jgharding

I just don't buy this whole "blame the distribution compression" excuse. Firstly, that's how media is bloody consumed, in a sense unless you're going to a cinema screen, it's all that matters. If the concatenation errors were so severe that footage looked awful online these cameras would be practically useless, it's a bad excuse. I've watched plenty of stuff shot on RED and Alexa in sub YouTube-quality compression and it doesn't display these issues. It's the 1Dx capture process, plain and simple. Sensor downsampling and processing are to blame. It's most likely they've tweaked about with the on board processing to create this 'unique' look for the 1Dx, but it doesn't look too great to me.Certainly not for the heaps of cash they want for it.

[color=#222222][font=Helvetica Neue', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif][size=4][background=rgb(255, 255, 255)][quote] :D To the owner of a Scarlett, who just invested 20.000 + in his set up, this sounds condescending. He surely doesn't want his camera to be forgiving (which implies that his incompetence to light and expose correctly needed forgiveness), he wants it to shine. And that's where I see the connection between parts 1 + 2 and part 3. The greatest portion of the budget went to the [i]time on set[/i]. I think this is credible. And if you [i]have[/i] hired the best DP and the most forgiving camera (= big budget), the shoot is effective not by sparing one or two thousand dollars, but by getting results that shine. That look brilliant on a big screen. Photographers who believe they can light and expose sloppily because they get absolution in post have lost the point. [/background][/size][/font][/color][/quote] Sorry if this came across condescending, it wasn't meant to be! Though I appreciate people get very sensitive and/or protective when they invest money! It's just a fact as far as I can see, and Zacuto prove it here. Take a scene lit in the same way and point a cheap still cam and a cinema cam at it and your resulting footage will be more forgiving from the cineama cam! Bags of DR, lovely sensor processing and AD conversion, hardly any compression, it's always gonna be the case. You can go all over the place with the footage, while the grade on a Canon will swiftly start to look like a bag of spanners if you take it too far. You gotta bake it in to some degree, and that is what I mean by less forgiving. It's harder to change your mind! Either way, it stands that a rubbish lighting setup and a set of dodgy actors shot on Alexa will be less interesting to an audience than an amazingly lit scene and the next Paddy Considine shot on a compact! It's just nice to know that if you've got the skills, you [i]can [/i]make a good movie on a cheap cam! Great times! If I won the Euromillions, I'd still buy an Alexa though ;) it's easier to use than a breadknife and looks the nuts.

Well the fact that I shot it five years ago tells I've been doing it a while! OK, yes the codecs back then were really really crap. And I'm pushing it a bit with the Z1, which was a bit rancid, I'm just being misty eyed ;) HV20 Cinemode was like the similar mode on Z1: it threw away half the lines in order to de-interlace and give a progressive feel, so you lost a lot of resolution. I still used to use it though. I think it was called PsF or Progressive Segmented Frame. Glad to see the back of that! I was more talking about the slightly later progressive models: you could use external recorders with EX3 and DOF adapter and get a real 1080 picture (if my memory serves, I'm struggling to track down some files to test it) all the SLRs fall short of that right level of resolution now... The RX100 reminds me of the level of sharpness from those methods, except its tiny and convenient, plus has some nice shallow DOF available. Amazing! Of course I'd never be bothered with that kit nowadays, but Mr Edwards did for Monsters and it worked out pretty well!

Yeah that's a good point, no-one is likely to hire a load of Panavision Primos to stick on a GH2 :) If i had the budget to hire that kind of glass for a day, chucking in another 600 quid for the Alexa kit would be peanuts. I'm still amazed by what the cheap stuff can do full stop! It's so easy to take it for granted already...

[quote name='evil_thought2' timestamp='1345182347' post='15863'] Actually, the final episode was the most objective and best camera test. Part 2 was just about subjective interpretation of the scene by the DPs. Most people picked B in part 2 because it was most over-lit. A few didn't like B because they thought it was too bright. Part 2 said nothing about camera performance. It was about DPs interpretation of the scene. Part 3 is real test of each camera's ability. Every camera was using identical lighting .. [/quote] Then as far as i can see part 1 and 2 are the useful parts, because the only thing I'll ever actually be doing with each camera is creating subjective interpretation of a scene with a DP (either someone else or myself). If I have a 5D MKii or a bridge camera I'm not going to shoot with it and light for it like it's an Alexa, so all part 3 does is prove that, yes, a $60,000 camera is much more forgiving and a better piece of kit, which we all already know! I know if I had unlimited budget I'd hire an Alexa for every shoot. I learn nothing from that being confirmed. The only lesson to come from this shootout [i]is [/i]that some very experienced people picked a cheap camera out of the lineup on aesthetic alone. The reason that's a good lesson is because that's your actual audience reaction, and what happens in the real world. Lighting everything the same -- in effect purposefully mis-using a less-forgiving piece of equipment -- then saying "look, cheap cameras aren't as good" is a bit of pointless academia IMHO. The spec sheet already tells me that information.

At the mention of old HDV, I was thinking about HDV cams earlier, and how some models were so damn good despite the compression. The resolving power of the RX100 compact is awesome, that little thing is getting on for the sharpness we used to have with small-chip cameras like EX1 and EX3 (back when 1080p was REALLY 1080p ;) ). It's a shame the larger sensor models aren't back up to that standard unless you wanna buy a RED or Alexa. Even watching some footage from Z1 I took over 5 years ago, it's really damn sharp and nice. Hopefully the Alpha hack will extend to the little RX100 and we can have 25p and high bit-rates too, but even for now between a sharp stabilised compact and an EOS with Magic Lantern 2.3 (550D, 600D, 5D MKii) I don't see the need to drop $6000! I can't say it looks that "unique" to me. I have come round to feeling that 135 photographic full frame is nicer looking in general than APSC though. It only took me two years to be convinced...

I wonder if there's any more un-dicovered gems out there? I've tried a lot of second hand stuff now. I never found a good but old Tokina, though the modern 11-16 is essential. I think these Takumars are great, as are many Olympus Zuiko OM lenses. The Zeiss ones are good but I'd never buy them at current prices, I just lucked out by getting in early. The exception being the Zeiss Contax 80-200mm f4, which was bloody awful to use and was flogged. I suppose it depends on the look you want! There's a lot of ancient single or un-coated glass around that might give some crazy vintage looks to signature shots... I've used Canon L and though it all looks very sharp and bright it all feels a bit sterile to me. I reckon we're all saying: "thread starter, go buy some Takumar before the price goes up".

The FS100 shares the F3 sensor, looks like this one does share the VG20 sensor. Being a re-purposed still-image sensor it's likely to give image quality very close to the SLR footage we're used to: quite soft with some aliasing, 8-bit colour depth 4:2:0 sub-sampling. It'll please those who like the ENG form factor and want an all-in-one shallow DOF solution for relatively cheap. What with the on-camera backup too, I'd guess lower end ENG and documentary shooting is the intended market for this. At least they didn't stick the screen in the middle this time!

Holy radioactive lenses, Batman! :0

They've taken on a massive task here, demand is bound to have outstripped supply by many times, so they're probably making sure they can close-to cover it without any recalls etc... Personally I didn't order one. I'll wait til I can try one out first! Incidentally, when I used to work at a magazine and dealt with BMD they were easily some of the most friendly and down to earth people in the industry, right up to the top. The company really is motivated by bringing in great products for insanely low cost to the consumer and I don't think this product could be in the hands of a better bunch! I'm sure all will come good, best to just be patient and get on with filming in the mean time... who knows, maybe you'll have time to shoot another short before the camera gets here, no sense waiting about!

Jesus. For the price difference the image difference is absolutely bugger all! I mean look at it... In what situation is an end user -- who neither knows or cares what you shot on -- going to notice such a [i]tiny[/i] difference? The overall image feel is pretty much the same... You could easily post produce the difference between these cams to a negligible level even for most perverted pixel peepers (PPPs). Unless you want the cam for stills or have money to burn, I don't think 1Dx is worth it at all.

I had some before I got the Zeiss ones! Here's the first video I ever shot with a 550D a couple of years ago. The main wide shot is a 28mm Takumar, it was great. The other shot is a Pentax mount 55mm f1.2. I sold it because the Zeiss equivalent 1.4 was actually faster and nicer looking, despite a tighter aperture. I only got rid of the 28mm f2 when I got the Zeiss 28mm f2 nicknamed Hollywood (no, really, it's official and stuff!), and I'd still be happy to shoot with a Takumar. IMHO, almost any manual old prime is better than getting a cheap modern low-end plastic Canon lens. They're just vile to use. [url="https://vimeo.com/12227849"]https://vimeo.com/12227849[/url]

With so many hacks going around for Sony, I hope someone hacks the RX100! It really does have a special market position, and being able to access 24/25p as well as much higher bit rates than 28mbps would be wonderful. It'd also be great to be able to change the speed of focus using the ring, and a couple of other tweaks.

It's odd but even back at the very start I decided not to buy any Canon glass at all, thinking it was likely that the race would hot up. But then I ended up getting lovely glass that won't fit Nikon or Sony legacy mounts! Still, once everyone chucks out the mirror it wont matter eh?

Sony are an odd bunch, there's always that battle between the company philosophy of locking people into their accessories. Does anyone remember ATRAC3 (the alternative to MP3), or the UMD disc, or Sony Memory Stick?! They've killed a lot of products with attempts to control accessories. So I've been surprised that they're not too fussed about NEX adapters. It's just a shame they picked the longest possible mount when designing the Alphas. It was the old Minolta mount, right? As you say, if it's super awesome enough I could just flog a bunch of Zeiss Contax for newer Zeiss and Samyang. If they can pull the price below the BMD camera and the 5D MKiii yet make it a proper video camera, this could be huge. As you say, they don't have huge lines to protect like Canon...

I hear what you're saying about glass. On a day to day basis I deal with editing a lot more C300 than anything else, and so much of it looks really brittle and electronic, even though it grades really nicely. It's not that it's bad, just that it's a bit lifeless. Nothing that wrong with it, but not much very right either. It's usually shot with those overpriced dull-looking L lenses too, though sometimes stuff comes in from CP2s and looks a bit nicer.. But then recently I had some 7D footage from a Hot Rodded model, using some older hired PL-mount cine lenses. F**k me it looked amazing (aside from the moire). The sense of 3D depth to the movement was something else! Plus it was all nicely lit. But even the rather flatly lit shots were just lovely... the glass really makes a huge difference. I can't wait til you can get some of your Iscos on the BMD! Speaking of monitors and compression doing justice, I watched Drive recently on standard def DVD on the Dell U2711, so compressed to hell and on a sharp monitor and it STILL looked amazing and nice and 3D and lively (sat back a little way ;) ). So I can't get into the theory that it's web compression or monitors that make footage feel flat, because if it has a real feel in its raw form it'll be there when it's compressed. If you shoot something looking dead, it's not gonna liven up because you add a few MBPS at encoding, but if you shoot it with real life, it'll maintain the life even when it's crushed down for web! Little 360p movie trailers really prove that. So perhaps if someone whacked some really nice glass on a GH2 and used high bitrate and lit exceptionally well and used it to tell a great story I'd change my mind... but I dunno... I think there's just something about that sensor I don't feel. I suppose it's similar with old film stocks, where some would prefer one type and one another, or the way some people love the Nuemann signature mic sound and some hate it! Maybe I should put my money where my mouth is, and buy one and see what I can do with it! Having watched that Zacuto shootout I picked the Alexa, F65 and GH2 blind, and the GH2 only fell down a step or two cos I thought it looked kinda.... flat, especially in the deeper focus toward the start :/ So I suppose it's all taste! But the scene was just ugly and looked like something of Tommy Wiseau's The Room, so it was kinda hard to get into the feel of the shots either way. I guess we just end back at: if the film is awesome, you won't care too much which one it was shot on. :wub: I'm shooting for 3 days with FS700 soon so I'll be giving that a tough time to see what it can do...

That's pretty exciting! :lol: The only possible downers are: judging by RX100's cost this will be really expensive.... and the Alpha mount flange distance is longer than Ron Jeremy, so I couldn't use my big expensive sack of Contax glass :(

Oh dear, I spy a sinc graph! I've not read this many graphs since I read Dan Lavry's paper on AD/DA conversion and digital sampling in audio... I shall save this for the next train journey! ;) Thanks for that... So to continue a little, why would a sensor with a 2.3x crop and only 2.5K sensor still appear so 'flat' in depth terms, despite using Zeiss glass (which can produce wonderfully 3D results with stills cameras cramming far more pixels into the same space on APS-C or full-frame) and using so little compression? Surely the physical size of the sensor has an effect regardless, as a larger sensor is capturing light over a broader area, so the resulting image is bound to be a 'deeper' point of view?

@CPC so effectively you need a lens that is 2.3 times sharper in terms of resolving power in order to achieve the same 'feel', as the sensor is simply less forgiving? That's a tall order.

[quote name='cpc' timestamp='1344421732' post='15122'] This is normal and is related to how lens microcontrast interacts with sensor pixel density. At the same image resolution subject "pop" will be more noticeable in an image made with a big sensor/film-size. This is usually immediately noticeable with still images but is generally masked out by video compression issues in moving pictures. .... This is normal and is related to how lens microcontrast interacts with sensor pixel density. At the same image resolution subject "pop" will be more noticeable in an image made with a big sensor/film-size. This is usually immediately noticeable with still images but is generally masked out by video compression issues in moving pictures. [/quote] Wow! That's fascinating stuff! Is there somewhere I can read more about this, or would you mind going into more detail? I'd love to learn the science that's behind my natural reaction to said footage. It really is noticeable with RAW stills: medium format beats full frame beats APS-C beats M4/3 and so on in the "3D" stakes in my experience, I've even double blind picked them from selections of portraits. I see what you're saying saying: that ordinarily the interf-rame compression and the like will smear this feel in video footage so that it's less pronounced, though I think it's getting noticeable with the likes of high-bitrate GH2 and BMD CineCam. Just as with microphones, where the physical size of the diaphragm simply is a contributing factor to the sound no matter what other tech is strapped around it, it seems the same is true of the image-capture area: you can't fake the physical reality of the size of that part however hard you try. Will there ever be a way to make photo-diodes behave more like film? Some kind of pseudo-lightfield microlens technology but used for traditional capture not gimmicky post DOF control? to broaden their angle of absorption and the spread of light in an organic way? Am I being intuitive here, or absurd?

I went and got one of these to replace my broken (dropped in the sea) HX9v. It's exceptional: manual control plus super stablilisation and 50p, and a one-inch sensor, AND it's tiny! Customisation of functions is brilliant too. All my wide steady shots are shot on this now, rather bothering to stick a wide on an SLR and that on a rig, which is a bloody hassle. If you want ND, you can buy some Lee ND gel as it costs nothing for a huge roll, and you can pop it over the front using tape or blu tac, or a custom ring of some kind if you're good at that kind of thing. The LX7 will drop a lot of points on noise on dynamic range probably with a sensor that little, but it could still be good in its own right. The aperture numbers are kinda deceptive, with a sensor that small, even the wide aperture at the long end won't give you equivalent DOF or light to the RX100...

[quote name='John Brawley' timestamp='1344378082' post='15084'] Hmm. Not a single L series lens was used for this clip. Maybe you should read the post that gives this context. [url="http://johnbrawley.wordpress.com/2012/08/07/some-more-blackmagic-cinema-camera-footage/"]http://johnbrawley.w...camera-footage/[/url] JB [/quote][quote name='John Brawley' timestamp='1344378082' post='15084'] Hmm. Not a single L series lens was used for this clip. Maybe you should read the post that gives this context. [url="http://johnbrawley.wordpress.com/2012/08/07/some-more-blackmagic-cinema-camera-footage/"]http://johnbrawley.w...camera-footage/[/url] JB [/quote] Hmm I missed that link before, cheers, I've now read it in full! I'm into Zeiss, so it's something else then. Maybe I just don't like small digital sensors. I've never really been able to "get into" hacked GH2 even with huge bitrates, I just can't say I 'feel' it. I don't 'feel' the stuff from the RX100 either, but it's just a cheap practical and usefull B-cam for running about with. That's a 1-inch sensor. Small film? Great, I love how 16mm looks. Perhaps a small sensor treated with many many layers of post until it feels as organic will be good. But photodiodes are fundamentally very different to film, so it's not fair to compare them straight up (as some in this thread have) and say "film this big looks awesome so a sensor this big will be awesome!" Still I see very few final products that come from small sensors that don't feel slightly... flat... in a depth sense. Something I don't see as often with 135 full frame regardless of detail or resolution. Does anyone else get what I mean? Or am I off my swede? Is it actually just the lighting or the lack of subtle post in many productions shot with small-sensor cams? I've yet to watch the Zacuto shootout, maybe that'll change my mind. This is certainly the most fun I've had in ages chatting before a camera's release, but we'll all know soon enough... I know I'll be giving one a try either way.

Hmmmm the plot thickens. I wasn't [i]that [/i]impressed with this stuff. I mean I know it's natural light with little augmentation so it's never going to look blockbuster, but larger-sensor cameras are able to make even mundane daytime scenes seem otherworldly, I think it may just be the nature of super 35 size and up. My recent experience with digital medium format confirmed this for me! Looking through the lens is really eerie. Even with one eye it's almost stereoscopic looking. Panning has a beautiful but surreal sense of depth. Then again, since Leica lenses also have this look, perhaps it's more glass choice. But there is an oddly electronic 'feel' to the image here. The motion itself is filmic (low jello and I-frame compression hand in hand there I reckon), but overall it's kind of... dead. Something tells me it's a combo of heavy sensor crop increasing DOF and reducing the 3D feel, plus the lens choice. It could be Canon L lenses here as the image is pretty warm, and I usually find them kind of sterile. Incidentally, I don't think this camera should have an EF mount, it should have a removable electronic EF mount with a mirrorless one behind, then people could play with hired, high-end PL glass and the like, to give the camera a fair run against RED and Alexa. The whole raw/prores/no in-cam NR or sharpness stuff is great, but this clip left me feeling a bit disappointed. Will be nice to see some footage that's really gone through its paces. I mean, in order to make EOS footage look the way I want takes a lot of processing (noise reduction, grades, film grain and more), so I'd love to get hold of some rushes and REALLY go to town on them, then judge the cam again. I suppose on balance, if we'd only ever seen straight rushes from the 5D MKii none of this revolution would ever have started ;) But still, I've yet to feel excited by a real image from this camera, it's only the spec sheets that have got me going, and that doesn't feel right. Perhaps it'll look nicer with a good super fast wide on the front... I'm still watching closely. Perhaps it's simpler than the above, and I just don't like the work of the film maker. After all, I've seen phenomenal work and average work and bad work come out of 5Ds.