fuzzynormal

If a camera has serious lowlight capabilities that's a huge value and not a gimmick...even with limitations. I can't tell you how many times I could have used a strong low-light camera in the field over the past few decades.

I do wonder how the camera would handle the kinds of high-motion footage I've seen you shoot. Previous reports express concerns regarding the jello. Still, carrying two or even three cameras around on a shoot these days is a heck of a lot easier than it was carrying just one around in the past, so I'm not put off totally by certain limitations when the payoff is of such high value. For my travel shooting gigs, a GH4, EM-D, and an A7s can live together in the same backpack with a few lenses. I could make that work.

Not familiar with the show either, but the ambition of the shots sounds intriguing.

Retail: One speedboster=$400. A cheap 13mm wide lens=$400. Or, the Panny 8mm lens=$600

Right, it's not an all-sum proposition, which is how most inter web discussions seem to go. Finding legitimate flaws in the production doesn't mean that an actual movie isn't worthwhile on other levels. If you're not a discriminating viewer of movies, fine. But if you want to be something of a film maker you should at least try to be so. Knowing why Kurosawa is superior to a contemporary studio guy like Bay matters. As an aspiring film maker of any legitimate level you gotta try to know why, understand why, and appreciate why. This particular BatMan movie production was a beast of logistics and it does look like some chaos and unwieldiness of the production ended up on screen. Or maybe it's just me... Establishing the "geography" of a scene and allowing for coherent action is out of favor these days with a-list films. Bombast trumps cohesion. I'll take a 3 minute single pan wide shot of 2,000 extras and horses ransacking Aqaba in real time rather than 300 .5 second edits with 2 dozen explosions.

The argument that financial success justifies something as a meritorious crafted or artistic success is more than a bit delusory. Pop culture just doesn't work that way.

Actually, unless I comprehended it incorrectly, that isn't the context if the initial sentiment.

It is. I do this often.

For what it's worth, I bought a single 1.8 ND and a collection of step up rings to adapt them all to my different lens thread sizes. I typically hit the field with a collection of three primes, so it's pretty easy to swap.

Look at the result and decide for yourself. Personally, I don't like it. An interesting side effect of a high shutter speed: Perceived resolution increases. Since edges of things stay sharp and defined rather than blurred it just looks like there's "more" there. However, that is not an organic image and is very mechanical/clinical to me. ...And the only thing needed to control exposure in bright outdoor light is a modest collection of neutral density filters. For mid-day sun, I like my ND rated @ 1.8; cuts down the incoming light enough that I can work my iris in the f2 range and adjust exposure with a bit of ISO play.

I'll expand on Com21's comment. A benefit of the G3, or any wireless system, is that you can have a mobile lav on a subject and monitor it easily at the recording source. The recording source and the subject can move about freely. Also, if something goes askew, like the mic rustling on cloth, you'll know about it. It's just a practical tool.

Okay, strike "action" from my response and re-read it. Also, color is not one of the fundamental tools, it's a supplemental one. More than half of all recorded cinema is testimony to that.

I hear this a lot, but it hasn't been my experience. Smaller lenses with longer focal lengths are readily available too. A little research into small M43 compatible primes will reveal numerous options. Various threads on this forum about it in fact. And go to B&H while in NYC. It's a bit crazy in there but worthwhile; better than the big box retailers in Tokyo!

Color helps, but it's not a fundamental. Fact is, folks before color like Eisenstein were kinda better at action sequences than Nolan, and Sergi was sort of starting from scratch when he did it.

Barreying, binning, codec, etc. "Cut to the chase": Which camera is best for walking around a major metropolitan area, grabbing random images, adding copyrighted music to the shots for an upload to Vimeo, and then having bragging rights that I've got the latest and greatest budget filmmaking gear? GH4, right?

Shhhh...nobody mention Michael Bay.

Since buying a wireless mic that has great fidelity, extended transmission range, useful monitoring, and is rock solid mechanically costs about 4 times that amount. Good audio gear is expensive for a reason. You're paying for the value of reliability. If you want cheap, you can always get a mini-jack lav and run it into a smartphone to record. I've done it. It works, but since you can't monitor the mic, you just gotta hope... If you can do shoots that can afford the luxury to fail on the audio side --and that risk is manageable, maybe that's a better way to go?

Proxy is a pain for shorter form edits. When one's doing long documentaries and the footage to edit ratio is something like 400:1, it starts to make a lot of sense however --as the log and transfer stage can also be a step to cull the footage.

Yeah, I don't even have the Gh4 yet, but shooting 4K, backup/archiving the raw files, and then transcoding it into 1080 will be my standard workflow for most stuff. Other times, for larger long form documentary work, I'll probably do low-res proxy editing and then re-connect only the large res clips that make it into the final cut. (it's like it's 1993 all over again! That's how AVID used to handle "hi-res" 640x480 stuff back in the day) Or not...might get a new computer this year too so we'll see how it goes.

"Loupe" it when you need it. Works. At any rate, I didn't buy the GM1 because of the image quality, even though it's pretty awesome. I bought it 'kuz it's the right size to be a stealth camera for documentary shooting. (also a good flying cam) That's what lead me to the GM1. The fact that it grabs superior video to a lot of cameras was a great bonus. It's a good camera size that fits it into a very useful niche for some of us. If you fall into that category the value is awesome.

That's the bulk of the consumer camera market you know.

35mm or 16mm?

How cropped sensor lenses behave is common knowledge among informed m43 shooters. "Impressive" is a bit subjective, ain't it?

Thank Alfred Hitchcock for that one. Well before the 80's too.

Sorry, it's not in anamorphic so it's not really a cinematic film. Right?