kye

No PDAF though

I get that sometimes. I also get it when you're trying to get something really big in frame too. Yesterday I was at some Greek ruins and checked the framing and had to walk back, three times(!) before it fit into the wide end of the XC10 24-240mm zoom. I'd suggest that it's any time you're working in a location where you struggle for space is a potential wide angle lens situation.

What kind of shots did you want the wide angle for? I sometimes miss a wide angle, and I'm curious to know when others do too

I'm hoping the mount swap service could do it. One less set of contacts and electronics and all that is a good thing. If so, it would basically mean that the new system would "launch" with the entire Sigma FF lens line up, and for many people they wouldn't have to re-buy anything to have native lenses. It would kill the paltry lens catalogue from CaNikon!

There's a well-known thing here called "the Australia tax" where the same products cost 20-80% more than the exact same products do elsewhere in the world. It's due to many manufacturers having exclusive suppliers with dedicated regions, so you can only buy through one business and they control the price. I am also interested in hifi and it's a common occurrence for someone to take their family on a week holiday to Singapore or Japan and buy a piece of hifi equipment and have it shipped directly back to Australia. Depending on how expensive the item is, the difference in price can be so large it covers the cost of the family holiday, a week of lost wages, the shipping of heavy and fragile goods, and the person still comes out ahead.

Does anyone know if the existing Sigma FF lens line up would be convertible to the new mount? I don't understand the technical details of lens mounts..

I've had the frustration of discovering this as well. I thought about it and I don't think there's much that can be done. I was going to do a follow-up test to see if a high quality 1080p upload would look better at 1080p than a 4K upload at 1080p, but was so frustrated with it I didn't bother. Facebook video is worse, with the video starting by default at 240p or something. I discovered why too, the channels with huge subscriber counts get high bitrates at the start of the video! Hooray for capitalism!

Absolutely. I did this for my XC10 in C-Log and luckily there were no significant differences a stop either way of where it exposes skin tones in auto (how I shoot) so I just don't worry about it. Unfortunately I sympathise with the OP wanting to know about cameras they don't already own. Unfortunately this level of performance testing doesn't often overlap with non-cinema cameras so the comparison probably isn't on vimeo somewhere

+1 for adding grain and uploading in 4K. Don't forget you can do an export of one or two shots, upload as a private video, watch and see how it looks, then adjust and do it again until you've worked out what looks best.

It depends on the camera. High end cinematographers always test the optimal level of exposure when they are about to film with a new camera. The answer of where each camera looks nicest with skin tones and DR is always different from camera to camera. For some it is underexposing, and others it is overexposing. However this is with cinema cameras and you are talking about prosumer mirrorless. The real question is perhaps "How do I get good results on a budget 8-bit camera shooting log?"

The 405 has been tested by the EBU folks, and the two profiles have 9.7 and 10.7 stops of DR. The XC10 tested at just over 11, so if DR is why you'd want C-log then you might still be satisfied. The full report is here. https://tech.ebu.ch/files/live/sites/tech/files/shared/tech/tech3335_s27.pdf Edit: just realised you were talking about the XF400. Doh!

Yes, I read your previous replies to others and understood where you are coming from. I was going to reply but saw you might be replying so I waited Yeah, if it's for different projects then that's awesome and you should totally do it. In which case I'd suggest that you compromise on features pretty heavily in favour of ease of use and convenience and reliabily. Also consider the whole process from shooting to editing to grading and delivery. If you're like me and have lots of footage on drives waiting for editing then the bottleneck isn't the shooting and so you should focus on streamlining the edit instead. Even consider a camera with a hybrid profile that has decent DR but wouldn't need grading. Anything to get the ideas finished and shared, while still being of acceptable quality for your tastes and preferences. If there's a large gap between your 5d and this camera then that might be a good thing because choosing which setup to shoot it on will help you to understand how much a project means to you, which is a great thing to know before you start shooting and have already made art-department type of decisions.

@HockeyFan12 I was hoping that the manufacturers would just build it in and we'd never have to even know it was there! You're right about my math being wrong, oops(!), but we'd still get a benefit. Every aesthetic impression we get of footage has one or more technical aspects that are responsible for them, and the colours of ML RAW vs other codecs is at least partially due to bit depth. My idea was to just get a bit more bit depth, essentially for free. Even if it was applied to 10-bit cameras, you'd still get a little bit more than 10-bits. Someone in the GoPro thread posted a link to a blog post about the GoPro Protune codec and it was fascinating, and includes much of what you are saying. The profile doesn't distribute the bits evenly between the DR and it mentions that there's less information in the bottom one or two stops and so it uses less on those but gives more to the upper two as that's typically more useful. ETTR is a complex approach. On the one hand it gives the most bits to play with, but on the other it means that the image is subtly different between scenes. I'm not sure if you've seen those articles where a cinematographer gets to know a new camera and tests it by under and overexposing by various amounts and then matches the levels in post? The results are typically that you'll discover the limits of where underexposing gives too much noise, overexposing makes the image start to look awful, and what is the best spot for skin tones. I've heard many cinematographers talk about how for a given camera you have to over or underexpose a certain amount. In terms of your approach I would suggest that if it's working then that's great, it's definitely the way to get a consistent image, and it will definitely be nicer in post. The adventures of your friend are too tedious for me as well. I have a technical education, and I am at home reading specifications and data processing techniques, but in the end I work out how to set my equipment for the best results and then I go out and put the effort into what I point my camera at. I think I'm actually far less technically inclined on set than you are - I don't white balance or even control my own exposure or focus most of the time. Everything the camera can automate (to a level where it's acceptable and not a detriment to the end product) I automate, and when I am operating the camera for recording my home and travel videos is spent thinking about angle, composition, camera movement, depth of field, anticipating what is going to happen next so I can be ready for it, and not have filming get in the way of the holiday experience for me or others. This is an art-form after all

@mercer yes, I remember your fondness for the XC10 Reading your other comments, and talking in the context of getting the job done, I think there's a few approaches you could take, depending on how you shoot. 1) just use the 5D for everything. You already own it, no work in post matching cameras, and it's only one setup to carry around with one type of battery, media, etc. 2) get additional cameras. If you go this route then if at all possible I'd suggest matching brands so the colour science (which I remember is a priority for you) matches easily in post. You may even consider another ML camera as extra time on set may pay off in editing (or may not!). If you use multiple cameras on set it may even be worthwhile matching lenses and battery types in order to cut down on what you're carrying around. It sounds to me like buying a camcorder may be tempting simply because a DSLR and ML is fiddly and annoying, which I totally understand. I challenge you to think about the film you are making and ask yourself how many shots in the final edit will be able to be captured with a camcorder. Most films these days have relatively shallow DoF on almost all shots except wide and establishing shots, and although a camcorder would be great for those, will it really be more efficient to have an entire second setup instead of the camera you are already using for most other shots?

I have the Hero 3. Old but still going. I use it for immersion in water, so any time there's swimming on a holiday such as snorkelling, or for parties where the wide angle lens is useful. I shot these two videos on the Hero 3 and iPhone 8. @webrunner5 I used to use the gopro as a camera when it started to rain, but the iPhone is now water proof, and I used to use it for wide angle photos but now the iPhone has panoramic mode so that's been taken over as well. I'm contemplating replacing it with the Sony action camera with the OIS. As good as digital IS is, if a frame is blurred due to motion during the exposure then there's no recovering from that, and considering how poor the ISO is on these cameras they go to long shutter speeds in basically every situation except direct sunlight.

I don't think the only issue is 8-bit banding. I wonder how much of the talk about the picture of various cameras being "thick" or "thin" or "brittle" is attributed to this. @Mattias Burling I agree that not all 10-bit implementations are equal and that's kind of my point, that we could get the benefits without needing a separate implementation. @HockeyFan12 I was thinking that the scaling would be applied during decoding so once the file is read then all the different shots would be comparable, obviously grading would be awful if this didn't happen. I agree that it's a complicated picture and absolutely depends on how good the implementation is within the camera, however, with all else being equal, more bits within the given DR is better than less bits. Different looks is also a solution, but it means that you give yourself difficulties in post. I've got footage from multiple budget cameras and matching them is a PITA and you'd think that things like RCM and ACES would be the answer but the reality is that these things don't have support for every profile, normally just the log ones from the big manufacturers. @Shirozina I agree, 8-bit can look fine, but using those bits more effectively would be better!

That is kind of their direct competition in a way. I have a love/hate relationship with my gopro, compared to everything else is absolutely terrible, but when you need it no other tool will do.

We all know that 8-bit video capture formats don't generate the best results. This is especially bad when combined with flat / log profiles, and especially especially bad when those profiles are calibrated to fit more DR than that camera can provide. The traditional solution is to output more bits, but 8-bit values are kind of a default in computers so can cause a challenge to go beyond. So, here's an idea. Instead of just encoding the image in 8-bits but having no values below say 40% and none above say 90% (which is really just 7 bits) how about stretching the whole DR over the full 8-bit range and just including the values of the brightest and darkest pixels in that frame? It would mean that all frames would have the full 8-bits applied, and scenes with less DR would get more subtle colour information. Every stop less of DR would be equal to effectively an extra bit. It would also mean that when a sensor is invented with more DR than that codec was designed for it will scale infinitely without hassle. It would add a small processing overhead and raise the data rates on more compressed codecs, but codecs where all frames are key frames wouldn't be impacted. If anyone knows any of the manufacturers, we'd all benefit if they could pass this along.. Thanks

That totally makes sense. I think this industry is in a period of rationalisation where the smaller players will die unless they form alliances strong enough to challenge the big players. Sigma has a native mount but no real share of the camera body market, and they have been making lenses that seem to be (are?) designed to be adaptable. If the announcement included Sigma saying that all of their FF lenses with convertible lens mounts could be converted to this new mount then they would definitely win the lens availability category against canikon! I'm not sure what they will release but out of all the rumours this year I'm optimistic that they'll deliver a larger percentage of what is technically possible and what we want than the other manufacturers attempts.

I am using the 1" XC10 with Rode video mic pro plus and apart from the relatively deep DoF and slower AF it is a great setup and just gets out of the way. If you can get the aesthetic you want from this kind of setup then go for it. Here's a BTS from the other day of me doing a horizontal sliding shot in Pompeii with the aforementioned setup.

When I bought my gopro hero 3 I read a lot of articles about how to make it look good, because my attempts didn't, and found a great article written by the person who filmed the snorkelling girls in the promo video. Unfortunately I now can't find it, so apologies for not linking it. The basic outline was that for the 3-6 shots in the promo they had a half a dozen person team and it took a week of 12-18 hour days to shoot. The first day they shot a lot and it was all unusable but they were learning the camera, the second and third days were the same and once they got it dialled in with all the right settings and rigging and NDs and filters and grading techniques then the last couple of days were about getting the shots. He confirmed that you really can get those results, but only if you are a very experienced operator and you have all the resources and time in the world. I've read other people also say the same thing of manually working out what ND strength gives what shutter speed etc etc. It's like playing chess and you have to get to checkmate to get the shot! I know the current ones give more manual controls, but you still need to try every video mode and lighting condition to see how they all turn out, as from a professional perspective apparently some modes are lovely and others are awful.

@jonpais Matti made an interesting comment in the first A7iii video he made (in Maui I think) about using some strange focus mode, centre-weighted perhaps. I suspect that he thinks like a long-term Canon user and is trying to use the Sony like a 2012 Canon and has therefore crippled it very significantly, instead of turning on all the 2018 goodness and letting it do its thing. I personally find this type of mentality common on this forum, with the reluctance (or open hostility) for any automatic features of any kind.

Unlikely as it's combining multiple frames together, so if the subject is moving then it'll be like a worse version of when the de-interlacing isn't done right! Of course, it kind of depends on how fast it can capture the images. Apple combine multiple exposures in the iPhone cameras to get better low light, so in theory you could build something that attempted it, but we're probably a few tech cycles away of it being good enough to release to the public, and by then we'll have 8K and not need pixel shift to get the resolution, we'll just have more pixels

You know that moment when you look at a recipe and see that all the ingredients look tasty and like they'd go together beautifully..... Well

I read a number of EBU reports for various cameras as well as the EBU specification documents when I bought my XC10 and I'm not at all surprised that the GH5s didn't get UHD Tier 1 or 2. Those standards are very high and there are actually very few cameras that meet them. I'd encourage anyone to pick a few test reports of very high end cameras and read those to get a sense of how well other very respected cameras do. Often they don't test as well as you'd expect. I haven't read all of them, but most (all?) cameras with only a 4K sensor fail to meet UHD Tier 1, and even those with 4.6K or 6K struggle. I was really disappointed with the test results of my XC10 until I read other tests and now I understand that its test results are remarkable. Also remember that the standard doesn't test everything. The XC10 exhibits temporal noise reduction resulting in ghosting at higher ISOs, and not only did the EBU tests not discover that but they also have no mechanism to test it either. I hope this helps