rawshooter

I do have both cameras and would say that the A7iii is the better stills camera in every respect (with mechanical shutter, an autofocus system that's several generations more advanced, much more advanced exposure metering system, dual card slots, EVF, tiltable screen, no shutter delay, possibility to use Auto-ISO in M mode with easy +/- exposure adjustment, multiple customizable function buttons, better flash sync speed, better battery life, better lens selection...). RAW image quality is identical since both cameras have the same sensor, and even the body size difference is not as dramatic as one may think. (The A7iii is still compact for a full frame camera.) The A7iii is also a better video streaming/Vlogging camera because of its great video AF (whereas video AF-C of the fp remains unusable after the update). The single advantage of the fp is RAW video recording vs. the Sony's 8bit 4:2:0 - which for me is reason enough not to use the Sony for video shooting at all. For shooting in sunlight, you'll need a field monitor/external EVF/display loupe for the fp. It's built-in, just like in the Blackmagic Pocket 4K/6K. From ISO100 to ISO 2500, you're using gain 1, from ISO3200, you're using gain 2. ISO100 and 3200 are the camera's two native ISOs/gains, everything else is just pushed ISO100 or ISO3200 material.

Just installed and tested the firmware, with the following results: - CinemaDNG recordings now have proper synchronized audio in Resolve, but Resolve still doesn't recognize them as CinemaDNG sequences, only as DNG stills sequences with attached audio. I.e. it does see them as clips, but only as folders containing DNGs, and you need to recursively import them ("Import folders and subfolders"). This also means that you cannot use Sigma fp's CinemaDNG in the Cut module. - In stills mode, the 0.1s shutter delay is unchanged. (Which also means the image you see frozen on the display after pressing the shutter is not the image that gets recorded/stored - you can test that by shooting a digital stopwatch.) So I guess this is a hardware issue and unfixable. 😞

The main problem with the camera's RAW video still persists, even with external ProRes RAW/BRAW: It doesn't record a pixel-to-pixel 6K sensor image, but scales down the RAW from 6K to 4K - so that you get a pseudo-Bayer pattern with all kinds of visual/line skipping artefacts. :-((

Jip is not a company that will continue building cameras or lenses - they buy up brands like "Vaio" from Sony to sublicense them for cheap no-name products. The brand Olympus will stay with Olympus for the (now) core business of medical equipment. Olympus imaging brands such as OM-D, Zuiko and Pen will soon appear on smartphones, selfie sticks and the like, ending up like Polaroid and Rollei did before. Olympus' camera technology is now history, like Yashica/Contax in the past.

More sources: https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/24/21301460/olympus-selling-camera-division-jip-vaio Original company memorandum: https://www.olympus-global.com/ir/data/announcement/2020/contents/ir00013.pdf JIP, the company that bought the imaging division, is a grave robber - they buy up zombie brands and put them on cheap products. That must be the end of Olympus cameras, and looks like half of the end for MFT.

Warming up this thread again: There is now an Open Source Python script that converts the Raspberry Pi HQ cam's raw pictures into DNG: https://github.com/schoolpost/PyDNG ...and a new variant of the Raspberry Pi has 8GB RAM and thus should be able to store about 300 16bit RAW 5K frames in memory: https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/8gb-raspberry-pi-4-on-sale-now-at-75/ Is anyone aware of commercial or DIY projects to pair the Raspi, the HQ cam module, memory cards and a USB powerbank into something resembling a camera? And did anyone try to make raw video recordings with this yet?

Panasonic has stated that they will make no APS-C camera and stick to MFT and Full Frame as their two sensor formats (and camera systems): https://phototrend.fr/2020/04/interview-yosuke-yamane-panasonic-japon-mars-2020/ DeepL translation (manually enhanced): Do you plan to use the L-mount with APS-C sensors, like Nikon does with the Z-mount? Yosuke Yamane: Our strategy is very clear: we are going to strengthen Micro Four Thirds and full frame L-mount. A small L-mount sensor could create confusion in the market. We have two sensor sizes. If we had three, it could cause confusion, so we will not develop an APS-C version of the L-mount and will focus it on full frame. And what about a mix of Micro 4/3 and full frame? Yosuke Yamane: Sony's E-mount allows both APS-C and full frame, but we don't expect a large number of users of large full frame lenses to want to use smaller Micro Four Thirds sensors. A common Micro Four Thirds and full frame system therefore makes little sense. We understand this demand and we seriously considered it when we developed our full frame cameras to offer a unified format for both full frame and Micro Four Thirds sensors, but we decided not to do so because we believe it does not provide much added value for the user.

The current factory generation of the SL60W has a much less noisy fan. Unfortunately, you can't spot that by the model number - Godox improved the design without any public announcement.

IMHO, nothing beats the Godox SL60W if you want a cheap light with good light quality/color rendition, and one that works like a proper film light (with optional fresnel lens, beauty dish, soft box) which can be used as both a hard and a soft light. So far, it has completely been in a budget-vs-quality league of its own, like only few other pieces of video gear. (Others would, for example, be the Canon EOS-M with MagicLantern RAW, the Rode Video Micro and the Sigma 17-50mm/2.8 zoom lens).

The rules are three-act narratives (preferably with a hero's journey) on 100 script pages, shot/countershot blocking, continuity editing etc.etc. The breakers and benders today are filmmakers like Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Werner Herzog, David Lynch, Harmony Korine, Nicolas Winding Refn, Abbas Kiarostami, Michel Gondry, Paul Thomas Anderson, Lars von Trier, Hayao Miyazaki, Bela Tarr, Gaspar Noé, Kim Ki-duk, George Miller, Joshua Oppenheimer, Guillermo Del Toro, Miranda July...

The leaf shutter would have to perfectly synchronize with the FP's built-in electronic shutter, which is practically impossible, and would result in artefacts. Normally, leaf shutter cameras (whether medium-format cameras or all-in-one cameras like the Ricoh GR and Fuji X100) are designed for leaf-shutter only, and provide no other options.

The fp/L-mount has no built-in mechanics and electronics to support a leaf shutter. It may be frustrating, but the current version of the fp is more a technology demo or beta version of a new camera concept. For it to become mature, there needs to be improved hardware, such as: faster sensor readout to make the electronic shutter a fully-featured, fully equivalent replacement of a mechanical shutter, a faster CPU to allow simultaneous focus peaking and zebras and eliminate shutter lag, a higher-resolution display with focus magnification during recording to give more confidence when pulling focus, higher USB transfer speeds to allow full resolution and sensor readout for RAW video.

ProRes, as a compressed undebayered video signal, needs a license from RED, since RED has a U.S. patent on factually any device that records compressed RAW video. Atomos bought such a license from RED after major legal threats from the company. (They were substantial enough for Atomos to describe them as a risk for its entire business in its IPO document.) The press release on Atomos' license agreement with RED is here: https://www.atomos.com/press-releases/atomos-and-red-are-pleased-to-announce-a-royalty-based-licence-agreement Consequently, camera manufacturers only avoid license payments to RED for ProRes RAW if the format is not recorded in-camera, but externally in Atomos' recorders. RED's patent is also the reason why Blackmagic removed (compressed) CinemaDNG from its cameras - and why, conversely, the Sigma fp can only record uncompressed CinemaDNG.

Good, in-depth interview with informed, no-nonsense and straightforward answers by the Leica representative!

Oh yeah, and another tip to @FranciscoB: If you really want to tune video quality, blow up your video to 4K in Resolve, and export, transcode and upload in 4K because YouTube will play 4K video with higher bitrates/less compression artefacts (even when it's just fake 4K). (EDIT: @KnightsFan was faster.)

With Resolve, you'll get the best h264 quality if you first export to a high-quality format like DNxHR, ProRes or Cineform and then re-encode that exported file with Handbrake/ffmpeg, using the x264 quality level 18, preset "veryslow" and tuning parameter "film" or (if you want to preserve grain in the video) "grain". If you use Handbrake, make sure that no deinterlace or noise filters will be applied and that the frame rate will stay (a) the same as in the original and (b) remain constant. This workflow will also give you a high quality h264 file to play back on smart tvs and other devices that support the h264 codec. (Resolve's built-in h264 codecs, both the software codec and the Nvidia/AMD hardware codecs, unfortunately result in much worse image quality than x264.)

Just ran my own test, because I never used the ALL-I codec before. Lens was an adapted Nikkor 24mm/f2 Ai-s. Framegrab from the UHD 23.98p ALL-I mov recording: Framegrab from the UHD 23.98p CinemaDNG recording, same lens, graded in Resolve 16 to match the h264 image (roughly), sharpness parameter in the RAW setting left at default value 10: 1:1 crop ALL-I mov: 1:1 crop CinemaDNG: What I don't like in the ALL-I mov are the pronounced sharpening artefacts (including halos) - although I had dialled down in-camera sharpening to the lowest possible value. On top of that, the ALL-I image is much more saturated and contrasty, although I used identical picture profiles on both recordings. ffprobe says that the ALL-I video is 8bit Rec709 4:2:0 with a bitrate of 400Kbit/s.

The Sigma fp can only record 8bit when it's not recording CinemaDNG.

I've owned both the BM Pocket 4K and the Sigma fp - and while I stuck with the fp because I mainly need a stealthy low-light camera, I'd say that the Pocket 4K is a far more mature camera in every respect (from the user interface to the postproduction workflow, not to speak of the absence of bugs).

This is a known issue, and there is no fix (yet). Everyone is waiting - and hoping - for firmware 2.0 to fix it.

Their website is from 2014, and their webshop is dysfunctional - so I'd expect them to be old tech... Quality of LED lights (particularly color rendition) has dramatically improved in the last couple of years, so I wouldn't buy an old light.

Yeah, just rewatched Ozu's Tokyo Story this weekend - with the exception of one single travelling shot, it's all static tripod shots, using a single 50mm lens!

Of course you can get a cinematic image from a 1" sensor - just take the first-generation Blackmagic Pocket and the Digital Bolex. (Let alone analog Super 16mm cinematography which uses the same frame size as the sensor size of 1".)

Sorry, I call that bullshit - and take (for example) Koyaanisqatsi over a reality soap opera any time - in fact, having to watch that reality show is my personal definition of hell. I really wonder where these voices are coming from, on this forum that is supposed to be about the beauty of cinematography.

I keep disliking this camera. It goes against any ambition of producing better - I dare not say: more beautiful, more filmic-quality - images, but throws us back into white trash reality tv aesthetics. (Chris and Jordan nailed that in their intro of their DPreview video, using it for a mock-shampoo influencer ad.) I really think that this camera doesn't belong to this forum - but since I am neither the owner, nor a moderator, it's just my 2 cents.