Inazuma

I thought there was a lot of improvement actually. Although the music and slow fades made it feel a little sad for a wedding. I think you should pull down the exposure a bit indoors. It just looks too clean and bright at the moment. No mood. Also try adding my >colour balancer LUT to your footage. Check out this guy's stuff https://vimeo.com/stayinfocus I quite like it. Also this guy does really wedding good photos http://www.danielkcheung.com/ Yes they're photos but the same composition and lighting principles apply.

Has anyone done real tests comparing the a7s DR to other cameras? I find it hard to believe that it only has 13.2 stops

So I bit the bullet over the week and bought the filter. From what I had read the filters work by spreading the light around the image, which is different to simply using a low contrast lens I think. And besides that, I don't want to add another lens to my collection when I already have three superb ones. I started with Ultra Contrast 3. It had good effect but I thought I'd go further so this morning I received the #5. The filters have an immediate effect of making the image look way more filmic. The reason for this is that really do spread the light around the image - but it's not so simple. They take in more ambient light and thus ambient colour. The result is that you get a much more balanced picture in terms of colour and tonality. These filters really are something magical. I have been shooting a fair bit with them over the past few days and will be putting together a video, but for now here's a few images: No filter, Standard iDynamic: With FilmConvert: Tiffen Ultra Contrast #5 (no iDynamic): With FilmConvert and some additional saturation. Each filter costs just over £100 for the 77mm sizes. I do recommend getting the strongest one (the #5). After further consideration I think the #3 is a better choice because the #5 washes out darker midtones too readily.

Haha wow. All through the video (and his other videos too) I was thinking "this guy looks a lot like Joseph Gordon Levitt" and now I just realised that he actually introduces himself as such at the start :D I'm not seeing anything particularly impressive about that footage, but then it is awfully compressed. In fact it's blowing out the store signs quite a bit, although he's generally exposed to the right. And at 1:33 you will notice the traffic light casting blown out colours on to the pavement, similar to something I mentioned >recently. Not sure how typical this actually is of cameras though. Nevertheless I am quite interested in entering that competition. Sounds great.

Hey Andy, One thing I noticed with my GX7 (and the GH3 when I had it) was that blue LEDs lights would oversaturate and blow out the area that it's shining on. Do you know why this is and if the G6's live mos sensor would prevent it?

Sorry to bring up an old thread but has anyone tested the mic port on their d5300? Cinema5d and the eoshd article says that it's really bad for hiss. Wondering if the issue is just with their copies or is a general manufacturer problem. I might need a camera with a mic jack in the near future and so am tossing up between this and the panny g6.

Just wondering, did you test the AF ability of the 70d or 7d mk2 live view in low light? Also any chance you can test it against the a6000? Just curious really :) not planning to buy either

I really think its strange how our opinions of the camera differ so much. When I had the d5200, I found it to have ugly, blotchy noise and be quite soft in low light. Barely usable at ISO 1600. I cant imagine that the GH4 would perform worse, especially at 4k. I also found that it didnt retain detail in shadows very well. So if you were to expose evenly for a scene (at low iso's) and then lift shadows up (in camera or post), you would find that blotchy noise quickly. Whereas with my GX7 I shot with medium or sometimes even high iDynamic and got good results.

Looks impressive!

Nice. I love this flat yet textured look. Can you tell me anything about how you lit it?

bought it from an ebay seller for a bit less :) The play definitely bothers me. On my tokina 28-70 the barrels are a little stiffer than most modern lenses, so rotating them makes the play quite evident. I don't want to put anything between the SB and the camera mount tbh. I've already had enough bad luck. Recently I paid £150 to get the shutter fixed on my GX7.

Hey Andy, does your lens turbo have play on either end? ie. it turns around ever so slightly (isn't quite snug). Edit: I emailed Metabones last night about the issue and they said they're sending a replacement back mount. Hopefully it works out :) Also I was looking around for a hood for my Tokina 28-70mm f2.6-2.8 and I saw a Flickr post saying that the same hood that's used on the Canon 24-105mm will work on this lens. So I've ordered one and will edit this post again with my results when i get it. Edit: Yep, it works :) The attachment grooves arent the same, but it does fit on and wont fall off.

Moshimo Garcia, although I praise the GX7 a lot, I think that if you are thinking about buying a GH3 and 12-35mm f2.8 then you may as well instead buy a Nikon d5300 and Sigma 17-50mm f2.8. It's a much cheaper combination and you get better noise performance and subjectively better colours. The two camera bodies weigh the same; just the Sigma lens weighs about double the 12-35mm lens. I'm personally not a big fan of the 12-35 as the focus barrel has a large turning angle and doesn't have a distance marker.

This is the best place to learn :) Ask away

I also have the Tokina 28-70 on Andy's recommendation. It gives a dreamy look as Andy describes, even when stopped down. I wouldn't use it for photography, but as a cinema lens it is superb. Parfocal too :) Except when mounted on the cheap Camdiox/RJ focal reducer. Not sure why that is.

A cool way to distribute it. I plan to watch it myself soon. Do you know if they made any profit? Or at least broke even?

Thanks for the image example above. It really hammers the point home about the difference between raw and h264. And as you say, working with RAW is not trivial, which is the main reason why I don't want to deal with it. There is the option of Prores which is a little less than half the filesizes of RAW but from what I've seen, the highlight clipping isn't that much better than my GX7. You are right I am trying to squeeze out as much image from my camera as possible. But the alternative is to invest in a new and more expensive camera and add new power solutions and storage costs into the mix. I am not a professional film maker, I am just a hobbyist trying my best not to let this interest spin completely out of control. Besides that, the old directors didn't have anywhere near the control over their image as you get with RAW now. From my experience with shooting 35mm stills, it's actually just as unforgiving as h264. Highlights blow and you lose detail in shadows as readily as you do with h264 - depending on your film stock of course.

Thanks, I look forward to seeing how it performs on the GH4's different profiles :)

I have been shooting with the Panasonic GX7 for the last 11 months . Having used a variety of mirrorless and DSLR cameras in this price range, I can say I've found the usability and video quality of this one to be superior in most respects. The colours and tonality felt like they popped, but there was always something about them that I felt was strange. This didn't bother me really until about two months ago when I tested the camera against the Nikon d5300 and when I started looking at a lot of Blackmagic footage soon afterwards. What I've found is that the colours on the GX7 (and other Panasonic cameras) lack a certain harmony. It's as if each is vying for our attention. I believe this is what contributes to the "video" look that people keep going on about. Colours don't desaturate evenly when you dial the picture profiles flat. The main issue being that colourful objects in the midtones stay colourful whilst everything else goes comparatively grey. This applies particularly to greens, reds and oranges. The green of trees and plants don't quite have a natural hue to them in relation to other coloured objects in the scene. I still struggle to quantify why. The best I can do is to say they look somewhat neon. Reds often dip into orange territory. It's subtle but it's there and can be distracting to trained eyes. Yellow is probably the worst offender here. It becomes very prominent when you add LUTs. I would not say these things are reasons not to get a Panasonic camera. They are just characteristics of the camera and don't necessarily equate to it being better or worse than others. You just need to understand and take the differences into account when shooting and grading. Every camera has its strengths and weaknesses. So having observed the differences, I took to Adobe SpeedGrade again to see what I could do. I called the resultant LUT, the "Balancer". Click the image below to enlarge it. Please note that the Sigma lens used on the d5300 is naturally less contrasty than the Olympus lens used on the GX7, which may account for why the girl's face is a more washed out there. As you can see, the changes might look rather subtle at first, but it makes a huge difference when applying other LUTs afterwards. The changes I made pretty much "fix" all the issues mentioned above. Skin tone connoisseurs might especially love this LUT as it pushes oranges more towards red territory and reduces the contrast there too. The download includes two LUTs. One is marked as "Less Red" meaning that it doesn't push skin tones into the red as much. Download Here More examples can be seen on the original blog post here: http://sebcastilho.com/journal/2014/10/19/a-study-on-panasonic-colours-and-a-lut-to-balance-them/

Yeh that nylon trick seems to do the diffusion thing pretty well but I'm more after the milky midtones achieved by these tiffen contrast filters. Nevertheless I'll give all these things a try :) maxotics, I've just gotten past my 2 years of GAS. Why are you trying to tempt me into buying other cameras again :P Also I wouldn't be where I am now if I didn't already have a decent job

I said "arguably" because it wasn't really my opinion but the opinion of a lot of others. I've happily been using a GX7 for almost a year now and am a firm believer in colour grading to get where you want,

So... I'm gonna go buy some from town today :p which shop and brands do you recommend?

Have you tried it with your G6? I tried putting fishing wire behind my lens once but it snapped when I mounted it to the camera. I did it successfully with my NEX6 last year though. maxotics that would have been a generous thing to do :) thanks anyway

Hah, i'm not quite prepared to pay $750 for filters. These Tiffen ones are "just" £100 and seem to do a great job. I'm sure there will be a day where I will upgrade to cameras that shoot in better formats (RAW or ProRes) but for now I have to stick to what I've got and get the best image I can out of it. Besides, it's not just h264 users that use these filters. Even guys with 5d RAWs do I'm based in the UK. Why do you ask?

The comments section to that article on dpreview is like a warzone. The GH series has always been awkwardly placed price-wise. The GH4 is probably the most technologically advanced consumer camera out there (with the EVF tech, focus peaking, DFD, 4k video internally, shutter angle/speed toggle, power efficiency etc) but also gives arguably the least desirable image quality, with unusual colours and tonality as well as less shallow DOF. It's always a toss-up between having something that is ready to go and shoot or putting up with something that is less convenient but with greater image quality.