BTM_Pix

I have that Tamron as well, it is an absolute steal for the price they go for. Which controller are you getting as a matter of interest, a basic LANC one or something more dedicated to the Micro ?

Thanks. No IR cut filter, unless there was one built in to the cheapo vari ND that I had on there ! I'm actually actively keeping an eye out for a cheap Micro now. The Pocket needs an EVF/Loupe anyway so I don't see the Micro needing one as an issue and the extra things it offers over the Pocket are worth it. The expansion port for external switch control is appealing in terms of building a custom handle. I've already made some development steps in preparation for that so it might be something that might be of interest to you when I find a camera. The expansion port also has a composite video output which gives some possibilities for cheap wired and wireless monitoring. With regard to the Pocket4K comparison, the OG has less of everything and obviously isn't going to win a game of Top Trumps against it. But...well we know thats not the whole story. In some respects, I don't actually care how it stacks up as long as it is good enough for the situation I need it for. On this trip, I had the OG Pocket in a small side panel of my bag with a couple of spare batteries and the 12-60mm lens. The whole thing weighed hardly anything, wasn't bulky and was discreet enough to take shots without alarming anyone. That just wouldn't have been the same at all with the Pocket 4K so in that situation for me it won hands down because it produced a standard and style of output that was acceptable in a more practical package. I would undoubtedly have been able to potentially do more with the Pocket 4K and done it in lower light but that potential is worthless if it not practical to actually shoot with it. If I only had one or other of them then I wouldn't be crying into my beer about what comes out of them even if one of them is "only" 1080p. I think someone on here was supposed to be doing an A/B comparison ?

I'm expecting it to fare better on the P4K with its greater sensitivity as it was getting fairly marginal on the OG Pocket that I was using it on at times in lower light.

Yes because I'm getting a bit bored of juggling all of my other unfinished symphonies. This is a pretty comprehensive camera app that does the capture end of it but you still need to do the merge in an external app but thats no bad thing in terms of the extra finessing standalone HDR merge apps provide. https://www.camerafv5.com/tutorials/hdr_tutorial.php

I have no experience of them but one thing that does look interesting versus the Uray is that it has an integrated status display screen and buttons to control it whereas the Uray has to be operated through the web interface. That is a big advantage for setting up and making changes and the integral battery makes it a neater overall package too.

I was in a shop a few days ago where they had an A6400 attached to a screen doing a permanent Eye AF demo. I had a great time trying to catch it out with the whole leaning in and out of frame, glasses on/glasses off, covering my eyes with my hand and so on and it NEVER missed a beat. As much as Panasonic get slaughtered for their AF performance (and I spent a good hour comparing the AF of the S1 against the Z6 and EOS-R in the same shop where it was beaten but not totally embarrassed I have to say) we really should acknowledge that Sony have some serious witchcraft going on with their AF.

And this is one of those three. I have quite a few cameras with MFT mount but I've never really bought anything from the mid let alone high end range of native lenses. Partly because I have lenses that I'd sooner use through adapters but also because I just baulk at the price of them really. As a consequence my collection mainly consists of cheap secondhand editions of the lower end stuff but while I was away I spotted a cheap used edition of a mid end one, the Panasonic Leica DG Vario-Elmarit 12-60mm f/2.8-4, and bought it as I was looking for a fastish (by MFT standards) standard zoom with stabilisation. As this one has a bit of extra reach on the long end, albeit at the loss of some speed, I thought it made even more sense and I have to say its not bad at all, although it probably distorts more than I would like at the wide end. For use as an all round travel zoom, particularly with a non stabilised camera like the OG Pocket Cinema Camera that I was using it with here, I think its a keeper.

In defence of the L mount*, the two most often used mounts for cinema cameras are PL and EF. There is an adapter for the former and a smart adapter for the latter so the risk such as it is resides in the body. In this respect it is no different to what people have been doing for years with an FS-5 or an FS-7 etc where you would be putting an adapter on it anyway. If people don't want to use an adapter then Sigma's L mount lenses will be here before this camera so the situation in terms of fast native lenses at reasonable prices will be completely different then. I think that considering the track record of the three current members of the L Alliance then the L mount will be around for a good while yet. Its easy to forget that it has already been around for five years as it is. * I'll exclude Leica in that defence for being absolute grade A arseholes for not making their cameras compatible with the Sigma MC-21

After going out and climbing the tree in question, I can confirm that it is just less than stellar rendering/focusing the red 'teeth' of the plants against the blue sky. When I say "climbing the tree in question" I mean taking a shot of it with a real lens

Well that is very interesting. I just picked up a very cheap Zoom H3-VR on my travels to have a play with and one of the clinchers was the V2.0 upgrade now includes support for UltraSync BLUE so I suspect support for Tentacle won't be far behind it if it releasing an SDK. I suppose the SDK would make it more feasible for an inveterate tinkerer to look at making some sort of converter that glued the UltraSync and Tentacle together as it at least provides one side of the puzzle.....

The fastest low latency monitoring (without getting into massive expense) is to use an old style FPV transmitter as per solutions for GoPros on the original Phantom drones etc. As that is an analogue signal, to use it with an HDMI camera then you need and HDMI>AV converter such as this (approx €12 ) Then you connect the output of that to a transmitter such as this one (approx €10 ) There is also this product from Skyzone that is a transmitter with an HDMI input so combines both devices but is a bit more expensive (approx €50 ). Once it is transmitting in this format you then have a multitude of options to receive the signal such as a dedicated monitor like this which come in an array of sizes (approx €30 for 4 inch, approx €50 for 7 inch ) Or you could use an adapter such as this which lets you use your Android device as a monitor (approx €17 ) Another alternative are the FPV goggles which aren't exactly the most discrete thing in the world but are certainly effective outdoors (approx €90 for these particular ones ) Or even this wristwatch receiver which with a Hoodman or similar loupe could actually be fashioned into a remote EVF (approx €35 ) The upside to going this route versus any HDMI wireless solution is that its low cost, lower latency and also very much longer range (1km and up). In addition, as it operates on 5.8Ghz, it is much less prone to interference in crowded public spaces than if it was on 2.4Ghz. The downside is that its not HD obviously as it gets downconverted but with the focus tools on modern cameras for critical manual focus that certainly not the issue it might once have been. The other downside is that its a bit messy on the transmitter end as you need a battery solution for it but making it need is only a question of getting a small project box to put it in really. Here is a latency demo of a typical solution using the Skyzone TX-5D I haven't used one of those but it looks like an ideal integrated solution with having the modem built in. The only thing to be cautious of is being able to get enough cellular network coverage at the location. Not only in terms of there just not being any but also if its a big public event trying to get enough bandwidth can be a problem. I use a Teradek Vidiu Pro for this reason as it allows you to bond multiple connections together to create a much higher bandwidth. This means that if a venue has public wifi for instance but because of the number of people connected to it you can't get enough bandwidth to get a decent stream out then you can combine that with several cellular network signals and aggregate them together into a much faster connection. There are three things to bear in mind about the Vidiu Pro though, the first being that as the streams are aggregated and then sent on to their destination via Teradek's servers then there is, not unreasonably, a usage fee has to be paid to use it. They have the a pay as you go option which is $10 per gigabyte of uplink or subscriptions starting at $20 per month which gives you 50 gigabytes of uplink. It sounds a bit onerous but if you are doing it commercially then it won't add much to your fee to pass this on to your customer and its definitely worth it for the extra security that bonding connections brings. Obviously, if you don't want to use that service then you can just use the wifi or ethernet ports if the venue has them available. The next thing to bear in mind is how it does the cellular connection as it doesn't actually have a cellular modem built in and how it achieves it is a bit unusual in that you have to use iPhones to do it. At first this sounds like a non-starter based on cost but as it can be run on anything from an iPhone 5s upwards then if you get three of those used you are looking at less than £250 to have a very powerful bonded system. Bear in mind as well that you can also put SIM cards from different providers in each of them to give yourself more safety as you then have an opportunity to spread your uplink out over a number of different networks. The final thing of course is cost as Vidiu Pro and the three phones (although you could start with one and build up ) is going to be not far off three times the price of URay. Whether that is worth it to you is something I don't know. If you are doing it commercially where you can't let the client down and will be working in different environments that will have very varying network connections then I'd say it was but if you are just looking to live broadcast one camera from the same place all the time for personal use and you have a consistent network situation then its probably overkill. Details about the Vidiu Pro here anyway. https://teradek.com/collections/vidiu-family Which bit of it was causing the issue ?

For a bit of context on that Angenieux and GX80 combo, I've just put it back on and shot a quick test of it at different stages of its range.

I haven't (daren't ) done a formal count but its probably in the same ballpark as you.

I just dropped the saturation and I was on that beach with Chief Brody I'm trying to keep mine down below 3 figures ! I behaved myself in Japan and only bought 3 so thats a start.

Haha....sorry. The image from the Zeiss ZF immediately put me in mind of a film but was too saturated so I did a quick edit but I withdrew it because I think its probably a bit disrespectful to do uninvited edits of someone's work.

.

I meant MFT adapter as in Micro Four Thirds. Not MTF as in Money To Fritter Like I'd spend any real money on a proper adapter when there are perfectly good wobbly ones available off eBay.

You should probably take a look at This Guy Edits channel on YouTube. This video is possibly not nuts and bolts enough for what you are after but the concepts are there. The more in depth stuff is accessed via his Patreon account which is fair enough as the stuff he has for free to view on his YouTube channel is always very good.

The context to that image is that the lens is actually for my JVC LS300 where it becomes a real ENG setup but as it had the MFT adapter on it then it went on the GX80 for a laugh. Having said that, when it is on the GX80, it actually handles far better than you'd imagine for handheld shots as you cradle the lens and use the tilt screen to do look down monitoring. It is far from being the most ridiculous lens I've put on a small MFT camera by the way Although nothing compares to this fella, who really did set the high watermark for putting B4 lenses on MFT cameras. As above, it was just done for a laugh as it was for my LS300 really. It has a doubler in it so when that is engaged it covers the whole sensor on an MFT camera. As I discussed further on in the thread you quoted, using it with the LS300, the VSM trick of that camera means that you don't have to do that and so avoid losing the light and some sharpness.

Just watched the first four episodes. I was glad to take these things off afterwards I can tell you.

Thats a good illustration of the issue you run into with video versus stills as if you were shooting stills you would just take a huge liberty and crop it like this which makes it a more directed image. But with video you don't really have that luxury without a lot more work in post, although you could shoot 4K with the intention of it being for 1080p and do a blanket centre crop when you edit. You could also do the faux multi camera routine by having one track with the uncropped version and one with a punched in version to switch to, which would also give you some latitude for framing safety and some post stabilisation too. If you wanted to experiment with a 300mm prime, there are quite a lot of old f4 manual ones on eBay that won't hurt too much.

Yeah, the 300-800mm is not the sort of lens that I would have fancied smuggling in if I didn't have the accreditation. Even with accreditation, it still raised a few eyebrows at the security check at the press entrance !

Yeah, I'm not familiar enough with that particular sport to know exactly what sort of groupings the shots would need so it was more a general point about shooting from a fixed position with the 100m+ range that @kye was looking for. At that sort of distance, even a five or six player grouping is going to be challenging with a 400mm FOV equivalent. For stills, when you can crop then its not so much of an issue but for video, purely at the range he's talking about, its going to leave you a bit short in my opinion. For Test cricket, I used to shoot on 300-800mm but still wasn't averse to throwing a teleconverter on or using a cropped body to get a bit more reach but with 5 days to grind out you'd take any chance you could to add a bit of variety in the shots

Even taking into account the 400mm FOV equivalence of you having it on an MFT camera, you are still going to be a bit short at those distances with a 200mm to be honest. Covering football (the real one not the weird variants that all of you colonials have cobbled together ), which, depending on the stadium, will typically have a 130m distance from my position to the other goal requires a fair amount of cropping with a 400mm to get anything meaningful for action at that end. I think you'd benefit greatly with a lens that ended at 300mm rather than 200mm not just in terms of additional reach but also in terms of separation from the additional compression of the longer focal length. Sigma have done a 100-300mm f4 in various mounts for many years which, whilst not exactly free, would be ideal if you went that route and is worth keeping an eye out on eBay for.

To the fully working in electric blue case with separate bluetooth remote controller stage thank you very much I'm looking for some bigger glass as there is currently a limitation on the size of lens it is suitable for. I did say I'd do a build along thread for it for anyone who wants to have a go as is (cost for the glass and controller is around £50-60) and I will get round to it.