display, then you get issues of viewing corners. A 32 inch display means scaling the UI, something windows is still a bit crap at apparently. Anyone using a big arse display out there? Or has also made the move to a finer dot pitch display that can tell me any pros and cons? my shortlist: LG 31MU97 ($1100 in aus at the mo) BenQ SW320 (about $1750 on sale) or that 43" philips monster

real estate video shooting is my day job. They have got crap loads of direct sunlight coming into that room. No lights needed! I did a stills shoot the other day for a property the total opposite of this: no windows other than the one the view was through, no direct sun coming into the room from anywhere. Total nightmare to shoot, ended up bouncing some light in with big reflectors. No way on earth a video camera of any flavour could handle it. To combat the sun you'd need a huge light. Even in stills a big room will swallow a 300W strobe. You'd need HMIs, but totally impractical for a real estate shoot. When faced with videoing places like this it's really OK to say to the client "there's no way to get the view and interior". You can shoot the view with something in the foreground to get a sense that it is a view from the house. This can work well with longer lenses on a track or gimbal. you can set the camera to auto and move from the dark room to the view. Or you can shoot a raw timelapse if the dyanamic range is within the range of your gear. one ritzy place I shot I set up 2.4x1.2 metre poly silver boards, but even with an assistant and sandbags they kept blowing over lol. I've never bothered again. Would be quicker to go back at dawn or dusk and get the light streaming into the room. Sometimes you can just chuck a silver reflector on the floor if there is sunlight coming into the room, that will bounce a fair amount of light back up, off a white ceiling.

hurrah! have sony claimed 15 stops dynamic range before? If they really can beat nikon, that'll be something

25p crop or no crop for us PAL folk?

I'd be fine with something a bit thinner than a DSLR, any size between the d5500 and the d800. I dont think they need to do much to make a winner if the d850 is anything to go by. A mirrorless D850 with a cracking EVF and 10 bit video. If the first gen has IBIS I'll eat my shorts

not sure - nikon could differentiate by the mirrorless not having quite as good af, not being quite as fast, not having quite the same usability. To be honest though if they dont make the absolute best camera they are capable of (as I feel they did with the d850), they are F#!*ed. This is my day job. If I had one camera for stills and video I could shoot both at the same time, certain properties this would save me hours. A7riii is the closes to fitting the bill at the moment, but it still doesn't quite have the dynamic range (or the look) of the nikon. My experience with sony cams so far is that the usability isn't a patch on nikons, but I hear that is improving.

I'm a nikon user. Ever since I ditched my canon 7d system and moved to nikon i've loved being a nikon user. But for the last 4 or 5 years i've been looking for and failing to find a good stills/video balance in my kit. The d800 is too heavy and patchy for vid, the heaviness dissuaded me from bothering with the d810; the d5300/d5500 image was nice but the usability is poor. I tried the sony a6000, but it was no improvement over the d5300. I got a gh2 and loved the hacked image. I mean loved. But for my bread and butter the shadow noise and lack of dynamic range made me move on. I kept my speedbooster though to use on my... gx85 and finally gh5, but found that rather than simplifying my workflow it was complicating it.: Better image in the right circumstance but more work -and back to the gh2 condundrum - nice image but not for my day to day. And gx85 rolling shutter made me realise a6500 was out too. All this time, I've been thinking - should I just get an a7r2 and compromise my stills a little bit to get usable video - but then I still have the issue of changing lenses to get nice 4k using the apsc crop, and could I really bare to part with my 14-24 nikkor? And the little forays I made into sony (a6000, rx100mkiv), made me want to tell them about dials and usability. But I find myself thinking the same about the gh5. Menus for changing the exposure mode in video mode? Blurgh? No shutter readout in aperture priority? Oy vey! And now finally nikon have a great stills/video camera, but its back to that BIG conundrum. Yes I can shoot great stills and easily gradable footage, but I'm getting a bit old for a workout with every shoot. D850+14-24+crane2? I mean my arms are getting tired just typing this tirade. So this is not a complaint, or a wishlist. I'm just externalising my frustration in a forum of people who are vaguely likely to understand. I cant bring myself to compromise my still image for the sake of video, but I ultimately need to be profitable, and that means being able to do a shoot quickly. Having a camera I can shoot stills and video with would be a HUGE! boon. A photographer mate of mine said I'm a consummate waiter. I guess it's true: I'm hoping that nikon's mirrorless will be a d850 in a smaller form factor. And I feel like I have to wait to find out. If its not then I'll move on. But whatever to it will be hard to leave the nikon image behind for the sake of speed. All of which makes me realise, it comes down to which compromises you are willing to make. THere's never prefect kit. It's a matrix of your needs an priorities vs economic imperatives and pressures. ho hum ps. if this is true nikons mirrorless will be the most adaptable mount available:https://nikonrumors.com/2018/01/11/nikons-upcoming-mirrorless-camera-rumored-to-have-a-new-z-mount-with-16mm-flange-focal-distance.aspx/#more-118686

Noticed yesterday my d5500 had exposure smoothing, thought I'd give it a go with a day/night transistion. It did the transition OK, but the shutter speed only went to 1.6 seconds. (It was full moon, so at f2.8 and iso 1600 I could just about rescue the TL yay nikon). I cant find any words on nikon's TL. Does it top out at 1.6 sec in TL mode, or does it have a max range that it will go to when smoothing exposure (bearing in mind it started at 1/4000).

just set up the crane2. God the zy play app is terrible. Didn't even know what way was up on my tablet. And the motor controls are a bit hopeless. With my pilotfly I could control the rate and which is started moving (panning, say), and the rate at which it slowed. With the crane it starts suddenly, and although there is a setting to allow a smooth slow down its rubbish. If you're panning quickly and stop quite quickly instead of the speed tailing off gradually (and therefore naturally) it drops to it's crawl speed, and then crawls for however many degrees you've specified. can anyone tell me if there's anyway to get finer control than what's in the zy app?

I'm a huge fan of the sigma art 35mm f1.4, but its longitudinal chromatic aberration make focus pulls nasty. Any recommendations for 35mm FF or S35 lenses with similar rendering that dont suffer from that or fringing?

yep I've been "checking" for several years now. I had the sigma 400 (not the apo macro, but I'm aware that's the one to get), but it got furry. I have a 300mm, 400 is not enough of a gain to go in my bag, and I'll get a 1.4x to go with any lens I get taking it to 800ish. Anyhoo, thanks all for the suggestions, I've done my legwork, I know what I want to get I was just checking in to see if anyone had experience of em.

I have the nikon 70-200 which is peachy on both formats, but specifically want a long tele for the full frame stuff. Using it on M43 is a bonus. Very rarely see people talking about such long lenses on M43 I know, but thought I'd just see if anyone had experience. If I do end up getting it will report back. Should let me do some frame-filling moon shots on m43

nikon F and m43

long tele! Looking at getting a long tele zoom to go in my stills kit, anyone here have experience of using them with vid? I notice a few reviews mention chromatic abberation on the one I was looking at (tamron g2 150-600), not a problem with stills, but is with vid. (One of my favourite stills lens - sigma art 35 f1.4 has longitudinal aberration makes it not so nice for vid).

on the other hand: shoulder - the white rolloff is very nice, no clipping. Could it be something as simple as a new log mode? Unless we're talking about literal shoulders: I noticed some darkening around the white shoulders, which on the nikon at least is indicative of using active d-lighting. But seeing as no one has mentioned that, and someone hit the nail on the head, that can't be it.

i dont shoot anamorphic but to my eye the DOF is not M43. I shoot 35mm lens on a speedbooster all the time, at f2. It looks like this. Several people said it was raw, a few said it was a bigger sensor, but I think only one person said it was the sensor from the eva1 with a 4/3 mount. So that's my guess. And also: this is fun! It's like a whodunnit, but nerdier :D

well ok thats bit of a clickbait title, but I've had the gh5 for a month or so, and used it on a few jobs alongside the d5500. the thing that i've noticed is is that it's made me appreciate the d5500 more. thats not really what I wanted to happen: i even put the d5500 up for sale before I used the gh5 a bit, now I'm not sure which to sell. Here's some things I've noticed, and I'd love to hear from anyone that has also shot nikon and the gh5 to see if its all done to the learning curve: 1. D5500 dynamic range seems better than the gh5. Flat profile. Did the same shot with gh5 HLG and i could recover highlights and shadows better on the d5500 at similar isos. 2. Less noise in the shadows on the d5500. I seem to be able to grade the nikon more than the gh5. What the? 10 bit HLG and the shadows are noisy, d5500 8 bit compressed to hell and i can shoot at iso 1000 and still lift the shadows with minimal noise. 3. d5500 is a dog to use but it tells me what shutter speed I'm at when shooting in aperture priority. Also no zebras - but can get away with abotu a stop either side of correct exposure. not sure I could get away with that on the gh5. 4. Consistent colour. Ok so my workflow on the d55/5300 is several years old now, but I have a couple of lumetri presets that I chuck on my footage and it looks great with minimal farting around. gh5 - feels like its a bit all over the place. Some shots just look wrong. The greens are too cyan, the skin tones are... wrong. Using Paul leemings luts on the CineD and HLG and I I find myself tweak tweak tweaking just to try to get something that doesn't look nasty 5. It shoots glorious mushy 1080, which warp stabiliser chews through and sharpens up quite well. I just feel that the d5500's image has a certain something naturally, and that you have to fight for that with the gh5: for what I do I dont have time for that. I just need it to good quickly, not great slowly. The gh5 has made me curious about the video on the d850, and hoping very much that nikon's mirrorless offering is not too far away. If I'm wrong, I'm all ears...

its all the framing: That thing moves across the sky fast. I connected my gx85 to a mates gimbal mounted 600mmf4 with 2x teleconverter. chasing that thing accross the sky was hilarious. I thought they were all blurry , but a while later I found a couple of shots where you could discern the shape. This is jupiter shot the same night with the d810: The gx85 was shot wide open, stopping down a bit helped a lot, but M43 not great when pushing isos, so the final results from d810/ gx85 were about the same. The takehome was: plan like buggery: dont try to follow it accross the sky, use a telescope

i've never manged to get such a good result with mercali. Nearly every shot that warp stabilser cant handle, mercali cant handle either. the only time its ever been better than warp stabilser is for gopro action shots. Warp stabilser fails me most often in tracking shots. it hates going through doorways. I'm wondering how much faff there is in post with this. this technology would be fab built into a camera though, saving a sidecarfile with every shot.

@jonpais, OK! well I guess I might as well get my head into that before getting any deeper into cinelike d. No, havent fiddles with highlight shadow yet, idynam off. Histogram was just slightly to the left of bang in the centre (but I must admit the histogram was very narrow, not evenly spread over the tonal range - I'll double check to see if I messed with tone curves). the other shot I did just before it was exposed exactly the same, but shooting into the sun and all looks fine - except again for quite a lot of noise in the hair. ANyhoo, the rest of the shoot was fine so the one curve I need to work on is the learning one and thanks for the heads up on 10 bit HLG. For what I do it means cinelike D is still worth exploring. I'll keep HLG for the right project.

so you're shooting HLG, and then applying leeming's Luts is that right? Can you use HLG with all the movie settings? Whats the advantage? (so many questions!) it was the highest quality 1080 that allowed VFR (whatever that was, I think its 8bit 150 Mbps). iso 200, stupidly high shutter speed (like 8000th, @f2).

Just shot my first commercial project on the gh5, Footage looks OK so far, although did notice a whole load of noise on a couple of VFR shots at 180 fps. One was slightly underexposed but not by much... 1:1 grab. Iso 200, but shot at rediclous shutter speed, cos I was shooting wide open on speedbooster. Maybe that was it? Should clean up OK though. So wondering if there are any cinelike D luts out there that I should try out? Most of the stuff I've found is Dlog. Any pointers welcomed

yeah was't the last one like $5k? The AF will be basic I would say.

thanks @Orangenz was hoping it would have the sense to go to a low power mode save for the timer. Probably doesn't have one would be my guess. Hey ho. I've got so many dummy batteries knocking about (including a few I made). The exposure smoothing is something you can do with sony cameras, I just assumed panasonic would have similar: it allows you to track changing ambient light but ignores minor variations. Its a bit crap for day to night transitions (at east on my rx100iv), but it could be perfected.