fuzzynormal

Yes, if one has the means to acquire the best camera, then maybe use the best --but look at the images posted by the OP, do any of them look like they'd be impossible to capture/create with modern/cheap gear? "400 Blows" especially. The more wonderful and advanced consumer gear gets, the sillier we all look [points finger at self] hanging out on-line talking about things rather than doing things.

Me too. It was fun as it tapped into my nostalgia for watching a film screening. The whrrrr of the projector was cool. But, aside from enjoying the novelty, it didn't look technically good as a digital projection. And I truly like the minor flaws that pop up from doing something mechanical and analog, but honestly, it's inferior to digital.

Anyone dabbling with Resolve and Linux in editing? I'm intrigued. Would love a strong viable editing alternative. Didn't enjoy my first rodeo editing with Resolve, but I'm willing to try again...

I cut a concert film once where the two main cameras were a 5d and a gh1. Liked the gh1 image more, but they were close enough IQ-wise that it didn't really matter. "Filmlook" really comes down to other things beside the sensor. I truly believe sensor preference is akin to choosing a particular film-stock. No more, no less. So...maybe you don't have the fastest and cleanest "film" for your movie, doesn't mean jack-squat that it would stop you from making a cinematic production.

I learned still photography on 35mm film, and that's typical of what people often talk about regarding "equivalence" online; which makes it easier to grasps from the get go the whole debate about it all. If you came into the camera enthusiasm/hobby these days, god help you. Ignorance mixed with all the jargon and all the different sizes of things? Yeah, we can understand why it'll make one's head spin. Mine still does because the maths on all this are not symmetrical. Sliding scales, expotentials, and numerical gradients. Physics stuffs. But here's my rather redundant summation and basic understanding: shooting a 50mm lens set to f2 on an M43 is "equivalent" to what would happen (circle-of-confusion-depth-of-field-wise -- not exposure-wise) if you put a 100mm f4 on a full frame sensor. Here's where the frustrating part comes in, I think. Folks use f-stop to generally talk about what it take to achieve a certain depth-of-field. You know if you're shooting glass wide open, you're going to be increasing the out-of-focus stuff in the frame, 'kuz that's how lenses work. Director: "Hey, we need shallower DOF on this shot, go to a f2.8" DP "Got it." Those folks ain't talking directly about how many photons the want passing through the lens. Rather, they're talking about creating a visual look. So "f-stop," becomes an easy marker to achieve a certain visual result. That term can get convoluted in the broader technical consideration. (And, hoo boy, let's not even bring in t-stops to this part of the discussion, lest brains start to implode) The thing about full frame sensors, and even larger sensors, is that you can achieve the very shallow depth-of-field easier and with wider lenses than you can if you have a smaller sensor. So, when doing a portrait shot, one can whack some back ground out of focus effortlessly and rather affordably with a cheap 50mm f2 lens on a full frame. Yes, you can get such "equivalent" DOF with something like M43, but then you're spending a lot of cash to get more exotic lenses that'll shoot f0.95 or something. The good thing about full frame, pragmatically speaking, is that you can easily get shallow DOF while closer to a subject. This is cool because when you have a wider field of view and shallow depth-of-field, the visual creates a sort of 3D pop. The in-focus bit separated easily from the background. Not to mention that motion in wider field of view has a different visual quality. I believe this is referenced as "parallax," which can also has a quality that should be taken into account. Also, again, FF lenses cost less to accomplish the same shallow DOF/FOV than M43 lenses. Other than that, I think a lot of people on-line in camera forums maybe don't have comprehensive wisdom, (including me) but certainly have a lot of notions they want to assert. More often than not, it seems like those assertions are wrapped up in some rhetorical ego. Seems like people want to hear and write affirmations about their current version of reality rather than actuality. So it's easy to understand why it's all a mix-up for readers of these words. The phrase "circle-of-confusion" is apt, in more ways than one ain't it? For me, I have a general knowledge of what stuff looks like simply because I've played around with this crap for decades. All one really has to do is put their eyeballs on results they create themselves and it's all obvious. It may remain inarticulated, but it does become obvious.

I had the D90. I shot video with it. It was pure shit. Horrible image. Embarrassing, really. Also, fwiw, putting old glass on any camera gives one a manual aperture.

Are you curious if they will literally respond by adapting their products, or are you just wondering what they're doing next? Their production pipeline stretches over years.

I do indy stuff for broadcast and I can tell you I don't obsess over IQ. The shows I've shot and broadcast this year look better than anything that came down the pipe from the guys doing productions in-house with their high end production gear. That result has nothing to do with cameras or properly calibrated displays. Obsession over other elements of the production, like story, visual compositions, cinematography, and editing, is much more justified. Calibrate your own stuff, do your best, and don't worry about it.

Yes. You work with the limitations. Lots of hybrid cameras don't allow this function. The in body stabilization. Also, they're cheaper.

I've been surprised to find how enamored I've been with the Olympus cameras. They're far from perfect, but I just like 'em. The model I've been using is the EM5's. And even thought the EM5II doesn't spec out as good as the LUMIX stuff, it just works better. Ultimately, that makes it a better production tool, for me, than. say, the GX85...even though the GX85 does shoot better looking video.

Artistic and/or craft contentment from the work; hopefully allowing one to make a simple living from it. I get what you mean, but (to get pedantic) this is inherently impossible. The best one can do is to try and be fair in service of a truth. The craft and art are always at contradiction to objectivity. Almost everything about filmmaking is subjective. I suppose you could screen footage from a security camera as a doc and call it extremely objective, but even then someone had to decide what the best angle of that camera would be. And that's not even considering the craft of structuring story and editing. If anything, docs are more, in a weird way, subjectively manipulative than narrative work.

Neither could I, but there it is. Randomly. Rather annoying. Not the biggest problem in the world, but when you're at the desk for months on end, that time adds up. Who knows what it is? Indeed. Same hardware all around except the integrated sound card, so you just bypass that with an external. You can literally buy the same components, just half the price and then you also allow yourself upgrade room. When I got my latest PC a half year ago, it was specifically for Premiere and to have a machine that would push the numbers, which it does. I really wanted to like and embrace the setup. But the fact that I can edit faster and easier on a 9 year old iMac literally using the same projects, that's enough for me to switch back to OSX. Too bad too. The first short film I edited on a consumer non-linear editing system was a simple comedy skit I did back in 1994. It was a PC and Premiere must have been version 1.5 or something. 3 years later I used Premiere for a local TV series. A few years after that, my first 16mm film was cut on Premiere and a PC. But when FinalCut came out. Forget it. The integrated system, great hardware, and commitment of Apple to the product made it a no-brainer. When things went wrong with FCP, you could figure out a real answer back then. With Premiere, it was a crap shoot. The hardware variables were maddening. Trying to figure out deep BIOS settings, IRQ address numbers, manual OS registry editing; it was all computer sciency-bull shit to try and get all the components and software to play nice. It was a time suck rabbit hole. No thank you. On the other hand, the DIY nature of PC builds is kind of fun... Now with hackintosh, everything old is new again.

I've spent the last year hoping back and forth between Premiere 2015.3 on Windows10 and Premier on OSX. I can't tell you the number of times I've clicked the mouse on the Windows machine within Premiere, have it do nothing, click it again, and have it finally work. Endless Windows quirks like that. Maddening. Never an issue on the 9 year old iMac that opens and edits the same project. Just sayin' Of course, hitting the render button on the Windows machine is fun. So, my next step is Hackintosh all the way. The joys of cheap swappable PC hardware and the Apple OS combined together...I'll go that route since I'm more of a power user with OSX anyway. Agreed. The trashcan machine is an insult to professionals. That said, I bought a "cube" once back in the day. Of course, the cube never claimed it was a high performance pro rig.

Thank you for the advice. I'll continue to play with RAW and see if I can get to a place that I'm comfortable with. The 444 examples give me hope. Potentially: Shoot RAW, transcode to 444, create proxies in Premiere from that, edit, grade, export. I suppose that's the extra step that bugs me. I want to grade completely after the cut, not at all before. Anyway, I've hijacked the thread, so I'll bow out...

Thanks. I'll continue to dabble with my 5D with option 1, but, as I understand it, anytime there's a transcode going on as mentioned with option 2, you've pretty much baked in your image by doing the encoding, so you wouldn't be able to pull effectively in the grade, which is the whole idea with RAW files; lots of post control. Shooting RAW for a direct transcode kind of defeats that purpose, wouldn't it? Which is something the OP should keep in mind. What workflow would they be aiming for with the $3K camera? Maybe the OP wouldn't mind dealing with RAW.

I'd love a URL link to a video outlining useful workflows so I could get a better handle on it. Maybe the path I'm on is the wrong one. Also, perhaps it's because I'm shooting docs, that dissuades my embrace of the RAW workflow. When the shooting ratios of the footage to final cut are so high, the process of manually "touching" every single clip to get them into the project is just too impractical. Based on how I've been understanding it, the "quick" RAW workflow doesn't deliver a big advantage IQ wise, and the "slow and simple" / "laborious" option are out for reasons stated. But, please, if anyone has an example of a RAW solution that would jibe with doc shooting, my goodness, I'd love to see a video. Thanks!

Of course, that's good for interviews as well. Allows a better report and interaction with the subject. So often film making is not about the visuals.

Yes. My theory is pretty straightforward: ISO is only one of the exposure variables. The amount of actual light (ambient/direct) in the setting, as well as the speed of the lens makes a huge difference. When you can shoot at 10KISO in a room with decent light and a fast f-stop, it's going to hide the noisy shadows, right? This footage, while technically in a low light situation, also has lots of ambient light bouncing around in the corners. There's a good scoop of photons for the sensor. On the other hand, when you get someone shooting 10KISO in significantly dim situations and a slow lens, then blacks will be the majority of the frame. Flaws will be more obvious. Bottom line, it's all relative. Take it all with a grain of salt. Consider the context of the shots (and operator skill set) when trying to judge this stuff on youtube and otherwise. Or, as mentioned, it could be a straight out misrepresentation to cynically garner attention. Such is the early 21st century in which we live.

Yup. As a doc filmmaker, I could work with that. ;-) 10KISO and a f.095 lens? That's handy for dark scenes. I might actually be able to make a film or something now!

Thanks for being willing to give this a test and share here on EOSHD. I've been curious as well. This setup, depending on how it renders DOF with wide open medium format lenses, might be ideal for documentary/corporate "talking head" interview production. Extreme shallow DOF and good low light offers an ease of interview shooting that potentially could justify it? I could see this as a dedicated rig for only that purpose if the advantage was there. If not, full frame and a 55mm f1.2 still looks awesome.

I've used a pro level Dropbox account for a few years now. No problem here regarding large files. It also will allow for upload interruption and continuation without trouble. So if your signal drops when uploading a huge file, it's no big deal. It just keeps going when you reconnect to the internet.

Depends on how much Depth-Of-Field you want or don't want. ND is typically used to allow slower shutter speeds as well as lower f-stops.

Not to hijack the thread, but I've been frustrated by the workflow of hacked RAW. Just a bit backwards and cumbersome for my style. Not that it's a bad image, but, man, you really need to put a huge "in depends or your production" asterisk on ML acquisition.

A pragmatic consideration is how the extra mass on a beer bottle (or fabricated prop that looks like a beer bottle) will affect the movement. If it's too heavy, you'll run up against some "uncanny valley" sort of physicality. Might not be a big deal based on your idea, or might be. You may have to settle on a lighter rig.

My recommendation is to consider longer focal lengths for what your going for. I've been shooting with a canon fd 55mm f1.2 and a cheap speed booster. It's not a pristine image/high contrast image, which is why I like it. The longer focal length appeals to me, emulates some "filmlook" mojo, and looks more flattering for capturing portraits/people. Plus, it's very fast, even though I don't often shoot with it wide open. That glass combo is about $325. Getting used to going narrower on the field of view is a challenge, but the visual rewards are worth it, imho. This glass on my stabilized gx85 or em5ii has been a lot of fun to shoot handheld. On the other hand, as mentioned, the Speedboosted Sigma 18-35mm Art F1.8 would give you one lens with more focal length options.