Shirozina

Sounds complicated - what's not so user friendly about Audition?

Adobe Audition is the obvious solution if you have Premier pro as you can work via dynamic link. If you are not signed up the Adobe suite licence then there are quite a few good standalone options which others will no doubt chip in with. I've not got any reason to use anything other than Audition though.

The Tamron is big, heavy, has horrendous distortion and (wide open) hopelessly outclassed in resolution by my 35-70 Contax. I'll return it and wait to see how the new Sigma and Tamron 24-70's perform but after playing with it for 1/2 a day I'm suddenly I'm not so convinced that I 'need' anything to replace the Contax.

But for VR you soon ignore the resolution ( or lack of it) as you get immersed in the 'reality' just like in the cinema where the size of the screen becomes immersive and seemingly hopelessly inadequate resolutions are perfectly acceptable........

You could try these - http://micromuff.com/ on your internal mic's. I have them on my A7r2 and the stereo image and sound quality is not that terrible in higher sound level environments. They are a bit flawed as the velcro lets in the wind so I removed it and stuck them on with double sided tape. You could also just buy some fake fur and DIY. You could add some LAV omnis to the camera or on some headphones in a binaural setup for capturing better quality 'imersive' sound in a stealthy way but for directional sound the mics by their design are less forgiving of wind so need large wind protection systems.

Such choices could be argued are more about style and fashion than creativity.

Sigma and Tamron are both releasing new 24-70 F2.8's which could be interesting but for over 2x the price of what I have just paid.

I purchased them individually and I only discovered the non parallelism on one recently. I had previously contacted Metabones about the thickness variations and they sent out some shims to correct the thickness. All now work perfectly. Their main use is for stills (architecture) where there is a higher need for perfect parallelism and thickness when using them on wide shift lenses and for video it's perhaps not so critical but still..... I could gripe more as well! - the hex headed bolts that secure the flanges are also of poor quality so if you do have to remove them to add shims you will undoubtedly chew them up and not be able to reuse them. I sourced a new set from Ebay which work much better.

If you don't need AF then give it a go. I've got 3 Metabones adapters for EF-E-mount + a speedbooster and it's not all happy stuff. The speedbooster is soft around the edges (actually it curves the focus plane inwards pretty harshly at the frame edges) of the frame unless you stop down a lot and one of the adapters doesn't have parallel faces so the focus plane is tilted. All 3 of the standard adaptors have different thicknesses so infinity is off on lenses with fixed end stops. The body of the adaptors is first rate in terms of dimensional tolerances but the machining quality of the undersides of the flanges is poorly done and requiresshimming and grinding to correct them for thickness and flatness. I use an engineering surface plate and dial guage to check parallelism and a micrometer to check thickness. Shouldn't be necessary with high cost market leading products like this......

Just ordered the Tamron - will report back!

Good tip - I'll look into this. I think I was put off by the size and larger filter at the front but shooting APS-C I can use a step down to 77mm and not worry about it.

Anyone using this for video? (particularly APS-C on A7r2) My only reservation is the resolution drop in the mid range but does this really show on what is effectively 8mp ( UHD). For locked down shots I have the superb Contax 35-70 F3.4 but I want something with AF and an effective IS. I know the 24-105 is the 'go-to' lens for video but the 24-70 is smaller, has less distortion and CA, better IS and more light transmission.I also have the EF 16-35 F4 and EF 70-200 IS USM. Cost wise they are very close on the used market (not the MKII version). I wan't to future proof my lenses and stick with the EF mount so have discounted the Sony 24-70 F4.

'Supporting' the codec is not the same thing as being able to play it back smoothly when you have a timeline loaded with effects and edits - transcoding / optimised media / proxies will still be a necessary part of the workflow for most people.

I think you missed the crucial meaning contained in '( or lack thereof)' which means smooth playback is not possible without transcoding.

There are no 'cheap and good' mics but if you really have no choice but to use a camera mounted mic in a 'run and gun' setup then as said the Rode Video Mic pro is probably your best choice as it has it's own internal amps so you can crank the gain up on these and feed the camera a very hot signal that minimises the influence of the internal camera amps. When using this setup get the camera and thus the mic as close to the subject as possible. Once you start using a separate recorder it will not be so much of a run and gun setup and you will need to get someone to act as a sound recordist but you could mount the VMP on a boom and feed it direct to the camera via an extension cable ( at the risk of picking up mobile phone signal interference). In a static one man situation you could rig a boom pole on a stand to close mic the subject from above or just a stand to do it from below for close up 'talking head' shots.

Interesting idea but I have too much invested in EF lenses to make the switch and with 2 very nice higher end EF mount cameras just announced that investment seems very wise and future proofed. Shame that Sony are not upgrading the A7r2/S2 interface software and likley waiting for the mk3 versions but can just about put up with the ergonomics of the A7r2 now that the camera is delivering such amazing image quality through your EOSHD profile!

In the past Tamron would fix / recalibrate their lenses for free. I had a 28-75 done which improved it quite a bit. They also would optimise it for full frame or APS if you specified this. The only drawback on the Tamron that has put me off is the large front filter size. Any reason you are not interested in 'native' glass for your GH5?

"AMD is planning to release its own high-end enthusiast Ryzen line — dubbed the “Threadripper” — later this year with up to 16-cores and 32-threads, something that the newly announced 18-core i9 Extreme will compete head-to-head against." - at last an Intel vs AMD speed war.

Smooth native playback ( or lack thereof) is the issue otherwise why would people need to use proxies / optimised media / transcode?

Until CPU's become fast enough to decode highly compressed camera media on the fly what choice is there but to work from Proxies / optimised media substitutes in the timeline? At least you are retaining the original camera files for future use when hardware can handle them. I'm just advising against transcoding as some users may be tempted to throw away the original camera files in the mistaken belief that a transcode is preserving perfectly whatever was contained (however imperfectly) in the original camera files.

I'd be wary of trancoding any original camera media unless you have huge data storage as the edit friendly codecs are like DNx / ProRes use lossy compression and the only way to be sure you are not throwing away data that may become apparent when you start pushing your grade is to use a lossless uncompressed codec which will create huge amounts of data. In Resolve use 'generate optimised media' and in Premier use the 'ingest settings' to do the same to create edit DNx/Prores to do all your editing in. Then when you come to render to output it will use your original camera files as the source. If your PC is still struggling to play back with heavy edits then you can go to proxies.

Looked at it but it's not significantly brighter ( I.e usable in sunshine) than my VideoDevices PIX-E which is also a recorder. They also have a 2200 nit ultrabright which will be usable in sunshine but it's £2500...

http://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/sonarworks-reference-3

Just tried Sonarworks on my DMR's and they take a massive chunk out of the HF. I know they are not that flat in frequency response but they are not that bad. Will try it with some more headphones.

4k at 60mbs vs 2.7k at 45mbs (still not enough to shoot a major Hollywood feature film with let alone satisfy expert pixel peepers on vimeo.............)