Full Frame For Interviews

[fuzzynormal]

Alright. What's the best value/option for a 4K camera that shoots full frame.  Would use it for interview set-ups...and that's about it.

[jonpais]

hmmmm... a7 III maybe?

[Kisaha]

I agree, for full frame the A7iii is a no-brainer. I wouldn't buy anything cheaper/used,  right now. It will be scary when it starts to go down ( a bit at least) in price just before Christmas or so. It would be cheaper than most top m43/APS-C and it can arguably compete with some high priced full frame dSLRs.

[webrunner5]

I think Sony is your Only option Under 2 grand. Yeah A7s mk I, A7r mk II is the cheapest.  I only paid 900 bucks for my A7s. But like others have said new A7 mkIII is pretty damn good at that price..

[aldolega]

The a7S needs a recorder to give you 4K, so that pretty much ruins the price advantage. The a7RII is a better option, but its FF 4K is only good up to about ISO1600, and even then it's a bit soft, so punching in in the edit will be limited.

For the ~$1600 you would spend on an a7RII I would probably just spend the extra $400 for the a7III. Then you'll get super high-res FF 4K, amazing ISO capabilities in all modes, better AF for those people that sway and rock in their chair, better battery life, and a screen that doesn't dim in 4K.

[webrunner5]

I am surprised someone hasn't come up with a hack to be able to shoot 4k internal on a A7s.

[Trek of Joy]

a7III seems most logical, though a7s2 prices are lower on the used market. If you go speed booster, it opens up Fuji and Sony APS-c.

[IronFilm]

On 3/11/2018 at 12:54 PM, fuzzynormal said:

Alright. What's the best value/option for a 4K camera that shoots full frame.  Would use it for interview set-ups...and that's about it.

 

Did the focal reducer for NX1 turn out to be viable? If so, that. 

Are there focal reducers for Fuji's X mount? I assume that, if so then go for this.

Otherwise ditch the obsession with "full frame" and go with a Panasonic G80/G85 for maximum bang for buck value. 

(or alternatively, is 4K *really* essential for the very low budget shoots? Then you could go for a Nikon D750 or Sony a7S mk2 etc)

[Nikkor]

Sony 6300 and speed booster?

[cantsin]

If you shoot interviews with your interviewees in medium closeup or closeup, you'd use f5.6 (at best f4) on a 50mm lens and still have background blur. With larger apertures, parts of the face would go out of focus, or the whole pictures would go out of focus if your interviewee moves their head. 

So you can just as well shoot s35/APS-C with a 35mm lens at f4, or MFT with a 25mm lens at f2.8.

[fuzzynormal]

3 hours ago, cantsin said:

If you shoot interviews with your interviewees in medium closeup or closeup, you'd use f5.6 (at best f4) on a 50mm lens and still have background blur. With larger apertures, parts of the face would go out of focus, or the whole pictures would go out of focus if your interviewee moves their head. 

So you can just as well shoot s35/APS-C with a 35mm lens at f4, or MFT with a 25mm lens at f2.8.

All true, and I've done it all... but with the way I'll have to do things on my upcoming project and in the places that I'll be forced to do 'em, wide open(ish) lenses on full frame is the extreme shallow DOF solution I'm aiming for.  Speed boosters are good for bumping exposure, but don't do much for the "circle of confusion," which is an important aesthetic consideration a lot of folks using SB's tend to ignore --which is fine to ignore until you don't want to ignore it.

I'd like 4k for the added benefit of cropping for a tighter frame as an alternate shot.

And, FWIW, following focus manually on someone shifting around is not impossible.  I'd suggest that if one has even a little bit of skill it's pretty simple to do.  Mark the focus ring based on an interviewees lean tendencies, and manually float back and forth between those limits as the person moves.  A cheap grease pencil can be your bestest buddy.  Hard stop the limits if you have to.

Besides, as far as I'm concerned, any analog organic motion (even when focusing) looks better than a robot algorithm doing it.

[cantsin]

45 minutes ago, fuzzynormal said:

Speed boosters are good for bumping exposure, but don't do much for the "circle of confusion," 

This is an urban legend, IMHO.

[fuzzynormal]

2 hours ago, cantsin said:

This is an urban legend, IMHO.

Is that right?  I've not noticed a more discernible shallow DOF simply because I'm using a speedbooster.  COC looks the same to me with or without a speedbooster...just adds more exposure and FOV.  Which is certainly great... wait, are we agreeing on the same thing?  

Ah, who cares.

I just want a FF cam with an 50 or 55mm fast lens for interviews.

[Don Kotlos]

I also believe that an A7iii would work great for FF 4K with AF. A7rII could work as well, but I would avoid it since you might go into moire issues with fabrics in FF mode. 

From metabones:

Quote

How does Speed Booster® affect the depth-of-field?

The short answer is Speed Booster® on an APS-C sensor gives essentially the same depth-of-field effect as if a full-frame camera body were used.

The long answer is complicated. If we are referring to depth-of-field in the mathematical sense, that depends on the aperture, magnification and circle of confusion (CoC). Magnification in turn depends on distance and focal length. The 50mm lens now becomes a 35mm lens which behaves very differently in terms of perspective. The question is, do we still keep the distance the same? Should the CoC be kept the same? There are many missing variables we need to choose and fill-in before we could get a meaningful answer. When people claim Speed Booster® does not change the depth-of-field, they usually neglect to state the implicit assumption that the distance is kept the same (thereby changing the object size) and the CoC is kept the same. The same logic would lead to the conclusion that an APS-C camera has the same depth-of-field as a full-frame camera, too, which under the same implicit assumptions is mathematically true (the depth-of-field formula is format-size-agnostic, after all), but with which many people would disagree from practical experience.

However, when most people ask about depth-of-field, they are not interested in mathematics, but rather, they are after a certain kind of shallow depth-of-field "look". If this is the case, the short answer above applies.

 

[IronFilm]

14 hours ago, cantsin said:

If you shoot interviews with your interviewees in medium closeup or closeup, you'd use f5.6 (at best f4) on a 50mm lens and still have background blur. With larger apertures, parts of the face would go out of focus, or the whole pictures would go out of focus if your interviewee moves their head. 

So you can just as well shoot s35/APS-C with a 35mm lens at f4, or MFT with a 25mm lens at f2.8.

 

I shot this on Saturday night (while drunk ish! :-P ha) with the Panasonic f1.7 lens, which I however dialed back to f2 rather than f1.7 (the seated subject wouldn't remain stationary at all! But it was more to fix exposure, as the subject very annoyingly wouldn't let me turn off a light DIRECTLY in front of him under the bench which was blowing out his very light skin):
 

 

Additionally, I used a BMPCC! Thus its 1" sensor is even smaller than the usual MFT sensor. 

[jonpais]

Nice job, @IronFilm, but don’t you find the background a touch distracting? sry...

[IronFilm]

That was intentional, as a talking head alone can be quite borrowing.  Plus his topic is about computers / visual media, thus I thought it would be nice to layer in those into the scene into the background and then another layer into the deep background. 

Would I do it the same all over again if I did this say tomorrow while sober? (I wasn't then!)

Yup, probably. Although what I would change is I would tone down the brightness of the monitors, by how much.... hmm, maybe even by as much as 50%? (plus a number of other tweaks, such as I wish I didn't have to use a softbox as a hair light, and I wish I could have had more time to play around with how I was splashing bits of light onto the background)

But we were very quickly running out of time.

Remember, I'd already had a full day of filming beforehand, working on this feature:

 

Thus we didn't have too much spare time available,  because we really wanted to get into town before all the clubs closed up for the night. (as it was errr... we kinda missed that! Oops. Well, we got into one bar we spent the rest of the night in, but it wasn't our 1st or even 3rd choice, but nowhere else was letting us in because it was already too late in the night!)

 

[leeys]

On 3/13/2018 at 2:53 AM, fuzzynormal said:

Is that right?  I've not noticed a more discernible shallow DOF simply because I'm using a speedbooster.  COC looks the same to me with or without a speedbooster...just adds more exposure and FOV.  Which is certainly great... wait, are we agreeing on the same thing?  

Ah, who cares.

I just want a FF cam with an 50 or 55mm fast lens for interviews.

Did you compare using the same lens with and without the speedbooster? If so then the DoF will be the same. 

[noone]

A7iii with the Sony Zeiss 55 1.8 (lens can be found a lot cheaper than list price and it is very very nice).       Another slightly longer option is the FE 85 1.8 which is to my mind the biggest bargain going in photography right now as well as being just a wonderful lens in its own right.