Phil A

I know the forum is mainly driven by lusting after gear and pixel peeping but if you should ever have the time and motivation, I would love to see a "behind the scenes" thread from you where you tell more about your process (without hijacking this one). Planning, shooting, post. I think your videos are some of the best I've ever seen by a participant of this forum.

I always, on every system, shot macro with manual focus so I would get a lens that has good manual focus and adapt, i would totally not get anything with focus-by-wire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikon_1_series It's not their first though, I don't understand why people keep saying that. Nikon was quite early with the 1 series, it's just that they developed completely independent of what customers wanted and the product kinda bombed.

Great. I think the rendering, etc. is good and I like both the quality and quantity of bokeh when shooting wide open, where the lens is already sharp enough for my taste. Auto focus for photography is working well and together with Eye-AF leads to being able to let someone else take a picture (there's not a single good picture of myself taken with the Voigtländer because manual focus basically overburdens most people who aren't used to it). On the downside, you might have to adjust the focal reducer to get sharp pictures at infinity (and then still not get them if you get a slightly out of spec one) and it's not ideal for manual focus because often the combination of lens to adapter to camera has some rotational play when turning the focus ring (you can limit this by mounting the focal reducer to your cage and/or using a lens support on rails). Continuous auto focus on the GH5 is basically unusable with the combination but I found it also too unreliable with native Panasonic lenses. I'm taking quite a bit more pictures than video so that was a good decision for myself in my opinion.

I've sold my Voigtländer 17.5mm for a combination of SpeedBooster + Sigma 30mm f/1.4 (EF mount). Missed the auto focus too much.

Clearly 40mm and then something 70-85mm as a complimentary second. I also kinda like 50mm but in actual use there are too many situations where it's just a bit too tight.

So we're now publicly shaming people and companies because the host of one of our favorite internet forums didn't get invited to a camera test event that he had no natural entitlement to be at (besides it being a good publicity opportunity for BMD)? While I can understand the disappointment of Andrew, I think the behavior displayed here will probably reduce future chances regarding any brands' involvements even more. Not exactly professional at all. Why is this forum always so god damn hostile?! I can't judge if John Brawley is a nice person or not because I don't know him, but I found it rather surprising he was even willing to fight it out with some of us arm chair experts. People here compare his behavior to how Roger Deakins behaves on his forum. Well, I have never seen the people on Deakins' forum question what he says all the time so I think it is not too surprising that eventually there might be rash answers. I find this really disappointing all in all. This is a forum I really enjoy(ed) to read a lot but the tone is often so negative, aggressive and absolute. I already took some time off the forum a while ago and now I often starting writing posts/replies but then stop and decide not to post at all because the internet tough guy behavior here. Like in all controversial threads, I guess it's again only a question of time for people who disagree to get banned?

Do you photograph for huge fine art prints? Do you shoot sports in low light? If the answers are "no" then any current camera will do. Unless you permanently shoot at ISO 6400 or need FullFrame f/1.4 shallow DoF, I don't see how the GH5 could hold you back. It's clearly a more pleasant experience than shooting my A6300 was. And the 5D III isn't exactly amazing for post-processing either.

But would you want to color grade on a 21" TN panel that was run 8h for 5days a week for 3 years? Also +1 to transcoding. I have a system with way better performance than what you're looking at and I still transcode all my H.264 stuff to ProRes because it's just less sucky for editing. A regular SSD or maybe 3 or 4 spinning drives in Raid0 are perfectly fine for even ProRes HQ in UHD 60p.

That Samyang 24mm 1.4 is clearly not representative of what the lens is supposed to look like wide open. For reference, just look at some pics on Flickr. Exchange it and the next one is probably a lot better. Quality for money, the Sigma 24mm 1.4 is amazing. In general I think the Sigma Art lenses are always a solid option, especially when adapting to mirrorless (no such thing as auto focus adjustment like in DSLR).

Considering that these are all mainly photography cameras and photographers like ecosystems and lens choice and stuff, we have to say: NX1 -> the first really good Samsung NX camera, but lens choice limited. Basically the 16-50, 50-150 and 85mm were the only pro lenses. Leica SL -> Leica. It's silly expensive for what it is/does. It's just not a mass market product. Barely native lens choices. Fuji X-H1 -> Exact copy of the X-T2 with IBIS and better ergonomics. Price difference and timing issues therefore... you also get exactly the same picture quality with the smaller models (X-E3, X-T20).

How is everyone editing his GH5 files, explicitly asking about the (in my case V-LOG L) 24fps 10bit UHD files? I'm using the regular Davinci Resolve so I can't edit the files natively. Therefore I use Rocky Mountain Movie Converter (which was the go-to with the h.265 files of the NX1) to transcode my footage to ProRes 422 HQ which I then edit and grade. I once read that this is a sub-ideal transcode but struggle to find other ways to easily(free/cheap) transcode, seeing how I have no access to Adobe Media Encoder CC due to lack of interest to buy into the Adobe CC subsciptions for video just to transcode files. Now with this workflow I have the Pro that it edits edits smoothly with the Cons of over 700 Mbit/s files needing a lot of storage while likely having quality loss due to lossy compression of an already lossy codec. I'm wondering what's the best course of action in your opinion? Keep the current workflow and maybe use a different transcoder Easy performance for my system but needs a lot of disk space and questions of generational quality loss Buy Davinci Resolve Studio to natively edit the 150 Mbit/s IPB files without transcoding Uses very little disk space but probably going to kill my system on the CPU level for the decoding when scrubbing/playing Buy Davinci Resolve Studio to natively edit the 400 Mbit/s All-I files without transcoding Uses more SD space (and buy new V60 cards) when recording, but less disk space than ProRes and probably acceptable system performance For the final results (on the internet) I have to question if the quality differences might even be noticeable but I'm a hobbyist so it's as much about enjoying the process. PS: Main system is an oc'ed i7 5930K with 32 GB RAM and oc'ed AMD R9 390. System, apps and all media on multiple Samsung 850 drives. Secondary desire to edit very basic stuff on my laptop with i7 6700HQ, 16 GB RAM and GeForce GTX960M.

@FoxAdriano The screen has lower resolution than the EVF, better get the G-Cup from Guerilla https://www.guerrillaproducts.com/products/g-cup-panasonic-gh5

As we're discussing travel videos, I'm curious about your feelings about duration. I think that the "parties involved" tend to go towards too much length due to having an emotional connection while an un-involved viewer might be better served with a short clip of only 1 or maybe maximum 2 minutes? Maybe split a longer clip up into multiple shorter ones with a specific theme? Obviously if it is to be posted via Social Media, attention span of most viewers is more like 10 to 30 seconds.

I just wish the sun hood was a) better designed/engineered b) less expensive c) both of the above Besides that the monitor is a pure pleasure.

I actually really considered getting one just like 2 weeks ago. We are working on shooting food videos more frequently and together with an external recorder the high frame rate options in raw are incredible. In Germany it's still like 2000 € used, then the 7Q/ShogunInferno on top, need for sturdier stabilization, etc. made us hold of for the time being as hobbyists. Seeing how you probably wouldn't make that much use of slow motion for narrative film making, I would probably opt for a camera with a "nicer" image. Personally I actually liked the Ursa Mini 4k image (as I did the BMPC4k). Since the Ursa Mini Pro is out I also see clear price drops on used UM4.6k which would probably be my first choice if I was in that type of business.

Used an A6300 with the kit zoom on a Zhiyun Crane. It's light enough that even when you zoom the gimbal motors easily compensate the off-balance. You could even motor-zoom from the gimbal itself if you have the connection cable. So it depends on your setup. Also internal focusing isn't really helping over externally focusing as it will move glas in the lens and change the center of balance.

https://www.flickr.com/groups/4162920@N21/ Great focal length imho, especially combined with the wide aperture. When 35mm is a wee too wide and 50mm a bit too tight, 40 is even more universal. I'm shooting mostly with GH5 + focal reducer + Sigma 30mm 1.4 because it gives me something like a 42mm f/2 would on film (photography) and I wish it was a stop faster for stronger background separation sometimes. Can totally relate why @jase considers to get a Sony A7 just to use that lens.

Regarding the bold part, I would imagine BMD intent this to be used for Davinci Resolve and their stance is that you need an I/O box anyway because monitoring via GUI isn't color accurate due to OS drivers/profiles. So they probably expect one to use 2 screens + a grading monitor via the Intensity Shuttle (that conects through Thrunderbolt or USB).

BMD partnered with Apple for an external GPU, it was announced today. https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/blackmagicegpu/

Nevermind. Edited, ignore my post.

Tremendously so.

What kind of files do you edit? Is it JPEGs, DNG shot with the mobile device or raw files you transfer to the device? With JPEGs there's only so much you can do, might be that black/white already clips. DNG shot with the mobile device (e.g. shot with the Lightroom app and set to DNG) are obviously quite a bit better but also don't have too much dynamic range. With raw files imported to the iPad from my camera I feel like it's more or less identical to editing them on my computer with regards to fixing exposure weaknesses. If you feel that other apps give you less leeway with raw files, maybe those apps can't actually edit the raw file but use the embedded JPEG preview?

I think Adobe Lightroom Mobile is free if you can live without some of the functionalities. I have the Adobe Photography subscription and use Adobe Lightroom Mobile a lot for social media activity. I just wish it wouldn't always try to sync all my stuff into the cloud, which I just don't want.

Semi rant: I shoot a lot of photographs with my GH5 and I use auto-focus with eye detection for it. If someone is proper dark skinned and has glasses, you're about to have a bad time.