BTM_Pix

And in today's episode of "Fun With Lumix And Gaffer Tape" we have the new LCD display module which gives you a pro SLR style top panel info for your little GX80/G7 et al.

Well, pro style if Nikon and Canon used more gaffer tape in their production process that is.

10 minutes ago, Fritz Pierre said:

I'm actually surprised how cheap cameras are in your neck of the woods...not crippling VAT or anything...why the huge price difference, or are these grey market cameras?

Always amazes me too.

Just looking at  numbeo.com comparing prices of goods where I live compared to Sweden and according to that I reckon me an Mattias could have a mutually beneficial arrangement if he gets gear for me there and I pay him in beer, tomatoes, oranges, petrol, Levis or men's leather business shoes.

1 hour ago, HockeyFan12 said:

Why would he need raw capture? Just curious. I keep reading people online write about how they need raw, but every Alexa-derived project I work on is shot in ProRes and the footage is always easier to work with in post than raw-derived red, f55, or black magic footage is.

 

I didn't say he did, to be fair. 

It was the OP himself who said he needed it and thats why he bought the BMPCC. Was just saying there was a way for him to preserve that and help him with his focus with the setup he already had that he was struggling with rather than having to throw the baby out with the bath water as it were.

** EDIT ***

Hang on, it looks like thats exactly what I said wasn't it!

Haha

I meant to say 'It sounds like RAW is what you want' rather than 'what you need'.

If you've got the Zoom to do external audio anyway @Chris Oh then the GX85 with the Cinelike D hack would edge it for me over the G7. With the hack and the external audio you've matched what the G7 has the edge with and gained what it can't do which is the IBIS.

19 minutes ago, mercer said:

Yeah that was the D5500 with the Nikkor ai-s 35mm f2. I just bought the 35mm 1.4 ai-s. So I'll probably sell of the f2.

The GX85 is a fun little camera, but be warned... it is pretty small and the buttons are tiny. If that matters to you, the G85 may be better. But the 5-axis is a blast. It's hard to go back to using tripods after having it. 

If only there was some way to have bigger and more buttons to control it with

If you're happy with the image quality of the BMPCC (sounds like RAW is certainly what you need for what you're doing) and that Sigma is an EF Mount have you considered part-exing the Metabones for the newer versions which support AF and IS?

Doesn't tick all of your boxes still but will get you the focus issue out of the way and for probably only about £400 difference. 

If youre looking for something relatively hassle free to tick some of those other boxes then you could do a lot worse than something like the Sony RX100 Mark V or the Panasonic FZ2000/2500. Neither are stellar low light performers but are a good combination of easy decent results but with offering more tweakable options like LOG when you want to delve a bit deeper. Nothing wrong with good all auto stuff if it keeps you motivated to keep shooting as its so easy to get deflated as you've found with the BMPCC.

A total spend of probably £1300 then will give your BMPCC a new lease of life (and it IS worth hanging in there with) for the RAW stuff you want to do and an additional camera with a bunch of tricks for other stuff and hidden depths that you can grow into if you like.

Another little update video that might be of interest to LX100 owners (and those with cameras like FZ1000/2000 etc) which shows the wifi controller operating the zoom and focus.

The zoom controls on all the Lumix cameras are quite clunky in transition so its limited by their inherent performance so better suited to re-framing than any ambitious slow creeps.

36 minutes ago, Mark Romero said:

@ mercer

@ BTM_Pix

Thank you both. I will look into the fuji.

The key I think is low light / dynamic range /  moire suppression performance (and better 1080p than the a6000 / a6300 at 1080p). And ease of use and ease of grading.

So I will start looking into the dynamic range and low light video of the Xt20.

Thanks again.

FWIW, I regularly have to shoot stills at ISO5000 and the Fuji's haven't scared me off from that point of view. 

They don't have the bordering on night vision levels of the A7S etc but they're competitive enough at 'normal' high ISO levels.

I'd take a look at the Fuji X-T20 and the 10-24mm F4

4K, can turn things round quick because of its OOC looks, light enough to mount on the Crane, A/B as a stills combo against a D800 and Nikon's 14-24 f2.8 and its not embarrassed in the slightest, you can put an ND on it without jumping through (expensive) hoops, the lens has IS, touch screen focus etc etc 

And you can put a lens turbo on it to use all of your Nikon lenses.

I used the 14-24mm far more than you'd imagine a sports photographer might (stadium views, low ringside at boxing,in the melees after a trophy presentation etc) and the key word there is 'used' as its been put into retirement  now by an X-T20 and 10-24mm for ALL of that stuff.

Might not be the total answer to what you want (and by the wrestling you're having there probably isn't one) but its worthy of a look if you have a local camera store that stocks them.

19 minutes ago, mercer said:

Another option to add would be the Fuji XT20. 4K and probably a good stills camera in one. Great OOC colors to speed up your post workflow. Would probably work well with the Zhyiun Crane. I know a lot of Nikon stills shooter end up with a Fuji eventually, so that could be a perfect fit until the D750 or D810 gets updated. 

I could've saved myself a load of typing if I'd seen this first!! 

As soon as I've got everything on it that I want and settled on what I'm running it on I'll sort out a guide to how people can make one.

It should be a matter of just buying a board and putting the software image on it then sorting yourself out for how to power it and getting a gamepad.

Total cost for the bits you need to buy should be no more than about £45 even if you got for a wireless gamepad.

There'll be a bit of a challenge sorting out an easily deployable software image that people can flash themselves but I'll sort that out over the next few weeks.

Presuming anyone wants one that is of course.

So......

A bit of an update

I've spent the past few days redoing this from the ground up and there's been what you might call 'a bit' of progress.

The camera functions are now controlled by a gamepad, which gives a bit more scope in terms of buttons etc.

By separating out the part that does the actual talking to the camera, this means that that can be smaller for mounting and the choice of the input device is now far more flexible as it can support pretty much any USB device that can be attached to it.

In this version, the gamepad itself is wireless too so not only is it a lot neater but it can also be used to extend the overall distance of wireless control (its range to the control box is added to the range from the control box to the camera).

I can also make it support multiple devices so you could have something smaller just to do basic control (or a USB numeric keypad would be quite good for that actually) and then use a more elaborate one when needed. Or do both simultaneously if you want control of exposure and someone else to do focus etc.

Speaking of focus, this is now controlled by an analog stick so has a bit more feel to it (ignore the transitions in the video, the debug mode makes the control much coarser) with a press in the centre of the stick activating a one shot AF.  

If your camera has a powered zoom lens (hello LX100 etc) then this is controlled from the same stick by pushing forward and back. 

I believe that this will also work with those MFT lenses that support power zoom but I don't have one so I can't confirm that.

I've made a drivable AF joystick point mode which you activate by pressing in on the right hand analog stick and then using the D Pad to drive the focus point around the screen and then pressing in the stick again to action it.

There will be more focus enhancements coming.........

The shutter speed and aperture are now controlled by the shoulder buttons on the gamepad and the ISO is now also directly switchable on two buttons.

I've got a few more enhancements coming over the next few days as well so I'll keep you informed.

In the meantime, here is a video of it controlling a GX80

On 08/06/2017 at 6:57 PM, ibd said:

"It poses more questions than it answers" -- That's a great way to put it. Overall I agree. On the hardware side of things, though, I think the investments would be minimal. All modern laptops bring fast WiFi, extremely fast processing, and fast storage. It then comes down to software to solve the problem. I think a proof-of-concept could be done in python in a matter of days or weeks. What remains unclear to me is whether or not the resulting stream is of good enough quality (fps and "bitrate") to be worthy of recording at all. A dedicated piece of hardware is far more elegant, of course, but also pricier. And I think one purpose of these hacks is always to save money by putting in slightly more effort on the user's side.

I've had a bit more of a dig about this because I was pretty sure that I remembered that the viewfinder app was upscaling to fill the phone screen. 

I had remembered correctly as it turns out the live stream resolution is only 640 x 480 so that would immediately rule it out.

33 minutes ago, IronFilm said:

Interesting!! You could make a control grip like say the FS7 for using while the Panasonic camera is mounted on your shoulder

Yes, it does all of the same functions (and a few more actually) and you could fit in pretty much whatever worked ergonomically.

Once its in its finished much more compact form (just the size of the blue-ish control panel in the video) its pretty small.

You could probably gut something like this PC Joystick (which is about £15) to use the handle part which has a similar ergonomic approach to the Sony grip and mount it in there.

For me, its better as a pocketable thing but thats the beauty of it being a bit of a DIY hack, it can be a lot more custom than an off the shelf product.

20 minutes ago, Grimor said:

I started learning arduino 2 weeks ago.

Now i´ve done a sound sensor based flash trigger  for high speed photography. I´m planning to take a cool photo in few days.

Cool.

I've got an arduino development board called an Esplora thats got lots of interesting sensors built in to it. If I did this remote on it I was going to incorporate the temperature sensor on it to give the Panasonics a Sony emulation mode where it stops the recording when there's a whiff of warm weather  

Just now, Grimor said:

COOOOOOLLLLLLL!!!

Whats the main board? Raspberri? Arduino?

Congrats, your gadget  is super!

That version is running on a Pi to prototype it.

The final version will either be on a PiZero to get the form factor down or an Arduino based small one like the Feather HUZZAH.

I don't have a dog in this particular fight but with regard to the storage issue won't everyone just be using the CFAST eSATA breakout adapters like they do with the URSA and going straight to SSD?

The whole kit is around $120 so you're saving money straight away.

Because you can have a 2 metre cable limit for esata it can also mitigate more restricted access to rigged cameras too even if you can't fit what you're doing within the greatly extended record times offered by the higher capacity of SSDs.

It also takes away the not exactly readily available in your local supermarket aspect to using CFAST as well as you literally can get SSDs in my local supermarket !

Even if you did decide to go the CFAST only route, a Nexto DI will make offloading pretty much hands off, portable and quick.

I built my own DIY one for less than £50 so if anyone wants to buy one for their new C200 then form an orderly queue  

And here it is

I'm about to start a new thread with a practical application of all of this poking around that some of you may be interested in.......

1 hour ago, Samin said:

Any guide on how's that done?

Mmmm.....complete red herring with this.

Seems that European cameras can't be switched to Australian region.

Sorry about that !

Guide for booting up to get 30p and 60p modes here though

For G7 owners, there seems to be some odd way of doing this to permanently lift the 30 minute limit but it seems quite temperamental 

//////EDIT/////

Tried it on my G7 and I can get the 30/60p but not the extended recording time.

Definitely seems to be different things these cameras can do depending on what mode they are in when you try them.

//////

9 minutes ago, ibd said:

 

Have you already tried grabbing frames from the video stream that it also sends to these remote control apps? For example, you could create an "external recorder" for this. This would also, for example, allow higher ISO in video mode because you're really just grabbing the "raw jpgs" and creating a video out of it. Not sure how the bandwidth would hold up, you would need a good router and stable wifi connection, and even then the theoretical limit is around 300 Mbps, with the practical limit being much lower usually.

I think someone has done a live viewfinder app for smartphones based on it but to be perfectly honest as a recording proposition I think it poses far more questions than it answers.

Considering how much you'd need to invest in the hardware to do it and creating the software to control it and the storage situation if you wanted it to be in a portable format (i.e. a smartphone) then, as with the higher bitrate HD quest, the Atomos Ninja Star at less than £200 is a far better proposition for me to eek extra value out of these cameras.

I've got one from a GH4.

Its not an app controllable function on there so without having a thorough poke around with an actual GH4 its a bit of a dead end I'm afraid.

However.....

Panasonic do an iOS app for the DVX200 (which is basically a GH4) that does allow it to be controlled.

If someone had a DVX200 and a packet sniffer then, well, maybe.....

http://pro-av.panasonic.net/en/4k_camcorder/ag_rop/index.html

1 hour ago, Octofocus said:

Thank you! Already found, there really is a flow through the UPD protocol, looking for options ...

____

It remains to learn about the possibility to change "Master pedestal"

I can't see any reference to the master pedestal control in the G7 files.

It would be very useful to have control of it though because I suspect it might be what prevents Cinelike D from working properly on the LX100.

3 minutes ago, tonysss said:

 

Switch to service mode (PAL-NTSC) with an exclamation point icon on shutdown. It does not work for me, still 29:59 limitation

And you switched the camera to Australian region too?

I was told their version did not have the limitation

2 hours ago, Octofocus said:

Hi all!

My G7 support next ISO:
<item id="menu_item_id_sensitivity_80" enable="yes"/>
<item id="menu_item_id_sensitivity_100" enable="no"/>
<item id="menu_item_id_sensitivity_125" enable="no"/>
<item id="menu_item_id_sensitivity_160" enable="no"/>
<item id="menu_item_id_sensitivity_200" enable="yes"/>

I setup ISO 80 and record video, next read exif and see this
ISO : 200  
......
......
Program ISO : 80

It is unclear what is really

___________________

Me interesting camera support "Master pedestal" someone tried to regulate it? :D 

___________________

I also wonder how the picture is transferred in real time from the camera to the application

It is a quirky stream of jpegs that a computer can be persuaded to display but it requires quite a lot of configuration to achieve

17 minutes ago, Rizky Ramadhan said:

Idk, the Hue and Extended ISO not working on GX85

Thanks, I only had a G7 to hand at the time and just dug my GX80 out and it takes the ISO commands but doesn't action them in video mode.

ISO50000 in stills is a go though!

The Cinelike D Hue controls are definitely working on my GX80 though and I think I've seen a GX85 user confirm them on his somewhere else in the thread.