KnightsFan

I'm probably wrong, I'll need to read up more on lens design. It was an intuition based on the fact that scaling an object doesn't change any angles--but again, I am not sure it's right. I hoped someone could explain why it was right or wrong. @Brian Caldwell That's how I understood you before, thanks for clarifying!

Exactly. So my intuition was that a 17.5mm f0.95 on MFT would have roughly the same angle of incidence as a 35mm f2.0 on FF, thus making pixel vignetting a non-issue when comparing the two. @Brian Caldwell has given me a few more things to read up on, thanks! Though, if I understand you correctly, the obliquity only darkens the edges of the bokeh, and will not have a large effect on the part that is in-focus?

@blondini No, perspective distortion is only affected by distance from the camera to the subject. No matter what sensor/lens combination you use, if the camera and the subjects don't move, then the ratio of the size of two subjects will remain the same. I did a quick and dirty test to illustrate. It's a little imprecise (the camcorder would NOT focus on the guy in front...) For all three images the camera is in the same place. I suspect the small discrepancies in ratio (2.2% error) are mainly due to moving parts inside the camcorder when it zooms, which changes its actual distance from the subject. But this is an easy thing to test yourself. First image is a 4mm lens on a 1/4 type sensor Second image is a 55mm lens on an APS-C sensor As you can see, the ratio of the figures is the same. You could even use a wider lens and the ratio remains, because the distance has not changed: Third image is a 2mm lens on the 1/4 type sensor. Quote from Wikipedia: Yes, it would. As long as the camera is in the same place, the relative size of the plane compared to the people will remain the same regardless of the lens or sensor. If you don't believe me or my Legos, go try it yourself!

Same reason why there is less vignetting on a center crop from a full frame image. Angle of incidence becomes more oblique the farther from the center of the image.

@horshack If I'm not mistaken, pixel vignetting is entirely due to angle of incidence on the sensor. Smaller sensors have less oblique angles of incidence at the corners. I could be wrong, but I bet that pixel vignetting won't be a factor in this comparison. I'd love to see evidence either way, though.

I would get a MoBo with more PCI slots. They can be used for many expansions, including GPU, I/O ports, capture cards, WiFi cards, and more. I would also get a case with lots of large fans. I've got something like 3 120mm and 2 140mm fans, which keeps it cool enough to prevent the loud GPU fans from kicking in. Lots of large fans => low RPM => less overall noise.

@Andrew Reid Yeah, "directly related" isn't the correct wording, but we mean the same thing. As sensor size increases, you can either increase resolution with the same pixel size, or increase pixel size at the same resolution. You said so yourself in your disclaimer at the end: "For example you can have higher megapixel counts because there’s simply more real-estate on the chip surface to add more pixels." That is why I said "assuming similar tech." The a7r3 has better tech. I should have specified photo-sensitive area, rather than simply "surface area" and would perhaps have been clearer. Wait, you just posted an article about how the 17.5mm f0.95 is comparable to the 35mm f2.0. If you don't have to change both numbers, why aren't you saying the 17.5mm is comparable to a 35mm f0.95? But anyway, I'm just explaining Northup's argument. He claims there is marketing material on their websites that is misleading, idk if that's true but his crop factor equivalence works for the comparison he's making, despite being poorly worded and convoluted.

Assuming we're talking about the same video, he was saying that manufacturers were erroneously marketing their lenses giving equivalent focal lengths, but not equivalent apertures. Like marketing an 14-42 f2.8 as a 28-84 f2.8. His point was that IF you change one number, you have to change the other. And he did specify that he was talking about equivalent depth of field - his title card for talking about it is "Aperture & Depth of Field." He was using ISO to talk about exposure, which he explained early in the video. In his logic, once you compensate for exposure with ISO, you have to compensate with aperture as well. It is a roundabout logic, but it does account for the lower light gathering power of a smaller surface area, and thus the need for more gain (and thus more noise or lower resolution) to reach the same ISO. True, but the light gathering power of the space is directly related to its size. The SNR ratio of a smaller sensor will be lower than a larger sensor (assuming similar tech), given the same image scaled down. Hence the f0.95 doesn't actually have any low light advantage over the f2.0, if you look at the system as a whole.

This is not true. If it were, photos of a total solar eclipse wouldn't work on different size sensors.

I may be misunderstanding, but it seems you want to transcode each original clip to a lower file size, which you might use at a later date to make new edits? Unfortunately, every time you transcode, you will lose some quality. It's up to you to determine how much you can lose and have it still be acceptable, since the only way to avoid losing quality is to keep the originals. So the question is, how much space do you want to save? Do you want to clips to take up half the space? A quarter? In general, you will want to use a space-efficient codec with the maximum bitrate you can. A 50mbps H.265 file will most likely be indistinguishable from the original. If I were you, I'd conduct a few tests with different encoding options, and then compare the smaller files to the originals to find the optimum size/quality that you like.

I wonder how much harder it is to manufacture a 17mm f0.95 that resolves the same on MFT as a 35mm f2.0 does on full frame.

which is compensated for by the 4x larger surface area of the full frame sensor (I know it's implied in the small disclaimer, but taken in isolation that sentence could be misleading).

I could not reproduce any of your issues. What is the icon on the left side of the screen in the middle? The little aperture icon? Mine is greyed out and I don't know which setting it relates to.

I've never shot in AWB, but I wouldn't be surprised if it had the same glitch. Fwiw, I can usually produce bizarre color shifts by quickly changing a manual lens' aperture from wide open to closed. I think it has to do with sudden exposure changes. But again I've never seen it happen with a white balance preset or when it's set to a white card.

Were you shooting with a Kelvin white balance? If you set your white balance to a Kelvin value you'll be in for a bad time. I did a few tests and found that almost every shot had weird color shifts, sometimes for single frames, and sometimes for seconds at a time. It did seem to be "overriding" my picture profile or something. I've never had that issue in any other white balance setting, so AFAIK it's just a really bad bug with Kelvin white balance.

Most of World Order's music videos use some variation of that technique. And they're mesmerizingly cool. (Skip to around the four minute mark for some examples here)

Your lens choices seem reasonable to me. You could grab a 50 to start with, and see whether you find yourself wishing for a longer or shorter lens. I personally would go for manual focus primes. I wouldn't say that it matters all that much in terms of how easy it is to start with. I still don't have an ND filter. It's only crucial if your camera has a high base ISO, like 800 or 1600 on some Sony cameras. You should get a polar filter though, which can more or less be used as an ND filter as well. I have a Nikon->Canon adapter for each lens. They're cheap, and a pain to get on and off. Yeah, a new speed booster costs almost as much as a used 5d2, and there's no mirrorless APS-C cameras that shoot raw. So it doesn't seem like it's a good fit for you. You'll be able to get a repeatable process with raw, though that sort of defeats the purpose of having all that flexibility. But like you say, it's always nice to have if you need it for a specific project.

@mercer Not sure if you're referring to me, but I'm not opposed to Magic Lantern. I absolutely love it! But I do want to be honest about workflow challenges so deatrier can make an informed decision. Raw, and especially Magic Lanter, is certainly most appealing to those of us who love tinkering, and have plenty of hard drives. Some people might not be into that.

Based on your interest in full frame Raw, then really it's either the 5d2 or stretch and get the 5d3 if you can find an amazing deal. Obviously, many of us have different priorities, but if that's what's important to you, then it's basically down to those two and seems to be mainly an economic choice. Electronic viewfinders and screens are actually easier to focus with, because you can usually do a pixel-to-pixel magnification and/or focus peaking. Optical viewfinders can be more fun to use, but focusing with an evf is easy, too. Shooting Raw on a Canon camera is not simple. The post workflow isn't bad, though it will take some experimentation. The main problem is that when shooting HD raw, you get like 5 minutes from a 32GB card. Compressed raw and lower bit depths were announced since the last time I used ML, so the situation is a little better now, but it's still very different from shooting all day on a 32GB SD card like you can with H.264. If you go raw for an all-day shoot, you will either need a LOT of cards, or you will need to dump cards to a hard drive as they fill up. Not to dissuade you. Like I said, the image is worth it. But you will need to budget for cards and hard drives. I have a set of Nikkor K lenses that I love. Great character (not terribly sharp, lots of distortion and CA, but wonderful vibrant colors), great handling, they can adapt to anything, easy to declick (if you're into that). Would definitely recommend them for the price.

What kinds of projects will you be doing with it: Narrative or documentary? Studio or run'n'gun? Will you be filming in low light? Do you plan to do a lot of color grading? Green screen or VFX? Do you also want to take photos? If you're set on ff, I don't really know of any options that would be better in the price range you've set. You can make great stuff on a 5d2--or any other camera from the past ~6 years. If it were me, though, I'd get a used APS-C camera, especially if you already plan to upgrade in a year or two. You could get a cheaper Canon for a few hundred dollars, or, if you can find a good deal, get an NX1. It's a fantastic all-rounder. I got mine used a year ago for $850 (700€) with lens and accessories included. If you plan on using Magic Lantern for raw video, be aware that it will be a mild PITA. Totally worth it, but not easy. Do you have an external microphone or any other audio gear? I'm not a fan of the H4 myself.

I like that they're going towards the more open OTG protocol, but it worries me that it's unclear whether the LukiLink and the phone can be powered from a single USB cable--or even if they can be simultaneously powered off an external battery at all. But yeah, super excited to see the final product!

The mewlips controller is unusably laggy for me also. After finding that the remote viewfinder app only worked with native lenses and the mewlips was unusable, I too searched for a way to monitor with a smartphone. I found nothing that was inexpensive. Apparently, you can use some sort of USB capture card and OTG cable for Android, but it would have been expensive and inelegant. Hopefully, the LukiLink project will finish soon because that seems like the solution you and I are hoping for. If you're on a tight budget and just need an external screen, you can get Raspberry Pi monitors for cheap.

@Mokara I read your entire post. It sounded like you were saying HDMI video by nature is debayered and processed. Even the second part of your post seemed to imply that Atomos was just sort of hoping that someone could send a Raw signal for them to record. Sorry if I misunderstood. Raw photos aren't processed, so there is a way for the image to bypass the hardware processor. And besides, Atomos seems to think it can be done. Edit: If Magic Lantern can write Raw to disk using software only, I have no doubt a firmware update to output Raw over HDMI is technically possible for many other camera models.

@cantsin Lack of white balance controls is really suspicious. Do we know if it's a limitation of ProRes Raw, or whether they just didn't implement that in FCPX? Considering the filesize is similar to other compressed Raw formats, it seems unlikely that the file contains the vastly smaller amounts of data that would preclude having a white balance adjustment. I mean, without white balance adjustment how can it even be called Raw? I'm would actually be glad there is no "ISO" control. You can still adjust exposure with curves and other tools, and calling it ISO confuses it with analog gain. Perhaps "ISO" is the more correct term, but we've been so relaxed about distinguishing between gain and ISO in digital cameras that it's confusing. I've had too many conversations about why the BMCC ISO's aren't "real", and why you can't set the ISO of a DSLR in post. Built-in proxies is actually a really good idea! If proxies were done at the file level instead of by the NLE, it could potentially standardize proxy workflows across different NLE's. Though, it would be disappointing to not be able to control how they are generated and used.

@cisco150 As much as I love the NX1, I would not buy any NX lenses.