kye

Yeah, wide and fast is the challenge. Thus why I went really wide but not fast (8mm F4) and then Medium but fast (17.5mm F0.95). In terms of long, I just posted a bunch of images to the Lenses thread from the Helios 58mm F2, used without SB as a 116mm tele. Great stuff IMHO. https://www.eoshd.com/comments/topic/6396-lenses/?do=findComment&comment=260336

In praise of the Helios 44m-4 .... Put on a M43 sensor without a SB it becomes a 116mm FOV, and used sensibly (not trying to show off the bokeh) it can be a nice lens, soft but still detailed. Some of the below might also be in ETC mode (162mm) but I can't remember which are and aren't. Shots below taken with GH5 in HLG 4K 150Mbps and processed in Resolve. Considering the low cost for the lens and a non-SB adapter, it's a complete steal really. It's probably too soft for most peoples tastes, but click on the crane shot above to see in full-res before you dismiss it as lacking detail. When I look at the images I stop thinking about camera stuff and start thinking about what is in the frame. EDIT... actually, I just realised these all had a slight blur applied in post. Here's the crane shot without it for resolution.

Yeah, I can understand that. At the moment I'm using it without a SB so I'm only getting the middle quarter of the image, which doesn't have the crazy parts of the bokeh. But, if you don't go wide open and just use it to soften the background a bit for some depth then it looks quite nice. I think people see a fast lens and think they have to use it wide open or somehow it won't have been worth it or something. A fast lens should be used to make the right images for the project, not to show off the lens. Watching too many equipment tests on YT makes you forget that equipment can be used with subtlety and care, rather than being bludgeoned to death with stress-tests of every feature regardless of the aesthetic implications.

The best way to think about these things is in terms of colour spaces. If you film in HLG then apply a LUT that is expecting HLG then the LUT will work as designed. If you film in HLG and apply a LUT that is expecting VLog then it will not work as designed and the picture will go all strange. You can use the Colour Space Transform or Input settings to change colour spaces if you like. For example, you could film in HLG, transform to VLog using the GHa Pre LUT from @Sage, then apply a Colour Space Transform to go from VLog to LogC, then apply a film emulation LUT that is expecting LogC footage and the results will be fine (I've done exactly that). I highly recommend Juan Melaras YT channel to understand how pros use Resolve - it's completely different to all the other YT colourists. He's the only YouTuber that I've watched the videos over and over again, studying them to understand what he's doing and how it all works. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqi6295cdFJI9VUPzIN4NXQ

It is a very effective product. I do a lot of stabilisation in post from hand-held shooting and SteadXP absolutely creams most of the post-processing stabilisers. This would actually be a very good match for the BMPCC4K, depending on the technical aspects of the workflow. If you're going to shoot and do significant post-processing like this then shooting RAW at 4K would be the best place to start from in order to get the best results once you've rotated and cropped the image. The best way to help is to add some mass to the camera so it doesn't shake so much in the first place. OIS is good for this, as well as any kind of rig. It is a bit of a funny proposition in the marketplace though, OIS can smooth the small jitters, IBIS can smooth small and medium jitters, gimbals can smooth large, medium and maybe small jitters (depending on intensity) and post-processing stabilisers an do large and some medium jitters, so there isn't that much of a gap in the stabilisation options as there used to be when they designed it. I use IBIS and post-production stabilisers and that mostly gets the job done. It is killer for action cameras and tiny cameras like RX100 though.

Yeah, that was kind of my logic, a faster lens can always be stopped down (and considering how fast and how soft the 17.5mm is at 0.95 it probably will be stopped down most of the time) but slower lenses can't be stopped-up I'm sacrificing the flexibility of a zoom, so I want to get something in return. Andrews comment about the Voigt and Super Takumar lenses on the BMPCC4K vs C200 video having a less clinical look is also very encouraging as I like the rendering of detail on the Helios 44M-4 quite a lot!

I have no idea.. which is probably your point! I'm assuming this is a photo. If you have access to an external recorder of some kind, then I'd suggest playing this game with a frame captured from a video file. I suspect you'll be able to rustle up a nice image from an old or obscure camera for us to drool over

I watched a video yesterday from Tom Antos who commented that his Ursa Mini has colours that are right up there with Alexa. What a wonderful world when the technology has closed the gap over time since the Alexa came out. When I was madly googling how to colour match various cameras, I found quite a few examples of large productions using small consumer cameras for crash cams or difficult locations etc. @Emanuel is half-way there with the comment about wide deep DoF shots, like using GoPros as crash cams and only having them in the edit for <1s, but they can also be used in far more situations too. Any time the image is stylised is fair game.. POV shot of someone on drugs, underwater shots, those shots in a sink looking up at the water streaming down onto glass, macro shots, daylight shots, the list goes on. There are mods for GoPros that change the lens out to be less wide and have adjustable focus for DoF, there are those EF adapters for mobile phones that focus the lens on ground glass, etc etc. 1" sensor is more likely to equal wide and deep DoF if you've got a small budget and little time, but if you're on a Hollywood production then you'll have time to test cameras, modify them, and do all sorts of things to get the shots you need. Then you can give them to your colourist who can actually match them properly. Nah.. skin tones look all plasticy!

That's what I like about the form-factor of it and the P4K, but hanging around here you'd think that a camera has to have 27 hour battery life to be able to even turn on, thus my reality check rant in the P4K thread. Of course the other limitation is the noisy audio. But it depends on what you're shooting - B-roll would be fine of course. Knowing you, you'd probably have an external audio setup larger than the camera!

How are you finding the Sigma? It depends really. It's trading speed for flexibility. TBH I came up with the F2 limit because I just didn't think I'd be able to get the shots I wanted with anything slower, but 1.7 isn't that far off and I was being generous including all those 1.7 lenses in my list. Basically what I'm looking for is to be able to get depth in a shot due to background defocus, but without having to make every shot a macro shot. If you look carefully at the gallery that @BTM_Pix posted earlier for the 28mm F2 you will notice that the only shots with any background defocus at all are those with a subject very close to the lens. I'm not looking for much defocus, just enough so that the eye gets the "that part is further away" signal and makes the mental image of the scene have some depth. I can make bokeh with my phone if I put something 10cm away from the lens, but if I want to do it with a mid-shot of someone in a public place at 35mm I will need a lot more than F2. Most of the time with a wide lens you want to get everything in focus, but if you're treating 35mm like a portrait lens (and cropping in to ~50mm FOV) then I want to be able to have a shot that is about a person in a generic environment without having all the signs and people in the background also featured (ie, have it blurred) as well as have a shot where they are in a specific environment by stopping down (ie, not blurred). lol! I had a teacher for year 11 English class that took a rather unorthodox approach to education. Before a test he would teach us how to pass it, but the rest of the time he would tell us stories from his life, philosophy, and various other things. He would let people zone out, doodle, as long as we didn't talk. There was one kid who obviously had a difficult home life who was always tired, so after a few discussions with the kid to ensure he was legit, the teacher arranged for him to be able to sleep in the next room for the class. Anyway, he was a fan of hifi equipment and was always buying some bargain in a second-hand shop and then having to smuggle things home so his wife wouldn't find out. I'm not sure how much of what he said was true, how much was exaggerated and how much was just story-telling, but we heard about turntables under the jumper and his walking into the house stooped over and the old "I'm ok, I just twinged by back, I'll be fine, I'll just go lie down for a bit" as he rushed through the house. We also heard about a technique that I have actually used in the past about how to get a large subwoofer into the house. The idea is that you buy it, and store it at a mates house. Find somewhere in the house you want the subwoofer to be installed and work out how it would be useful as a table. Find (or make) a table the same dimensions but make it ugly, and then install it where you want the subwoofer to go. Wait for the wife to find it and freak out. Explain how proud you are and how useful it is, fight for it to stay there, and as a compromise put a tablecloth / sheet over it to hide it all the way down to the floor, and make sure you put stuff on it, like a plant or whatever, so it's useful. Wait a few weeks. When the wife is out, swap the table for the subwoofer, but don't connect it. Wait a few weeks. When the wife is out, hook it up and adjust it so it's good, but don't have it that loud. Use it when the wife is out. After a few more weeks, use it while the wife is out but let her hear it when she returns. When she notices it (if) then explain that you've had it for ages, it's been there for months, you thought you told her but she must have forgotten, it's really useful, she didn't seem to care that much before and why is it a problem now, etc etc... If only I had dozens more stories like that, I could start my own YT channel!

Yeah, forum threads aren't really effective archives. Further to what @IronFilm has already said, I'd recommend watching two or three of those "first look" videos to get a sense of the weaknesses, and then perhaps do a bit of googling around any specific features that you find critical to your work. My impression of the feedback around the BMPCC4K is similar to the original BMPCC - its a camera that does well in a rig with lots of external things (like all cinema cameras) and makes a great image if that style of shooting suits you. If you're looking for a camera that can be used as a complete package with only a lens and a mic thrown on there then a hybrid is probably going to work better for you.

It may be a one trick pony, but it's one hell of a trick. Being able to take a photo with anything other than a 28mm F22 lens (or the 50mm F-bullshit lens) and then post it to social media without having to do repetitive and frustrating admin work in-between is something that every teen who can spell "aperture" would love to have. Unfortunately they've got a lot of challenges ahead of them - delivering on the promise would require them threading the needle around almost all of them. I wish them well, but won't be buying shares just yet. It's interesting that they've mentioned vintage lenses.. and probably indicates where they think their user base is at.

I'm no expert, but my understanding is that there are an unknown number of challenges waiting for them, depending on what Canon have changed in the camera. Also, considering that many of the problems seem to be brute-forced (where they setup a script to try every combination of values for a range of settings) which might crash, that combination of values be removed from the test, and need to be restarted again, also an unknown number of times. The combination of which is that there will be an unknown number of problems and each problem will take an unknown amount of time to be fixed. Add to that the personal schedules of people like A1ex who do a lot of the ground-work, and you have more variables again. We might be building up an awareness of how long other ports have taken, but it's not a fine art. Plus, no idea how hostile Canon are to the team, but I wouldn't rule out Canon putting in roadblocks deliberately. Business is war after all.

Out of likes - but thanks!! The masonic handshake thing made me laugh

I thought the aperture was de-clicked already? Might have to do some reading. If I'm going to be composing a shot and want to change the aperture to get the right depth-of-field then the last thing I need is the horizon to rotate wildly each time I go through a stop marker! With shooting manually and in fast-changing situations I'm learning that you have to hit record almost before you've composed the shot as for some things a slightly wobbly or not quite focused shot is better than missing the moment, so I'll be adjusting things when the camera is recording.

People often say that post-production is finished when the deadline is reached or the funding runs out and you send what you have (!), but in a sense this is also not true because the goal is different As you say, for a TV ad you would do more in post than a doc, but in a sense that's appropriate for the story too - an ad normally has to setup a context, a need/want, and a solution, and do so in such a way that you identify with both the problem and also the benefits of their suggested solution, quite a trick in only seconds. This requires more manipulation and therefore much more careful construction, both in post with editing, sound design, colours, as well as in pre and prod when the right set design, camera angles, script, must be chosen and then executed. If you're working on a doc then there's a heap more footage and therefore less money-per-second to spend in post, but this also works for the genre as the goal is probably only to create footage that matches reality enough to be believable or to nudge us subtly into how we perceive people and their motives etc. Of course, a long video with heaps of post-processing is called a "feature film" ??? I would suggest that actually the P4K is probably a fine choice for any of these if you've got a small production, just like most modern cameras. If you were shooting an ad you might shoot RAW for the flexibility in post (if you were going to heavily process it or do VFX or green screen), shooting a doc might be good because 1080 prores would be lovely to edit with and scrubbing through footage to find good bytes would be painless, and an amateur / indy might shoot a feature in RAW or prores knowing that they are going to do lots of VFX or post work, and have the time to do so because it's a passion project not paid work. It's not the best camera in the world for everything, certainly, but it is relatively flexible and suits many circumstances, especially if you have a lower budget but still want a big image. IIRC the P4K can record internally while sending video to an external recorder at the same time? If so, that's the perfect way to record the master and proxy footage at the same time too, eliminating a time-hungry step from post.

It depends on what you're trying to achieve. Turning a RAW photo into a nice picture is basically the same for video. Perhaps video might be a little harder if theres a single shot where the subject moves between light sources with different colour temperatures, but that's unlikely for most of us. I think there are two situations where grading does require a very high level of competence: When you're trying to compare two cameras by grading them to look the same, or trying to make both look as good as possible so the potential of both cameras can be compared, or, When you're trying to grade a piece of footage so it just looks absolutely stunning. The first scenario is what the videos in this thread lacks: people that can't match two cameras (or can't even WB both cameras properly) or people that grade one camera nicely and grade the other one very poorly, resulting in that BMPCC4K vs GH5 video where everyone said the GH5 footage looked worse than even average GH5 footage, let alone be good enough to compare to another camera. The second is a bit less relevant to this thread, but we've talked a lot about the BMPCC videos and how they just looked wonderful with lots of mojo and general awesomeness, and that the BMPCC4K hasn't lived up to that. Unfortunately, what we're doing is comparing the best results from years of people shooting with the BMPCC - both in terms of people getting to know the cameras modes and best lens combinations, and how to grade it, but also picking those videos where the colourist was quite skilled. The BMPCC4K hasn't been out long enough for the people who have it to get to know it, test lens combinations and filters, and probability suggests that the best colourists haven't even touched any of the footage yet. You simply can't compare the best ever footage from one camera with the first few quick films from another. The videos we've seen so far have been basic colour space conversions, or even just a LUT. Wait until people really get stuck into the footage. The highest level of grading work will have qualifiers to treat skin and various other specific tonalities, will have localised adjustments that will be tracked as objects within the frame move, and these days often some VFX elements, which it's also worth noting that VFX elements don't always mean adding in objects that aren't there, but can also do more subtle things like adding lens flares, digital re-lighting to change a scenes light-source behaviour, digital make-up with face tracking and face enhancements, etc etc. Lord Of The Rings is obviously a movie with a lot of VFX but IIRC they said that every frame had some VFX on it, even if it was just localised adjustments to dodge-and-burn elements in a landscape or whatnot. Truly skilled colourists will not only do all the above to make things like nice and give them a look, but they will emphasise and de-emphasise elements and adjust colours according to the psychological effects that these adjustments give, but all in support of the story and characters and entire world of the film. When we watch a film we become emotionally invested in the world that the film creates, and we cannot help but let this effect the way we see the footage. A photograph will have more meaning to us if we know the people in it, and so if a great story has characters we care about then the footage will all look better to us because of our emotional engagement. This cannot possibly be emulated by random test shots of strangers in parks, models posing, or travel films where the people aren't really featured and certainly don't have any real dialogue. Have a look at this video which shows a good but still basic colour grade, and note the difference between the first step (LogC to rec709) and the final grade, even though this is a very basic adjustment. Truly great images will be made from footage recorded with this camera, but the images themselves won't be truly great until they are made into emotionally engaging art. Otherwise, cameras really would improve our film-making.

Not necessarily.. The SD controller hack made a huge difference to previous cameras, doubling or more the write speed of the card slot. I think either way it's likely to be a good result. New and fancy controllers will be pretty fast, but if they use an older one then ML will probably have seen it before, and perhaps already hacked it to go faster.

After the wife saw how much effort I was putting into looking at various options she just told me to buy the Voigtlander and be done with it, so I now have a 17.5mm 0.95 on order!! I wonder if I've managed to escape without having been bitten by the vintage lens bug? Probably not! ??? So, my lineup will now be: SLR Magic 8mm (for "wow" landscapes and cityscapes / tight interiors) Voigtlander 17.5mm (for the 80% of shots) Helios 58mm + 0.71 SB (for quirky portraits or without SB for tele detailed shots from lookouts or what-not) No excuses now (not that I ever had any before anyway....)

Great to hear your thoughts, and I agree about post-processing being critical. I specifically went with Resolve because it had the more advanced colour and image processing, which I believe is more important to the feel of the footage than people realise. After more than 18 months of trying to learn colour grading I can do a lot of stuff, but putting magic into the footage still eludes me and is a deep art indeed! The best footage is yet to come. I know from playing with my GH5 and some vintage lenses that an image can be detailed and yet still soft and film-like, and this is the kind of thing that can be done in post if the colourist has the skillset. You'd think that they'd know better than to let @webrunner5 in there in the first place!!

Yeah. I keep tossing up between calling this fictional camera an XC20 or a C50 or a C100mk3. If I asked Canon for an XC20 they would probably keep the fixed lens, if I asked for a C100mk3 then they'd probably not include decent 4K, but the C50 might be the winner because it might get the best of both worlds.. The "mini C100" concept is great. Imagine if Canon changed their stripes completely and made a C50 with M-mount, APS-C sensor with IBIS, DIGIC processor giving 4K from 6K downsample, HFR and 10-bit modes, H265 to the SD-card and RAW to the CFast card, with the existing XLR audio module for the XC15. Would anyone on here buy a different camera ever again? Of course, Sony probably wouldn't deliver anything like this either - partly because its in the grey area between their hybrid team and their cine team, and partly because no other company is forcing them to do so. If Canon released the C50 as described above then it would almost instantly cause all the other camera companies to restructure to either merge their hybrid and cine divisions or create a third one with people from the other teams. Ah, we can dream....

Excellent start, and +1 for more videos!! Everybody on YT has had a go at making a how-to for travel film-making and somehow basically none of them get past having an ND filter and buying their LUT. ??? I'd love to hear about getting close to people, as well as all the artistic elements that also never get spoken about. Why you chose one shot instead of another shot in the final edit, how you colour graded to match the location instead of the latest trend, how you choose which places to go, when to use drone footage moving forwards vs backwards, how all that contributes to the story-telling, etc etc.

It depends on how many NDs you want to put in it. It might be bigger than a single ND (I'm just guessing tho) but by the time you're saying two or three NDs plus a clear setting, that's got to eat up space surely. If they put the A7Sii into the XC10 form-factor then that's basically what it would be! Of course, the C100 does all that except 4K60. If they released a C100 mkIII it would be interesting to see what that would look like.

I wasn't talking specifically about either. When you said "The pocket 4k has different tone curves at different iso's (shown drastically by the dual native iso) so the discerning user will choose the ISO with a tone curve that matches the look they are going for at that particular moment (narrative/documentary)" it made me think that for people shooting in less controlled situations they could use whatever settings was appropriate (full sun or low light etc) and still benefit from being able to choose which tone curve they want. If you're on set then you can just dial in whatever lighting hits your favourite ISO, but that doesn't always work for everyone. Does that make sense? Maybe I'm the one missing something

Thanks all, just what I was hoping for This video was what made me eliminate the Olympus 17 f1.8 - it just looks so flat and 2D, like she's standing almost against the back wall. I've linked to the comparison shot in the video below. There's obviously a grading difference, but I don't think it accounts for the lack of depth. The Panasonic 15mm 1.7 looks much closer to the Voigtlander which is encouraging. The Olympus 17mm F1.2 looks like it has potential but is the same price range as the Voigt which has a stop or so more aperture (not that sharp mind-you, but it is there). Size isn't that much of a problem as long as the lens isn't larger than my Rode mic on top of the camera. I am also kind of intrigued about the vintage glass, and full manual controls don't fuss me. I'll build the muscle memory and the GH5s autofocus isn't reliable so I'd rather gear up for MF than have a hit-hit-miss-hit-hit type scenario when I can just do it myself. I looked up the Hollywood Contax and just about had a heart attack! Not cheap!! Still, it warrants further research. I found it difficult to find 28mm lenses that were fast enough, but maybe I'm not searching for the right things yet. I'm still learning. I did some tests today with a few lenses to compare and the results are interesting. Left = Panasonic 14mm F2.5 Centre = Yashikor 28mm F2.8 (no SB, so 56mm equiv. and lens has lost its front coating so flares the highlights a lot!) Right = Helios 44M 58mm F2 (no SB, so 116mm equiv) While the middle one has too much flare, the right one has a nice balance between detail and softness. The full images from it look just like film. I've played around copying the look by softening the left one and sharpening the middle one, and the left one can be softened but the middle one didn't give me much success. What other ~28mm vintage lenses are F2 or faster?