pietz

thanks for the explanation. can you confirm that this lever works with the sigma 18-35mm? ok i might hold on for a while then. $450 for the speed booster sounds like a lot of money if i dont get all the benefits i hoped for. on the other hand shooting only at f1.2 sounds tiring. i just absolutely fell i love with the look of this lens. i sometimes find the native m43 lenses pretty expensive. i mean $900 for the 12-35mm f2.8? the canon 24-105mm f4 on FF is one stop faster (if you take sensor size into account), also comes with OIS, has a bigger zoom range and costs $700. its just ridiculous... anyway, thanks a lot.

different people, different stories. let me summarize and please correct me if im wrong: 1. Yes, the manual aperture control was what i heard about Nikon glass and its true in general, just not for THIS lens. so if im going with a dumb adapter, it really doesnt make a difference for this lens if its Canon or Nikon mount. 2. Additionally because Canon EF has a shorter flange distance i wanted to go with it. then i could have connected another adapter to the focal reducer and use Canon and Nikon lenses with one focal reducer. 3. So the original Speed Booster gives me aperture control of the lens itself and for cases where this doesnt work manual aperture control inside the speed booster. 4. GH4 (what i would be using) + focal reducer + Sigma 18-35mm might vignette a little of what i heard, which fades away completely when using 4k, because of the additional crop. wow, i never thought i would admit the fact that there is a benefit in the additional crop :D so in the end i would go with a metabones speed booster, but only if it existed as an EF-M43 to have all the benefits on my side: aperture control, can connect the lenses of my colleages, connect nikon glass with an additional adapter, have manual aperture for those nikon lenses and a tripod mount. but since theres only a Nikon F version some of these benefits would fade away for me personally, thats why im having trouble to pay the high price... any other recommendations?

so there wouldnt be any advantage of the nikon combo over canon, correct? i thought i read something that is possible with nikon lenses but not with canon glass. thats why im asking, but im probably just mistaken...

im about to order the Sigma 18-35mm f1.8 + a focal reducer to go with it. because of the budget i'll go with one of the cheaper focal reducers from ebay, because from the tests i've seen they deliver comparable results to the Speed Booster. since these focal reducers are available for pretty much all mounts, including canon EF, is there any reason i should go with a Nikon mount anyway? its the only option for speed boosters because those dont come in an EF flavor, but many of my colleagues have canon lenses, so it would make sense for me to get it as a EF combo. that would also mean shooting exclusively wide open. has anyone had experience with the sigma when at full aperture? or do you think it make sense to invest the extra $350 for the metabones speed booster? thanks, pietz

but see my friend, you're not giving me much to work with. many people have theories and throw them out there, but without any evidence or proof you cant just go around and tell people they're wrong. i mean Ken Ham believes the world as completely flooded 4000 years ago for a full year and the only reason he can state pretty much is: "you cant prove that im wrong. something that happens in the past can never be proven true." well, i just dont argue with people discussing like this. its not a logical behaviour. and you go around saying, i found this ground breaking new theory and youre all wrong but i wont prove it to you. i just cant take you serious and i hope you understand my reason behind it. you also keep stating things that give the appearance as if you absolutely dont know what youre talking about. how am i to test this myself with a camera and a zoom lens? your statement from page one is also based on this false connection to this matter. well this is undoubtedly true, what does it have to do with this discussion? if you take one image at 50mm and crop away so much it has the same viewing angle as a 200mm. than you take the same image at 200mm. well OBVIOUSLY these pictures will look different and nobody is saying otherwise, but if this is the only reason behind my wrong-being, you should rethink your theory rather quickly.

@araucaria the one thing i like more than telling people how wrong they are, is actually learning to know i was wrong. that way, ill wake up the next day knowing something more. that in mind, i would highly appreciate if you ever published the facts, because as of right now i cant see them to be true. based on the fact that full frame is PRECISELY twice as high and wide as m43 and we're also comparing SAME aspect ratios, im certain to say (as of right now) that 30mm f2.8 will give you the exact same look on m43, as 60mm f5.6 will give you on FF. just based on the optical physics i learned. now comes your turn for saying: dude look at my 2 comparison shots and see how the bokeh differs. and i get you. but i also immediately see how you didnt use 30mm but 28mm. now you go: dude, do you seriously wanna talk about a 2mm difference? really?! and i go: absolutely, because the difference in bokeh is just as small as this difference to my eyes- now one of two things could have happened: 1. to get the exact same image you cropped away some of the 28mm picture 2. FF is not precisely twice height and width of M43, maybe because of different aspect ratios either way which of the two is the case, your comparison shot is not a valid comparison anymore. if you cropped away some of the image you OBVIOUSLY get a deeper dof in the m43, as its the same as cropping a 50mm picture to 200m equivalent will never get you the same image as an original 200mm shot at the same f-stop. if you didnt crop away anything than the crop isnt PRECISELY 2 and therefor going up PRECISELY 2 stops doesnt give you the same image either. your fellow believer "rchg101" posted two comparison shots of which i dont see the purpose in this discussion, as the dof seems to be precisely the same. the fact that in-focus points are sharper on a ff camera are nothing new either, but that doesnt have anything to do with this topic. however righg101, i wanna thank you for your focal reducer statement from the bottom of page 2. if taking a speedbooster into this discussion it should always be seen as part of the lens. therefor changing its light sensitivity and its focal length. saying that it changes the sensor size or its crop factor seems to be true in many examples, but its not the same if we look at it more closely. and since this discussion is getting pretty anal, we need to be specific.

i would recommend the G6 or the D7100. im a big fan of the G6, but since you have some nikon glass and are used to this system, i would probably recommend going with the D7100. (but i dont have any first hand experience with this camera) G6 + focal reducer + nikon glass is a great setup, but everybody coming from the photography side of life seems to be allergic to manual focus. and thats all youll have with this setup. dont get the GH3! not only is the G6 cheaper, but its also a better camera over all. at least for the kind of video work i do. the only real advantage of the GH3 is weather sealing, if you dont need that, dont get this camera. the 72mbit all i is on par with the 24mbit ipb codec of the G6. the g6 has a better display and focus peaking. i would much rather spend the extra money of the gh3 on a lens. if you do run and gun video (like it sounds like) the G6 with 14-140mm is an absolutely astonishing setup. nice zoom for getting into those climbers: check. OIS for stable footage out of hand: check. but go to a store first and put your hands on this camera. i know how hard it is to switch camera systems, that why you might wanna stay with Nikon.

do you have a preproduction camera? you have been talking about some menu bugs as well, it kinda sounds like yours is broken or comes with unfinished firmware.

Andrew, i just sometime feel like youre selling your opinions as facts, which i dont agree with nor like. your tests are perfectly objective and i love your page for that. but saying that its "madness" not to use the gh4 in 4k or declining that it doesnt come "at many costs", is not true. whats true is, that these draw backs are so little to YOU, you dont mind them, and that is absolutely fine. but its just not true for everybody, like it sounds like in your answer to my post. obviously the 4k image of the GH4 is absolutely lovely and i can understand everybody using it exclusively for everything they do. but i for example shoot weddings and like to record everything with at least 50frames to have a dreamy slowmo when i need it. my G6s 50fps is soft, i hate it. having a crisp 62fps on the new gh4 is a real advantage for me. next, i shoot on cruise ships that often vibrate due to the engine. with even worse rolling shutter in 4k the footage will look terrible, having 50% less rolling shutter in 1080p is another huge advantage for me. that also applies when i have to stabilize shots in post. these things sum up in my personal use cases, which is why id rather use this camera in 1080p 62fps than in 4k. this goes against anything you believe in, but only because you re putting your focus on different features than i am :) what im saying is: the way it works right now the 4k is not a selling point for ME. the gh4 comes with other great features that are good to have, but especially on the auto focus (in video), i expected some better. i understand your opinion thinking "pietz, its the first camera that shoots seriously impressive 4k material and it even costs below $2k. how can you complain about this camera?" but if 4k isnt a selling point for me, im not left with so many other improvements in the gh4. and not having auto focus in VFM at all is just rediculous in my oppinion.

uhm, i wasnt actually including you in my fanboy phrase...? you just put yourself there :) but let me rephrase more clearly and with a smile in my heart: if anyone is offended by facts, you should probably rethink your way of thinking. i started this thread to bring information to the table and help people making a choice. i never mentioned that i dont like the GH4, i actually only said the opposite. AFS is very important to me. having an auto focus like the new A6000 is absolutely astonishing in my opinion: just because i dont do commercial shots with auto focus, doesnt mean that there arent many uses where it makes so much sense. maybe not for you Andrew, but for wedding videos or any kind of real time documentary, i cant always take the time to manually focus and set up my camera perfectly. and im just saying i would have loved the GH4 to have better video auto focus, since they made a huge fuzz abut the new focus system. i found out that the soft image appears when you go from 62fps to 75fps. in case thats interesting for some. and i did just see your rolling shutter test, Andrew. exactly what i was looking for, thanks! it really did improve in 1080p! personally i think the 4k of the GH4 comes at too many other costs, which is why im only interested in the improved 1080p mode. if anyone has anymore input regarding this, id like to see. until then ill stop posting in this thread, since my help wasnt really appreciated.

i dont understand those people who go all "fanboy" on my idea. is the gh4 a great camera? yes. is it a good bang for the buck? absolutely. is it perfect? obviously not. since its a new camera i thought it would only be fair to talk about things people should know before buying this camera. if you would only get it for the 96fps mode and then notice that its quite soft and auto focus doesnt work, youd be disappointed, correct? im just here to list facts and information, if you feel you have to defend the gh4 for being super cool and i'm just a bad person for even talking about these things, i think youre being subjective and need to grow up. anyway i did a quick screenshot comparison between 1080p 96fps off the camera and downscaling it to 720 and then upscaling it back to 1080p. http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/74686 as you can see there is more information in the 1080p picture. that means although the 1080p 96fps picture might be a little soft, it retains more information than a 720p picture. id love to see a comparison like this between the GH3 and GH4 both in 1080p mode regarding sharpness and rolling shutter :) if anyone has the possibility to do this test, id highly appreciate it.

im not surprised by this result at all. it would have been my first guess that 100mbps ipb is better than 200mbps all i on the GH4 and any other camera to begin with. especially in a comparison like the one you made. let me explain: most of you know what i, p and b frames are and how they work, so i wont get into it. for the 200mbps option to be better in image quality than the 100mbps one, all B and P frames from the lower setting need to be larger (in file size) than half the size of an i frame. lets talk numbers: an i frame in the 200mbps is pretty much exactly 1MB in file size, that means the b and p frames from the 100mbps setting need to be between 500kB and 1MB, so the 200mbps option is superior in picture quality. but thats just rarely the case. b and p frames are usually smaller than half the size of an i frame. in an example like yours with a locked camera the b and p frames will probably around 10 to 20% the size of an i frame, because you have very little change from one frame to the other. if the camera uses 100% of its available bandwidth, which my theory is based upon, the 100mbps will bring you much better quality, because the i frames in the 100mbps setting are "allowed" to be larger than in the 200mbps option. the only advantage of shooting only i frames is that your computer has to work and calculate less. meaning it works better and its response is faster. if however youre on a very fast machine anyway, theres not a legitimate reason to use 200mbps all i.

Hello everybody, i wanted to collect all the things where the GH4 doesnt quite work as it should. Those can be bugs, problems or things that are just worse when compared to the GH3. bugs or problems are something that need to be fixed and since panasonic seems to read around this forum, it might shorten the time to do so. quirks are negative aspects about this camera, that people need to know before buying it, since these things are not advertised: -Very soft video in variable framerate mode: 1080p 96fps footage looks more like 720p which has been upscaled than actual full hd footage. -No auto focus in slow motion mode: when recording 96fps the auto focus is not available, which is understandable on my end. but its also not available when you havent even started recording, which is just weird. so once you set it to 96fps, you have to focus manually. -Slow auto focus in video: its hard to detemine a definiton for "slow" in this regard but since its slower than the GH3 it cant be working properly. it should be faster, due to the new auto focus system used or at least the same than the GH3. -Crop on 4k video: recording in 4k will give you a crop factor of 2.3 instead of 2. -Rolling shutter is worse in 4k: rolling shutter is worse when you are filming in 4k compared to 1080p, which makes sense. but its also worse than 1080p on the GH3. i thought the sensor read out was supposed to me much faster on the GH4. anything else? i heard there was some audio issue with humming when not in manual video mode. is that correct? please let me know other things i forgot or didnt know.

Hey everybody. I just asked myself which mode i would use for a project that i need to export in full hd. c4k or 4k? leaving out the different aspect ratios because i mostly go to cinemascope anyway, the c4k (4096px wide) image is a little bigger and therefore has more video information. however 4k (3840xpx wide) will have a perfect 50% downsample and create 1 pixel out of 4. what do you think would be better?

you ripped my quote out of context, if you had included my next sentence, your comment would have been unnecessary...

yes, its like the GH3 at 1080p. when you switch to 4K however the crop is even higher. i dont have the exact numbers, 2.25 crop i believe? are thre aready comparions between GH3 and GH4 @ 1080p? maybe even stills in comparison to GH3 or EM1? i think that the GH4 is a great camera, with the official price tag it sounds even better, but the handheld shooting style is still very popular and i need my next camera to have IBIS. switching from my 25mm 1.4 to the 14-140mm just for OIS, just isnt acceptable anymore. i would have rather seen a GH4 with sharper 1080p compared to GH3, IBIS and no 4K option, than what the GH4 offers right now. sure 4k is nice to have and Andrew always says that you can always downsample it to 1080p obviously, but that happens at the price of a smaller sensor. sure its only a very small difference to m43, but we have to draw the line somewhere. going from fullframe to apsc to M43 multiaspect to M43 to cropped M43 doesnt cut it anymore for me. when i buy a new generation of a camera i need it to be better or at least the same in ALL aspects. cropping m43 even more is definately a step back that im not willing to take. however i can understand anybody who ll buy this camera in a heartbeat :)

or just use 1080p footage and scale it to 960x540. still plenty large for comparison and the same effect as 4k to 1080p.

im exactly where svendson is right now, so i dont give you the long form of my comment. however. i do respect mr newman and im certainly not the person to say somebody is wrong just for kicks, but im at least 90% sure that 2.7k 4:2:0 sampled to 1080p will NOT give you 4:4:4. if he'd said that 2.7k 4:2:2 samples to 1080p 4:4:4 or 2.7k 4:2:0 samples to 1080p 4:2:2, then i had to give it to him. i never actually thought about this. genius. BUT i absolutely do not see his statement as true. BUT i would also like somebody to prove me wrong :)

4:2:0 in 4k simply means that the luma resolution is 4k and the chroma resolution is full hd, so it actually will give you 4:4:4 in 1080p. which brings up the question why it cant just record 1080p 4:4:4 natively. or at least 4:2:2... if premiere really features lanczos (i cant confirm) it could be sharper than any other 1080p picture. pretty cool! is he simply wrong about the IBIS? that would be a game changer even if its just 3-axis. that would leave me with just my 2,3x crop complaint, which is probably gonna stay. shit panasonic you could have gone with a multiaspect and given us 4k with a 1,86 crop. instead youre going in the opposite direction...

most of the PROs of this camera dont affect me so much. as of right now i dont need and i dont want 4k. this might be changing the next 12/24 month, but id much rather have a crisp 1080p image. i mean 4k on youtube? 99,5% of the people cant even view this. its good to have a 4k option but its nothing i need right now. and for editing i dont need the zoom in option. this rediculous xlr/sdi mount is probably something that real professionals care about, but i dont see myself using something like this or an hdmi recorder anytime soon. i like to have everything build into the camera. that thinking also kills 4:2:2 and 10bit. whats the point of 100mbit recording if its not 10bit and not 4:2:2? these high bitrates seem to be for professionals what high megapixel count is for consumers. the 24mbit of my G6 looks so good i never wanna use anything higher than 50mbit for full hd in h264. 2.3 crop? absolutely not. i accepted the 2x crop of m43 but im not willing to go any further. thats not a big difference you say? the 2x crop is already a big difference. we have to draw the line somewhere. why didnt they use a sensor with a native horizontal resolution of 4k? that would have also meant better low light capabilities. the 96fps in 1080p is absolutely great, no argument here. but thats about it for me! most of the changes they made are for complete professionals. people who work with a crew of at least 5 people and use equipment worth $20.000+. people who have this kind of production money could use a camera that features 4:2:2, 10bit, xlr, hdsdi natively and has the ergonomics of a video camera. dslrs have always been for semi professionals. i just wanna grab a camera and work with it. thats why IBIS would have been so nice. i like the kind of filmmaking that andrew showed with the latest music video. just a camera and maybe one source of light and just go with it, this feels like a dslr workaround for pros, who probably have the budget of using a camera that is built for their job out of the box... EDIT: andrew why "boo" for MP4 instead of MOV? there is no technological reason why h264 in a mp4 container looks any different than in a mov container.

what i dont understand to this very day: Panasonics m43 approach has always been listening to video people and creating hybrid cams. Olympus on the other hand has always only focused on stills. so how exactly does Panasonic dare to sell a GX7 with the stabilization disabled in video mode? Olympus doesnt give a rats ass about video and they decided to just enable it. that means it really cant be that hard. even on the budget EM10 which comes with the same kind of stabilization the GX7 has. if i were somebody to make any m43 regarding decisions at Olympus I would just add 24fps in video. done. absolutely amazing camera. and it really cant be that hard to tell a camera to record 24 instead of 30 pictures per second. those lazy asses couldve at least added 25fps for PAL customers. would have been good. Panasonic is really close to fucking up big time and they re certainly setting their priorities wrong. i would trade 4K for IBIS any day of the week and seeing how good the 24mbit codec of the G6 is, i dont need 70mbit bitrates to begin with. Olympus is better for stills in every possible way and Panasonic have a hand full of things giving an edge on video. To take Olympus on par regarding video cannot be a lot of work. why not do it?

thats not quite how it works. the 4 means that in a line of 4 pixels, every single one has full luma information. the 2 means that out of the same 4 pixels only every second has full color information. pixel 2 and 4 in this row get the color information from 1 and 3 respectively. the last number looks at the next row with the 4 pixels right below this first. the 0 implies that no information is added here. instead the color information from the top row is just copied into the next creating the exact same colors as in row 1. 4:2:0 basically means that chroma has half the information on the vertical and half of the horizontal line compared to chroma. 4:2:2 means having full chroma vertically, but only half horizontally. this picture and video sum it up nicely: '> but since we opened this topic. why should it be better to have full vertical information and half horizontal. well, i phrased that wrong. obviously more information is better, but who decided that vertical information is more important that horizontal? Andrew, thanks for the article. very helpful as always. now my "need" of this camera got a little less :)

i recommend using Handbrakes Constant Quality RF20. Excellent Quality at probably half of what Andrew is suggesting. Not just for this purpose what in general if you want high quality at a small size. cool to see you on there Andrew, i guess its one of those awards where you just enter something that you already have and not go out and shoot something for it. so for that matter, why not do it... although a much better price would have been the new A7r with all lenses that they announced :D

RED cameras always look amazing on paper, just the specs that come with every new version. it really gets you like: wow 4K at 200fps, thats awesome. but when it comes to picture and especially stability while shooting, nothing beats an alexa. it is just rock solid.

are you just talking video here? or stills as well?