eatstoomuchjam

Your experience is pretty dead-on for most of the features here in not-rural Minnesota in the US. A bunch of theaters are closing around here because the experience became such shit. A friend of mine owns two theaters and said that a lot of them have been jacking their prices sky-high because the landlords keep increasing the rent. He's apparently been able to avoid the worst of it and keep prices (relatively) reasonable where 2 people could reasonably see a film with drinks/popcorn for about $40-50. At a lot of other theaters in the area, that's a $70-80 night out. Bonkers. Minimum wage here is $15/hour so a night out at the films with a partner for someone earning that is nearly an entire shift's wages after taxes. I spent months at a time abroad, mostly in areas speaking Spanish and Portuguese. My Spanish is passable in conversation, but not nearly enough to watch a dubbed film where mouths aren't aligning with words. My Portuguese is enough to read well, but to be completely lost in anything but the most basic conversation. It's usually a big pain to find films that are subtitled - and in some Latin American countries, one can't even buy movie tickets online without a national ID so you just have to show up to the theater and hope to get decent seats. Anyway. Totally feel the pain of trying to go to the theater in another country. Still feel some magic to seeing things projected big on a shiny screen. 😄

Oh, sure. That's all fine. I just meant that people here might not want to waste their time if looking for actual comparisons between the Arri and the GH7 since that's what I expected to find after seeing the title and watching the first minute or so. Their short film had more than 10x the budget that I plan for my first feature this Fall. If I could talk about how great Hollyland, et al are for 10 minutes and get $100k to pay cast/crew/locations, I would absolutely do that. 😅

Dude claims not to be spazzing and then spazzes some more. 🤣 People who are spending $1,000 on a product usually do a bit of research on it beforehand. Seems like it's possible to find out about the recording time limits from nearly any written or video review. "I would really prefer that companies crippled my camera so that even when recording in a refrigerator, I would still be stuck with the same short clips that would guarantee that it wouldn't overheat at 45C. Arbitrary limits are super cool which is why everybody loved the R5 so much when it came out." 🤡

Brother, no offense, but aside from being a bit funny, that's a really dumb statement and your overall attitude on this seems like typical internet forum spazzing. I haven't shot Sony in years - but I've seen/heard nothing about this camera that makes it seem unreliable, other than that it overheats on long takes. And now you, as an informed consumer, know that if you'd like to record longer takes, you would be better served by either purchasing a camera that doesn't overheat or using one of those modes on this one which doesn't. For a majority of people in it's target market of internet content creators/vloggers, it will give them something like 60-80% of the features of the FX30 at 60% of the price.

Well, sort of. Now I watched the whole thing. I guess it's more "YouTuber shills for like 5 different companies and talks to other YouTubers while near an Arri and a GH7" - though it'll be interesting to watch their short film when it's done.

But it also shouldn't be expected for free. 😄

Digital projection isn't always a bad thing, especially not now. I was so excited to see Hateful 8 on 65mm film projected on an IMAX screen, but I arrived after the film had been at the theater for more than a week and by then, the projectionists who were presumably completely unfamiliar with how to handle film had basically wrecked the print and the whole thing looked like garbage. Same theater, digital prints? Looking great. Same film, watched on my TV later? Looked great. I'm definitely not saying that digital projection looks better than a pristine print on film - but after a few weeks in the cruel hands of teenage theater employees, digital can look a lot better. I'm still in the category of people who find magic in seeing a film reflecting off of an enormous screen in a darkened theater. I just also make sure to only go when the place isn't packed so that the other people around me ruin the experience (also one of the reasons that I went to see Hateful 8 a while after it opened).

Another entry in the "YouTubers shoot the GH7 side-by-side with an Arri" catalog:

I feel like any of these discussions should include a link to Vincent Laforet's Reverie. He shot that with the 5D II with the early firmware which had all sorts of limitations in video mode. The 5D II's SOOC rec.709 had shit DR compared to a modern camera. Reverie still looks good. A lot of people will use a modern camera with greatly superior features and produce something that doesn't look even nearly as good. But with that said, I suspect that if you offered Mr. Laforet a choice between most modern cameras and the 5D II, he wouldn't hesitate to take the newer camera. Anyway, as far as whether DR matters, that depends entirely on the project and expectations. Are crushed shadows and/or blown-out highlights acceptable? For a lot of people, they are. If so, there's no need to be concerned with it. Will there be time to light the scene to keep things within a range that the camera can capture? Is the footage being delivered as-is or is it being turned over to a colorist? You can go shoot something that looks really nice with a T2i and its kit lens. Will it match what you wanted? Probably not. Will it be what the director/client wanted? Probably not. Will it be enough to put on something like instagram? Probably. Are the "probably nots" made better by using an Alexa? Only maybe. 😃

We shouldn't overlook this. For many use cases for a camera, this is one of the most important things. For a shooter that is doing long form interviews/talking head content and concerts, 12 or 20 minutes before overheating is a big deal. For any vlogging that I've ever done, it's usually in the form of several-minute takes followed by several minutes when I'm not rolling. For narrative, the camera is usually rolling for less than 10 minutes for any given take and there are usually at least 3-4 minutes between takes (and more like 5-10 minutes between setups). The R5, with its original firmware, was a problem for this since its recovery time was based on a timer instead of sensors. Otherwise, most cameras (including this one, probably) don't end up overheating on set. It's also worth mention that at some of the temperatures where overheating becomes a problem for some cameras, it will also be a problem for the talent. 😅

May I borrow your time machine so that I can get back to the past before all this AI bullshit got started?

Right, but they're why your conclusion of "PDAF vs CDAF is a small portion of the AF system on a modern camera" is absolute nonsense. One of them is able to consistently and smoothly track moving subjects and one of them is not. If the subject is completely still, then continuous autofocus isn't needed. Your list of things that you don't understand has nothing to do with the discussion. As far as shooting interviews/close-ups with an intensely fast lens, if that's what people want, that's totally fine. It probably won't be my thing, but maybe their client or audience will like it. I've also personally used extremely shallow DOF on eyes or similar to show that a character is feeling isolated in that moment. The directors of those shorts seemed to like the result and I felt like it was effective in the final product. Anyway, the failings of CDAF have been more than evident to me in the past when using the FF equivalent of a 50mm lens at f/2.8 (such as a 25/1.4 on M43) - no need to bust out the 85/1.2. Just as there is a middle ground between coke bottle and clinically sharp lens, there is also a middle ground between "the irises are in focus, but the nose is fully blurred" and "there's almost no sense of subject/background separation, as everything from foreground to background is in in focus and autofocus is effectively meaningless now anyway."

AFX range is better than some others. PD Movie, for instance, advertise 4 meters. Their entire system with motor and handwheel is only like $500, though. DJI, on the other hand, 14. I'd love to evaluate the DJI because I don't like the silly proprietary(?) batteries that the PD Movie uses, but they seem to be producing them really slowly judging by the lack of "in stock" notifications I've received after signing up within a day or two of them announcing it. As far as sunlight, yes, I'd expect that the sensitivity of the sensor and the strength of the IR laser are major factors in how well that works. At least with the PD Movie, I'm pretty sure some reviewers complained that it lost accuracy on a sunny day. 🤩 (insert meme image of Fry from Futurama saying "take my money already") My willingness to calibrate is correlated to how many profiles the thing can store. I find the calibration step upsetting and annoying if I can only store like 5 lenses in the thing. It means every time I want to use different lenses on a shoot, I'm going to have to spent 15-45 minutes recalibrating lenses ahead of time. If I had enough profiles to store a decent subsection of my lens collection, on the other hand... I think that it's a fantastic tool to keep in the toolbox and like any of the other tools, it's great to understand the strengths and weaknesses. The AFX sounds great, but I don't really see any place where I could purchase it. Assuming that you are cda-tek as well as btm_pix, there are reference to firmware and documentation on the home page, but otherwise there seems to be a BlackMagic-focused focus unit which also looks nice, but wouldn't be useful for me. As far as the first bit of that, my point was only really that you need to move the motor for certain lenses and that the move is apt to have an impact on the center of the frame (if you move horizontally or vertically) or the focus distance (if you move it in or out) which, since it's not in the lens/sensor pipeline, is apt to have an impact. Your offset parameter sounds nice, though I'd be guessing at the value since I don't usually carry a ruler on me. 😃

A lot of the rules are different if we're talking photography vs videography. I've heard generally good things (and had a good experience, even with Fuji) for animal eye detect in photo mode. I've had almost nothing but heartbreak with Canon and Fuji using animal eye AF in video mode. I just switched to centered focus point in those cases and didn't spend a lot of time messing with it. It's hard to say what others have done when having a good or bad experience doing it. 🙂

This seemed timely and relevant to me because of the discussion of documentary stuff in this thread. Some talk about the A cameras used for the most documentaries that made it into Sundance this year. The list is topped by the FX9, the C300 II, and the FS7.

Oh yeah - lidar also suffers with lenses with large front elements, as the sensor/laser thing needs to moved further from the camera's sensor. Otherwise, part of the sensor's FOV and some of the points illuminated by the laser will be the lens vs the subject.

You don't seem to understand the limitations of CDAF. A more correct description of why it's slower and they are pulsing is this: Scenario 1: Subject walking toward camera. PDAF camera: CDAF system determines accurately and quickly that the subject has moved out of focus. Uses PDAF to determine difference in location between current focus point and new desired focus point. It moves lens to approximately the correct location and uses CDAF for micro-adjustments. CDAF camera: CDAF system determines accurately and quickly that the subject is out of focus. Does not know which way. Does not know how far. Guesses one. May need to use a relatively small step to avoid overshooting. If accurate and the amount of OOF frame decreases, continues in that direction. If wrong and the amount OOF increases, go the other way. If indeterminate, keep going the same way. Wrong way/multiple steps the wrong way? Pulsing time. DFD helps this by improving the accuracy of the estimates of distance + direction. Could also potentially optimize by guessing that a subject will keep moving the same direction. However, this optimization is potentially difficult due to... Scenario 2: Head and shoulders video, subject cannot sit perfectly still. PDAF camera: CDAF system determines that the subject has moved out of focus. Uses PDAF to determine where the subject went. Jumps to about the right place. Use CDAF for micro-adjustments after that. CDAF camera: CDAF system determines the subject has moved out of focus. Has to guess which way. Same as above, but now there's a bigger chance of overshooting, as the subject's movements are not in any way smooth or guessable. In my experience, frequently results in a mess. Better to stop down the lens a bit and give up on shallow DOF aesthetics in favor of an image that's vaguely in focus. Both systems use CDAF processing to some extent. However, courtesy of parallax, one system is able to cheat by knowing the direction and amount of movement. As far as Lidar, it seems fantastic for certain use cases. It suffers from range limitations and can work very poorly when in bright sunlight or other areas with a lot of IR pollution. It also doesn't operate through the lens so requires calibration for sensor location as well as profiling the lenses. This also requires understanding of its coverage vs the lens (very wide lenses may only focus on things in the center, for example). Every existing consumer lidar system I am aware of can store only a few lens profiles so choose carefully. As mentioned, though, it seems incredible in very low light. I got the cheapest version of the pdmovie live motor and (thus far) I've kind of failed at testing it in any real way.

I mentioned that (briefly). Any sort of animal eye focus seems pretty unreliable on almost every camera right now. I haven't paid much attention to trains or motorbikes, etc, but I'm not even remotely surprised that they aren't very good. How fortunate that you had better luck than the half dozen people that I know who have Panasonic cameras with CDAF/DFD who complain that the AF on their camera pulses! It was weird how much it's like my own personal experience with the GH5 which would have a box drawn around the face of a person and yet, every so often... pulsing. It's almost like it chose a subject and then when that subject moved slightly, it wasn't sure which direction to go and had to rack focus a little bit to figure out that they were more or less in focus than before. It's also weird how that fits the description of how CDAF/DFD works almost perfectly. What a pity, then, that the dummies at Panasonic finally gave up on their DFD/CDAF system and switched to PDAF when the DFD/CDAF on their previous cameras was so excellent and well-loved industry-wide. Guess their management and engineering orgs just don't understand how the two things work.

For continuous AF, it absolutely does. Panasonic spent a lot of years on CDAF/DFD and AF on the GH6/S5/S1/S1H/etc was still not even nearly as reliable as Canon/Sony. There's a reason that they finally took whatever steps were needed to enable PDAF on their modern bodies (and from everything I've heard, AF on the S5 II and the GH7 is fantastic). Some people say that with a bunch of tweaking, they could get the CDAF to be acceptable. That's all fine and good, but Canon and Sony users take the camera out of the box, enable continuous AF and human eye detection, and watch the camera instantly lock on to a subject and stay locked on (some caveats around terrible lighting and multiple subjects in the frame apply). (And yes, of course PDAF = PDAF+CDAF, but it should be understood that use of the phrase PDAF is usually intended to be inclusive of the two technologies) (And yes, Canon isn't PDAF, but DPAF, but DPAF is for practical purposes very similar to PDAF, as both are based on parallax) One's experience with this, though, is likely to vary based at least somewhat on the working aperture. If you're consistently shooting deeper DOF (like an 50mm at f/8 FF equivalent), the pulsing and occasional refocusing will be less noticeable than if you're shooting with shallower (like a 50mm at f/2). Simply implementing PDAF doesn't guarantee parity (see: Red and Fuji), but it certainly puts companies on the right path to it. And as BTM's photos demonstrate, a lot of the subject detection automatic modes on modern cameras need work, even for those vendors whose PDAF is solid.

A softer* look. Sheesh.

If I want a software look with lower contrast, I prefer to use a vintage lens. Want really low contrast? Go single-coated or uncoated.

Sorry, I wasn't suggesting that the BBC was doing run & gun that would use a GH2. I was only responding to the implication that the GH2 would be a poor choice for a documentary. 😄

If you're doing a run and gun documentary, the GH2 has a number of advantages over a v-raptor vv, including that it's smaller/lighter, requires less rigging to be functional, and because of those things will draw less attention.

One of my all-time favorite lenses is a single coated collapsible Summicron 50/2. The only bummer is that short of rehousing it (which I won't do), it's impossible to use it with a follow focus. I also have a collapsible 90/4 which I've wanted to try for a shoot, but never get around to bringing with me.

Yeah, that's what I do - I'm just saying that I glued the LTM lenses into the LTM to M "ring adapter," making it effectively permanent (so the lenses won't loosen). Then I have M mount adapters with and without the helicoid.