fuzzynormal

Just a general observation for others following these sort of "what's the best" tech threads: If you're a beginner on the piano --and you spend a week learning how to play "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star." It's not going to sound a whole lot different when you play it on a toy or on a Stienway Concert Grand. The thing that matters at first is learning. You can't buy technique or skill. You earn it through practice. A 200k camera in the hands of a novice will look worse than an expert shooting with an iPhone. With motion pictures in 2015, you can't buy your way into something extraordinary by purchasing a camera body. They're all awesome. What you do with it is the only thing that makes it extraordinary.

The thing is, (in my opinion) the difference in IQ is not that big of a deal these days. If you're spending about $2k, you're going to get some sort of camera that does a good job capturing clean nice motion pictures. Bmpcc. You like the image? Get it! Honestly, no one needs the "best" camera anyway. It's how you use it that matters. To wait in the meantime... and miss out on the time and opportunity to actually go out out, film stuff, and be creative seems like a strange idea to me. It's not that such a thing isn't good for you, it's just that I don't really understand it. If all you want is the best camera so you can carry it around knowing, "wow, I have the best camera," that's perfectly fine, but making stuff is the ultimate goal, right?

This'll sound snarky, but it's written with honest sincerity: Go ahead and place your order. What exactly are you waiting for? Are you scared to actually start making videos or something? Again, not trying to be rude, just curious why you seem to be here asking for affirmation to spend your own money? I'm always curious about that.

The Gx7. If you already have the M43 glass, why not? It's under $500 in the u.s..

I only shoot "manual." Being a good editor is what sets you apart. Knowing how to work with clients, solve their problems, and answer their questions gets you hired again and again. In my (admittedly low-end) world gear doesn't matter so much anymore. All IQ from modern cameras is good enough now. EDIT: It's just as important to know which clients you should stay away from. Hard to explain that one. You just kinda figure that out through wisdom.

Yeah, but it's just a PR thing/contest. No need to assume it's supposed to be an a-list caliber film.

The basic reason: Garbage in, garbage out. You can use search engines to quickly find out the why and how of low-bandwidth video compression. Understanding the technology you wish to use will ultimately make you better at it. Higher end studios actually hire professionals to deal with this specific issue, so it's well documented across the world wide web super information highway. Good luck!

It matters.

I think it's nice to have friends that are good actors and that can do earnests naturalistic reading of heavily metaphorical writing. Seriously. That is NOT easy to do. Without the allegorical VO the short would be rather typical of what we normally see on Vimeo, eh? To be honest, I'm not sure why the NX1 is mentioned specifically...images look decent; not bad, not great. I wonder if it must be some sort of PR thing going on with Samsung and Levitt? Anyway, short, punchy, held my interest.

Shoot motion pictures with manual camera control.

Any camera is perfect as long as you actually do something with it...besides just take test pictures of leaves and then compare DxO charts the rest of the time. Or, just wait for the next big/best thing. Have a lot of patience because it never comes.

I've always had problems with color clipping in nightclubs and weird stage lights. Maybe the A7s is more sensitive to this because of the way it's engineered for low light, but I've yet to use any camera that does not ultimately have issues with this. That's my experience anyway.

Don't feel silly. The extremely narrow "DSLR" DOF is kind of ideal for interviews. The key to getting good interview shots is to always have as much depth/distance in the background as possible and have the bacdrop behind the talking head be about 2 stops darker than the subject. If you can arrange the space and subject to accomplish that you'll get decent interviews everytime. FYI, I always turn off the lights in office space then do my own. Office lighting is horrible and almost never flattering.

I use B&W ND. No complaints other than they're a bit more expensive than others.

The Nikon D750, The Sony A7s, the Nikon d810...all cameras costing more than triple what a $500 GX7 goes for. Just saying. The Lumix's IQ competes well too. Not that those other cameras mentioned aren't nice pieces of gear, but that GX shooting exceptional 60p on the cheap is pretty sweet. I just used the GX7 with that frame rate on a job last week and I'm using it again tomorrow. Anyway, that's my testimonial. Good luck!

40mm FF equiv is too short a lens for interviews I think. I did that set up once with my Gx7 and it's just not very flattering for faces; too close and distorted. You can get a 45mm f1.8 prime for M43 at a decent price. I use that alot for talking heads. If you want something really cheap and just plan on using it for interviews in controlled lighting, you might even consider a used 5DII with a used 85mm lens.

"Surely, you can't be serious..."

I've been very pleased with my gx7 @60p 1080. The camera is below $500 in the U.S. now so it's not much to give it a try. Impressive IQ as far as I'm concerned. It's nice and clean.

Doesn't have to be ideal to be effective. Besides, a small 5-10% crop to fix some wonky framing is not going to reveal too many flaws. I know many strive to have perfect pixel peeping portraits present in their productions. Possibly, particular people present partake polar preferences. Potential poll, perhaps? Point is, 4k is a good development. Why so many nay-say it is weird.

Mock it if you must, but when shooting 4K for documentary, corporate, or "low-pro" jobs this ability is an effective tool to have.

Color grading a down coverted 4k to 1080 clip. As you say, that's nice, to have that little extra push and pull. And, yeah, reframing if required. --In case you need to salvage a visual "motif" on a misframed shot ...for those of us plebes that do lowly documentary and run n gun corporate stuff. Now supersize it and give me toy with my happy meal.

If it was, say, a mug falling to the ground on a busy street, and you had control of the set, I'd film the background on a lock down shot with everything and everyone faking moving in slow mo. Then green screen the object off the same camera lock down. In post you can use a twixtor type plugin more effectively when the object has clean/no-overlapping edges. Once you got that set, you could composite the two shots. You probably only want to hold a shot like that for a second or two before you cut to another... But I don't know what you're going for ultimately, so that might be a worthless suggestion ;-) Anyway, here's a fun website for cool compositing techniques. Just keep in mind, if you're new to all this it's gonna take a lot of hours in post to make it happen. http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/

"What is the point of 4K" Ignoring the difference between DR and IQ in various cameras, which isn't what the OP asked anyway: More resolution gives you more flexibility with the image in post. 4K is suddenly affordable and pretty decent in low-light. What's not to like about that reality?

Yes, the lens choice needs to be paired directly to the sensor size for the poll to make any sort of logical sense. For example, I like a 30mm lens on a MFT as an all-around lens, but wouldn't use a 30mm to shoot a head shot with a FF sensor.

As I said, there's alot of fundamental information about how all this knowledge ties together. It's not that most of us are unwilling to try to explain stuff, but there's an essential foundation and grasp of basic theory you'll need before you can successfully implement practice. And typing ALL that out would be near impossible in an abbreviated way. Although I'm sure you'll get help here on this forum. As I can tell from your questions, you don't really understand the nature of light and camera exposure. So, to go from the basics of grasping that --to the comprehension of applied practice on an impressive special effects shot is a long haul, but if you're willing you should definitely give it a try! Trying and failing is one of the best educations. Here's a real simple start explaining some basics: http://wolfcrow.com/blog/understanding-camera-shutters-and-the-shutter-angle/ If that GoPro software is free, I'd suggest you try that first.