Milton Lopes

Thanks for the input guys, its good to hear such positive experiences, it calms me down a bit 😃 Changing system sounds a bit scary as i've been using DSLR/Mirrorless since i was learning the basics and this is going to be my first video only camera. Panasonic would be my safe bet, but wages in my country are too low to risk that kind of money in a grey market product 😅 Guess it is just down to find a good deal with an official reseller and call it a day. Hope Black Friday may help me in this regard haha @JordanWright Nice to hear your input about rigging the camera, thats exactly what i was planning to do at a first, get some LP-E6, one CFast (or one of the recommended SD's at first if my budget falls short), a cage to protect the camera, give me a top handle and then just start shooting to get the hang of the camera and add things as/if i need them. Do you know if the camera can be wall powered with the LPE6 inside as a backup to kick in if the AC power disconnects? Most of my long continuous shots are usually in places where i could easily get it wall powered, but i could never trust it without a backup, Murphy's law gotta be respected 😅

Hello everyone, whats up? I had to sell my trusty Lumix G7 last year to solve some financial issues (moved out to another city, lots of things to buy and my main gear comes from my employer) and now i'm back on the market for a new camera. I'm pretty much sold on the BMPCC 4K to be my new workhorse, but i'm a bit worried about reliability as it will be my one and only camera for my personal projects and freelance work. I've never used a Blackmagic camera before, but most os things i've read on my research point out to "great image, but quirky to use, sometimes buggy and need to be rigged". I'm used to doing everything on manual, carry a tripod/monopod around, never used AF-C and only used a good IBIS for photos on my old EM10 MK1 (although AF and IBIS would be two nice tools to help on some shots). So how bad (or good) will it actually be right now in 2020? Is there anything i should be aware of? Is it reliable enough to be an A-Cam? Just for some background on what it will be used for, i do mainly doc work, interviews, speeches, concerts, sometimes events and i'm willing to do some more short narrative work. Besides been working for quite some time as camera operator/editor, i've mostly worked as somebody's else employee, using my gear only for personal/passion stuff and minor/side freelance stuff. Right now i'm willing to try and up my game, work more on my own, and the whole Blackmagic ecosystem seens very promissor with good higher end cameras i could rent if everything goes well and i manage to get some bigger projects. I've got my eyes also on the Fujifilm XT4, but then i would be blowing all my budget on the body, which i think would be unwise as there's some other departments i need to upgrade (a gimbal to replace my broken cheapo steadycam, better mics, media and etc). An XT3 was on the radar but unexpectedly seem some rises on price on my country, coming to close to XT4 to be worth it, and costing more than the BMPCC 4K (which also comes with Resolve Studio and would save me some money) it seems just not like a good deal. The GH5 would be nice, as i'm already used to the system, but got no official support from Panasonic on my country and can only buy it from grey market, so its a big no. If anyone could share theirs experiences, i would be greatly thankful 😃 Thanks and see ya!

Gotta thank you all for everything i could learn since i`ve found and started reading this site and this forum. I'm finishing film school right now, barely finished editing my first Doc, and today is a great day for me. Since i've started reading Andrew`s posts on the blog and following the discussions on this forum i started to fall in love with anamorphics. They're pretty hard to find around here and i wanted a small lens, that could fit well in my G7. 1.5x is what i aimed for, as the 4K photo on the G7 only does 30p, and i really preffer the 24p look. After some months monitoring the biggest used gear website around here i've finally came across an YashicaScope 8mm. Converting the price to dollars, it costed me only 100$ and got no scratches, fungus, os dust. It`s crystal clear. Loved that thing and it weights so low it doesn't even make a difference. Unfortunatelly i couldn't buy a clamp yet, as they're non existent around here and doing imports this time of the year in my country is know your gear is gonna fall into a black hole to never be seen again, so all the tests i've done are with me holding the lens with my hand in front of the camera, no good for alignment. But i wanted to share them with you guys, as without everything i've read here along those years it simply wouldn't be happening right now and it is time in wich i could be helping other people, just as you all helped me along those years. I've tested the lens with the 14-42mm kit lens, as it was my only lens wich the frontal element was small enough so i could press the anamorphic against the lens without risking to scratch it. I could go as wide as 25mm without major vigneting problems (theres a slight vignete at 25mm, but if you crop from 2.66 to 2.39 it should be gone). It is double focus and i'm still trying to figure out how to do it right, but as it is just a 1.5x lens the focus peaking still worked well enough on most of my shots and it's been easier than i thought it would be, with a clamp it should be better, as i won't have to be holding the lens with my hand. It seemed sharper than i thought it would be based on the few tests i could find on youtube. Here are some frame grabs. First one is 25mm, so you guys can see the slight vignetting. Shots 2, 3 and 4 are at 35mm, it seemed to me a good spot to shot, as it got no vignetting at all. The last image is at 42mm, the end of my zoom. I've shot all the images on f/5.6. Tried to bring my 85mm f/1.8 with speedbooster to test, but its frontal element was to big and the light leaking made the image a total mess. I did just some quick grade using filmconvert and lumetri. Hope you guys like them and sorry about my english, writing and speaking aren't things i fully domain.

That gpu is 2006 stuff. I think you will do better with the Intel HD of your processor than with that (it has one, right?). Graphic cards evolved a lot, and since Sandy Bridge the Intel HD performance surpassed older entry level cards and mid range stuff the older Intels couldn't even touch. Perhaps, i still can't say for sure if it's enough. I've already used premiere with an HD3000 and t3i 1080p. Can't say it was nice, but still works, and back them i was with an i3 and 4gb of ram, but with no color grading plugins. Your whole system is better than mine was. Way better. So it probably should be fine. But if you want to play with color, i suggest transcoding the h.264 files to some edit friendly codec and depending on which plugin you want to use, i still can't say for sure if it will be good.

Those new mobile cards from Nvidia had closed the gap to the desktop performance pretty well. I think they're very solid as mobile workstations. Even my 2013 Clevo with a 780m can already handle 4k editing (i'm editing my college final project on it, no problems so far) and my old friend 780m dont even come close to the performance of that new series. I miss OSx, i really dont like windows interface that much, but, as i dont use FCP, there really had no sense in buying a mac, especially with the absurd price they're sold here in Brazil haha

If you want a good performer mobile editing machine i strongly recommend having a look at the Clevo/Sager/Eurocom/Avell notebooks (They`re all the same brand, Clevo, rebranded) or MSI. They`re build for games, but also perform really well with Premiere Pro. I also prefer OSX over Windows, but the performance i got from mine Clevo is far from any Apple computer i could afford haha Take a look especially at those with the new Nvidia 1060/1070/1080 graphics. It seems that in this generation they finally catch up the desktop performance on their mobile cards. The only downside of those gamer notebooks is that they`re huge, and are usually around 2,5-3,2kgs, but they still portable, and i dont find it that bad having a 17.3'' screen to edit.

Waiting for the price tag. I dont usually consider Canon cameras, since i don't miss my old one since i've moved to Panasonic, but if it comes at Rebel price territory it sounds to me like a great B-Cam for its AF and stills capabilities.

Well, i usually do speeches, lectures, events and whatever pay me well haha Never got the chance to put the a6300 on one of these jobs, as i'm still geting used to it and seeing if i can really trust it for that kind of stuff, but its doing fine so far. I also do some short films, which is what i really like to do, and i am using it for an art video that a friend of mine is directing, first serious stuff where i decided to use it. I wasn't recording all the time, but the camera was always on in video mode with the screen turned on (what is usually enough for it to start overheating) for 3 hours with 30m of recorded footage. Overheating warning didnt even showned up, the camera was still in a "not so warm" stage and the cheap $15 (R$50) powerbank i've bought for tests only droped from 89% to 68%) Well, its pretty unbalanced for run n gun if you use the powerbank+fan setup. The cage may help in make it better to handle, but ergonomically its not the better choice. Without this setup the batery life sucks and you got overheating, so no good too. The worst part for the fan setup for run n gun its that the fan makes any audio from the camera unusable. The audio may come from an external recorder. But the image quality it gives speaks for itself and you can't find anything in its price point that beats it, especially in low light. Rolling shutter is bad but can be worked out planing your shoots and avoiding whip pans. Just keep in mind that the camera its just a tool and that you may have to choose the best tool for each job and work around the limitations of the tool you choose. The a6300 is about pure image quality, not ergonomics, ease of use and all that kind of stuff. For that stuff i still keep my G7, which fells way better than the sony and which i enjoy using far more than the sony. But if i need the best image quality i can get, low light or slow mo, i'll take the sony any day. Its a pain to use it, it fells wrong when you put a powerbank and a fan in it, but damn the images it makes...

I've adapted an 3cm silent fan powered by a usb powerbank that feeds the camera and the fan. Never got any overheating problems and the powerbank lasts eternally (i live in Rio de Janeiro, pretty hot all the year). The in camera audio goes unusable, but i never use it anyway. Rolling shutter still the though, so keep this in mind while planing your shoots. Wide angle lens with is helps for handheld stuff and a gimbal may be welcome. Image quality is awesome and low light i think its the best in its price (its not an a7s, but really good). Only problem its its auto wb that seems to always miss it, so doing it manually its the way to go.

Here on Brazil at Rio de Janeiro the things are really messed up. I work with green screen to record teachers. The bosses make us export in 480 with extreme compression to save disk space and make uploads faster with the horrible internet they pay. The cameras are very old sony camcorders with 1080i that almost never get WB right and the wage its equivalent to $350. If you find somewhere that pays around $500 you've got the hell of a good job. Freelancing you can get around $100 a day or per edit, but people generally have zero knowledge about image quality here (720p barely arrived at or tvs, mushy 480p its a norm and its by air with tons of noise depending on where you live). Its a pain having a G7 and losing the job to someone with no idea of what hes doing and is asking $50-$100 to record and edit the footage, just because he has an old DV cam that looks more "pro" or a T2i that is a canon and for being a canon its obviously great. People talk about Canon here like it is some kind of god, but i never actually seen anyone who heard about ML or got courage to use it. Panasonic even quit our market because of this and got no official seller here now. 4k? People talk about it as some kind of ultra pro high end stuff that is totally useless. Our taxes are also pretty abusives (a7rii are around $4500 and even the G7 its $1000). Fortunatelly there is still some hope and with some good quality footage you can get some nice jobs as the TEDx im gonna cover next month and keep growing. But my advice its to stay away from here. It is almost only Stress and there is only one giant company ruling the high end market of Radio, TV, Newspapper and even Cinema. And they dont like the kind of things we like. If you dont wanna do some kind of comedy for the masses they dont want you. There are many people doing great stuff here and there always has been, but its up to creativity to make good stuff with little to no resources. There has been an Brazillian animation at the Oscars. Never seen anyone out of my film schoo who ever heard about it. It didn't even make it to the theaters and was there with a nominee. Its a pretty bad place to live with cinema stuff... But if you guys look at movies as the one that Rogerio Sganzerla, Glauber Rocha, Eduardo Coutinho or Kleber Mendonça did, there is still hope.

Would have been nice from sony if they gave us the option to have a crop mode of the 4k area of the sensor. Something similar to the APS-C crop of the A7 line. That would help with RS and solve overheating, as there would be no need for downscalling and the readout area would be smaller. Would be a bless for times when it's needed...

Ordered mine today. Even with all the downsides, it is still appealing to me as the right company to my g7. Will do some tests when it arrive (there is no official seller where i live, so i've bought from a guy on the usa which will come back by the end of this month). As i live in Brazil, overheating is my only concern. Its pretty hot around here. But under controlled situations i think it could shine. If, as reported, there is that much heat coming from the battery, wouldn't help when a third party grip gets released, or using a dummy battery on a powerbank? Anyone already tried that?

If i'm not wrong, i think the Gamma Display Assist is in the a6300 specs list, which may be what you're asking for.

The G7 has Zebras and peaking, it just lacks the 10bit hdmi, v-log, weather sealing, headphone and high bitrate Full HD (thats a bit annoying and i dont know why they did it, but downscaled 4k always look good). Its a great performer, specially for the price. But as you said, these things that the G7 lacks are fair enough to someone with the budget to buy the GH4 do it haha In any case both are good performers, they just need good glasses, what i think you already have. For the Canon EF, stick with the metabones, its worth the price, but for the Canon FD, the Roxsen you find at Ebay gets close enough for much less money, just run away from the fotodiox one, it sucks haha

Panasonic G7 is 599$ by now at B&H with a Rode Videomic for free on the package. It's 4k for cheap with a 100mbps codec and a good mic for run n gun. Black Friday deals ¯\_(ツ)_/¯