BTM_Pix

Atomos looked like they'd got great timing releasing the new Ninja Inferno at the same time the GH5 became available but its even better timing with this upgrade of the LS300. For a total price of $3550 from B&H these two make a massively specced package. JVC did packages with Samyang lenses and if they've got any sense they'll do a bundled version of the LS300 with the Ninja Inferno. Everything about the LS300 on the front end is there (Super35 sensor, 4K,LOG,flexible mount,ND,XLR,dedicated controls) as are the clever features like Variable Sensor Mapping and the brilliant Prime Zoom function and mating it with the Ninja Inferno now takes care of the rest of it as on top of all that you get 10 bit 4K60p direct to edit ready ProRes on affordable media and a no compromise professional monitor with all the bells and whistles thrown in. Thats a hell of a system for $3550. Its probably not going to be attracting the same sort of user (or buzz!) as the GH5 (to which you could of course attach the Ninja Inferno and get all the back end stuff) but for people who really need a solid camcorder for broadcast work that can also be used for digital cinema then I can't see any better options than this. But they really need to up their marketing game and let people know about it.

From my tests today, the face detect AF in video is very effective indeed. I tried it on 18-55 f2.8-4, 35 f1.4, 50-140 f2.8 and the 50-230 f4.5-6.7 The weakest (although its all relative as it was still good) was the 35 f1.4 I was just shooting someone cooking (all handheld) so the subject was nipping around a bit and being front on, side on and facing away from the camera and moving towards it as well and it performed brilliantly to be honest. I was doing some manual crane ups from foreground objects such as bowls and appliances with the subject in the background and as soon as the face came into view during the raise it locked on to it and racked smoothly without overshooting. The big downer of course is that in only does this in HD rather than 4K but you never know with Fuji and they might bring it in next time. The other niggle I have is that AF Lock doesn't work when you have face detect on and it would have been nice to be able to hold focus on a foreground object and then let it got to choose when it racked to the face. All in all though, I must say that if I had to shoot a similar subject in a documentary type style then I'd go as far as to say that I'd forego the 4K and choose to shoot it in HD so I could use the face detect. Focus beats resolution all day long when you have to get the shot.

Well the new firmware has certainly improved the AFC hunting of my 27mm. It now only sounds mildly asthmatic. Initial thoughts about the rest of it are : Refocussing works well off the AF-L button (which I have remapped to be AF-ON) Histogram is welcome but they could've pushed the boat out and put zebras in. The new Eye Sensor + LCD Image Display mode is great for weaning myself off the traditional DSLR chimping method. I actually quite like the playback through EVF method as its a boon in bright lighting but most of my work means you still have to keep one eye on whats going on around you when you're looking and marking images so being detached from that by having the camera to your eye isn't always a good thing. Its a bit niche but the voice memo function is a boon for anyone doing editorial work with it. Copyright in the EXIF ditto. I'm going to test the face detect AF tomorrow......

Well if you're going to bring facts into it John..... DOH !!!! Thanks

I'm probably very late to this but prompted by a discussion in another thread about editing on a MacBook I thought I'd flag up what I've been using as an additional monitor when editing. As you can see here, I'm using my iPad Mini in FCPX as the Secondary Display using an app called Duet which was developed by some ex-Apple staff. Basically, it allows you to use any (and multiple) iOS devices connected to the USB port to increase the screen real estate of your MacBook (and any OSX machine actually) when running the Duet app on your Mac. OSX just sees them as additional screens so you can arrange and orient them anyway you like just as you would normal additional monitors. And because you aren't dealing with big monitors on stands, you can quickly reconfigure your setup depending on what you're doing. For example, if I'm using Aperture, I'll have the iPad on the left of the screen with all the tools on it and the main MacBook screen just having the image I'm editing. Also, unlike proper external monitors, you can take them with you easily. So if you're away somewhere and you have your iPad (or even your iPhone) then you can setup a dual screen system wherever you are. Or a tri screen system if you can borrow someone else's iPad there! I attach mine using the Ten One Design Mountie which at £20 is a bit harsh for some plastic and rubber but it works well. Other types are available cheaper on Amazon. The Duet app is £14.99 on the app store and the OSX control app is a free download. So, all in all, £34.99 to turn what you might well already have in your bag (or your pocket if its an iPhone) into an additional monitor is decent value. https://tenonedesign.com/mountie.php https://www.duetdisplay.com

I've got the 27mm f2.8 and I put it on earlier in AFC as I'm starting to look at video features on the X-T2. It sounded like it was gasping for breath !

Might as well post them. So, the grip then. I wasn't sure about the extent of the bottom lip protrusion relative to the rest of the camera as it seemed awkward at first and digging into my wrist a bit but after a small adjustment to how I was holding it then it actually felt very solid so thumbs up for that. I don't like the connector being covered by a removable rubber piece rather than a slide as I won't always want to have the grip on so its going to be a pain to remember to have that piece in whatever bag I'm using at the time. Performance wise, I use the X-T2 in boost mode anyway so its a marginal gain in some respects but the blackout time reduction did feel noticeable. But the move up to 11 fps is a big, big win for me. But obviously, it doesn't matter much if it can't nail focus consistently at this higher rate! So, quick test, focus was held on the golfer for a burst till the ball was out of the frame, then a brief pull out to reframe and lock on the ball and then a 37 frame continuous burst tracking the ball across the green. The grey frames are where it lost focus or in the case of the first one didn't acquire it. Considering the size of the object it was tracking relative to the frame and I'm judging focus by being able to read the markings on the ball then I've got no doubt that every single frame would've been acceptable with even a slightly larger target like a tennis ball. I would not be troubled in the slightest by this performance in similar circumstances if it came off my Nikon D5 to be honest. And I've done a blow up of what was causing the last frames to be out which was that it was attracted to some blades of grass in front of the ball. With the custom AFC settings tweaked to the option to ignore obstacles. I like this camera more every time I use it and the grip has moved it on another level. With more tweaking of the settings that I've been doing then - long primes aside - its getting towards being indivisible from shooting with my Nikons.

Well done for your diligence and honesty Mattias. I bet the original owner is a thrilled as he was stunned to hear from you. Talking of things that might have been stolen..... I was looking for JVC LS300 videos and this one popped up. Is this you or has it been appropriated? If it actually IS JVC then their subscriber count might explain a bit about why they haven't had much success marketing it !!

FFS!!! I popped in to share some results of the tests with the grip that I've literally just finished and the buggers have rendered the results a bit moot because of their fancy dan new updates. Damn you Fuji and your on time deliveries on promises

Yes, had the boost mode on so I was expecting more drain but it was the erratic nature of it that was troubling. More testing required to get to the bottom of it I think.

I think the buzz around it is a good thing as it's making people who've got one get excited and get out there shooting and making the people who haven't got one take a good look at what they HAVE got and by and large think "I can live with what I've got. I'll buy some lights instead" Everyone wins like that. With regard to the AF100, if Panasonic refresh the HVX200 (which is a GH4 with a lens) with the GH5 sensor at NAB then it will have some serious attention for anyone with rig and jig fatigue

I was a bit perturbed by a reviewer listing his palm activating the half press on the shutter as a minor drawback! I havent really shot any video with it as yet so I'll be interested in seeing how long it can power it for as on its own it's poor even for stills. Worse is the completely non linear/random/lying bastard indicators depletion rate of the batteries. Long story but.... I was doing a test on Monday of battery life in evf only mode with all power saving off to mimic a DSLR being sat there ready to shoot. I'd found that when it was used as the 70-200 camera for football (which can have variable periods of inactivity but needs to be ready to go all the time) the power saving was making it unusable. So the bottom line was that if it couldn't sit there for at least 60 minutes in constant ready mode then it would be dead in the water for me really. So, I left it for an hour and picked it up and sure enough it was ready to go and had lost only one bar of power. But when I then rattled off a load of frames (testing speed of an eyefi card) it was all over pretty quickly. I'd noticed it doing this when I was doing the work trial with it but put it down to it being possibly environmental with the cold and how much the work rate was varying (inactivity then multiple long continuous bursts) so it couldn't work out the right average. But then it went from a couple of bars to empty within about 10 shots when shooting a medal ceremony (hardly the most taxing thing for it to do) Seemed independent of Fuji or 3rd party batteries as well Anyone else had this issue?

Anyone used the battery grip with the X-t2? I didn't bother getting it for my initial trial shoots as I wanted to see what the camera could do on its own and the whole point for me is to reduce size so didn't want to end up with it being as big as my D5 etc. Plus, well, you know...£300!! Anyway, as I'm keeping the system (and the battery life is poor for what I'm doing) I've been softening on the idea. And as luck would have it, I'm at the airport and for once the tax free shop has an actual saving (it's "only" £250) so I've took the plunge. I'll test it tomorrow and see if the promised AF improvements are significant. As per previous tests, this will be done in the dark obviously

Exhibit A ! 8 chargers for simultaneous charging of 16 batteries with storage for charged and need charging, all off one mains outlet and fits in a tray the size of a kitchen drawer. They all sit on a strip of velcro so can be detached easily for travel. Total cost was around £90 with an average of about £9 per battery charger and I think roughly £25 for the USB distributor and cables. Plus £2 for the plastic tray obviously! It was worth it for the lack of clutter alone and having to root through bags to find chargers and batteries all the time.

The dummy battery solution will let you do that though as long as your rechargeable power bank can output 9v as well as USB. https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Computers-Accessories/Lanparte-Coupler-Battery-Panasonic-DMC-GH3/B00LHNBF08/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1490621048&sr=8-2&keywords=gh4+dummy+battery If you want to take a couple of batteries that you can recharge off the USB port of the power bank as well then these are ideal https://www.amazon.co.uk/Newmowa-Charger-Panasonic-DMW-BLF19-DMC-GH3/dp/B00Z65W732/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1490621097&sr=8-2&keywords=gh4+usb+charger I have sets of these for most of my different camera types velcroed into a tray running off a multi output USB charger so I can be charging all of them off one outlet. Then when I'm going away its just a question of pulling the right chargers out of the tray and I can recharge batteries off the usb outlet of my laptop or a regular iPhone charger. Saves a ton of space and hassle.

I have mine set at a nominal ISO with 180deg shutter angles for the different frame rates and auto WB so its an advantage to me as it means I never have to remember to change to the correct shutter speed when switching between modes, which I was always forgetting to do! But I can see your point why it doesn't work for you. The manual seems to say you can map the VFR to a Fn button and it will bring the menu up when pressed but thats not letting you set it directly to the FPS you want at a single stroke is it. It will save you a menu press, a scroll to the video settings and a scroll to the VFR function so thats something I guess.

Can you not make a profile with those settings and assign it to one of the C positions on the top plate? I use that on other Panasonics to quickly change between 4K24p with 1/50, 1080p50 with 1/100 and a generic photography profile. Lovely stuff of your kids by the way.

I reckon you've got a GH5 that was meant for the Australian market with that screen mate. In a world of vlogs with people being "brand ambassadors" and having highly dubious product placement relationships with manufacturers, the segment from 2 minutes to 3 minutes is probably the most effective ethics statement I've ever seen!! "Anyway, I told him to fuck off. I said fuck off. What a dickhead"

This pack contains a dummy battery for GH4 that you can connect to a rechargeable power bank that outputs 9v Alternatively most recent Panasonic camcorders can be USB powered https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ex-Pro®-Replacement-Panasonic-DMW-AC8EB-DMW-DCC12/dp/B00EF7J91U/ref=sr_1_2?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1490548051&sr=1-2&keywords=gh4+power

If you balance off the concrete post on the right, the flowers do seem to be a pale pink.

A refreshingly violent camera test that ! I've been using the Camranger system for a few years to set up behind the goal cameras for football matches. The max tripod height you can use is 10cm so its a massive plus to not have to lie on the usually wet ground to frame the shot and it also wirelessly sends the images to the laptop so you don't have to wait till half or full time to retrieve your images and wire them. I've also been using the Panasonic app this week with the G7 for vlogging stuff and its a boon for people like me that are too blind to see the fold out screen when they're doing a piece to camera and too vain to wear their glasses on screen. Oh and for setting exposure and all that stuff as well. The app is good with cameras like FZ1000 with servo zoom as you can control that as well. Panasonic actually do a remote pan/tilt head that can be controlled by it as well for the full PTZ experience but for reasons best known to themselves it only works with a really limited range of their camcorders. The Osmo Plus is good in that respect as with the zoom it does make a decent little remote system if you stick it on a tripod. Which is a bit arse backwards for a gimbal but there you go.

Can't believe its still on back order considering that fella seemed to get his in 1943.

There doesn't seem to be any software solutions but using an Atomos Samurai or some such would be a good solution. In a twin monitor setup running Photoshop, you'd have one monitor with all the tools on and the second monitor full screen of the image that you're editing. Loop this second screen through to the Samurai so it will be seeing exactly what's on that screen and you simultaneously have full real time histogram, vectorscope, RGB parade etc on the Samurai. It would actually be a neat system as you could mount the Samurai between the two monitors or above them or wherever and of course it serves double duty as a field recorder and monitor. And its a completely free system if you already own one Blackmagic do their Ultrascope system but its got issues with USB3 compatibility and would require come cobbling together to use it with one PC (basically you'd have to set up the PC to think it had 3 screens) and its also more expensive anyway than the Samurai. My logic in this instance would be to say that if I was going to spend $575 on the Blackmagic product anyway then I'd effectively be getting paid $80 to buy the Atomos one ! Or, more likely, I'd say that I was getting the shiny new 4K Ninja Inferno (which also does that stuff of course) for a bargain $420 Good overview of the scope functionality of the Atomos products here :

OK, I've done a basic little test. Its tricky to do it exactly equivalent because of lens variances etc and my range of X mount lenses is limited compared to my Nikons but anyway. The test 'scene' was a bedroom with a tiny fragment of outside light, an empty clear mineral water bottle stood on a beige duvet cover with a plain light coloured wall behind. So it was low light and not much for the AF to grab hold of as the more distinct contrast points were the creases on the duvet cover! The illumination level at the bottle was 2 lux according to my Sekonic. Exposure for the cameras was ISO 12800, f3.2, 1/50th. On the D500 I used a Nikon AF-S 24-70mm f2.8G ED FX and on the XT-2 the closest thing I've got to that which is the XF18-55 f2.8-4. Not doing the Fuji any favours really by putting a mid-range kit lens against one of Nikon's holy trinity but I'm guessing you'd sooner have a less than ideal case scenario anyway. Also, I've used the Nikon 24-70 for years in every permutation of light and environment you can imagine so I'm comfortable with using it as the benchmark in this instance. The test was to manually set lenses to infinity (so they had to do some work), switch AF on and then swing around to the bottle in centre frame and fire. The results were that there wasn't a massive amount of difference to be honest. Both of them locked in as short a period of time as to leave me comfortable that if I was ever in a scenario where I had to shoot an empty water bottle in a virtually dark room that I wouldn't miss a second of the action. Neither of them hunted particularly. The majority of the time you could hear the motors had only gone in one direction without overshooting and coming back. Very occasionally they'd go back again but they both did it and never more than one overshoot. Where the Fuji scored big though of course is with the EVF you could actually see what it was you were shooting whereas of course with the OVF of the D500 you're virtually blind in that scenario. Changing lenses out on the Fuji to the 35mm f1.4 and the 50-230 f5.6 was a different issue though. The 35mm was the worse of the two and would almost always overshoot at least once whereas the 50-230 would generally just do it once. So, all in all, even with the right lens, its marginally slower than the D500 and even with the wrong lens it will get you there without too many overshoots if you happen to find yourself shooting in conditions where, to be fair, you might want to re-think whether its a video camera you need or a thermal imaging one. How this test would have gone if the water bottle had decided to get up and run around and which one would track the better I don't know. But from the actual real jobs I've been doing with the XT-2 the past couple of weeks, I wouldn't be massively concerned about that either.

I honestly think in 2-3 years time when we are all done to death with cobbling together different lenses and bodies and interfaces and all the other hooch looking for perfect systems then we'll all end up buying camcorders again. The XC10/15 has a lot going for it in this respect. Everyone I know who has been sceptical about it and tried it has found it quite liberating to just have a one box solution that - when you look beyond the specs - just makes decent images and makes them without fuss. Obviously they aren't without their issues as you'll find if you have a search on here so whether this iteration of the concept is the right one at the right time I don't know. Canon have the wherewithal to make a Super 35 version of it with L optics with a constant 2.8 with a FF equivalent (not that old chestnut) of 18 to 300mm, retail it for 5K and it would probably be the last camera most of us would need or buy. Which of course is precisely why they won't do it! I tell you who might though and that's JVC if they used the LS300 as a basis. I've been using a G7 effectively as a camcorder this week with just one small zoom lens on it and relishing the speed and simplicity of the restriction rather than fretting about it. So, yes, I think if you just want to get and shoot do what you've described then the XC10/15 is not going to get in your way. In that regard, it has to be a smart choice! But.... If you're in that area, I'd also take a good look at the Panasonic FZ2000. Its a lot cheaper, faster lens (at the long end), much longer reach, has NDs, LOG, 5 axis IS, 10 bit very good stills extraction, much cheaper media, 10 bit 4:2:2 HDMI out.... The downside is that in 4K, its cropped to about 35mm FF equivalent (here we go again) which may or may not be a deal breaker for your application.