Cheap bokeh setup?

[kye]

I think I'm sold on the Sigma 18-35 for my Canon 700D.  

I fired up ML on the 700D and with the quality setting at 3x (the max) managed to write a file that averaged about 125Mbps where the 1x setting only managed 52Mbps, so higher quality encoding is at least possible.  So with that hurdle down I watched some videos shot with the Sigma and wow - it looked very nice at times, very very nice indeed.  I was surprised that the best moments were during the day rather than the bokeh lights at night style shots - the daytime shots looked bright and clean and had that nice mix of detail with the softness of out-of-focus areas.  It also responds wonderfully when pointed towards bright lights / the sun, with on-or-off-screen flares that are quite pleasing aesthetically.

I've never really had a wide-aperture lens before (except the 50mm 1.8 which is too long for main usage) so I am probably going to go overboard for a bit until I work out how much to use and when etc.

[IronFilm]

9 hours ago, kye said:

Good to hear, and yes, I know it's a bargain for what it is.  Does this lens have the magic the internet says it does?

 

Nothing else on the market can match its specs 

[kye]

11 hours ago, IronFilm said:

Nothing else on the market can match its specs 

I've heard that.  What about that certain X-factor that some lenses have?  How does it look in an aesthetic / cinematic sense?

I've seen some nice videos shot with it, but you've lived with it so understand it...

[webrunner5]

On 3/12/2018 at 11:44 PM, kye said:

Is now the right time to tell you about what cars I'd like to buy? 

 

Oh my God don't get me started on Cars! I have owned close to 300 cars in my life from Ferrari's to Fiats. And no I have never owned a car dealership or had a Dealer License. I have only owned 3 new cars in my life. But wow I have owned some crazy nice cars. Way more foreign cars than American cars. But when I was young, younger, really neat cars were damn cheap to buy. Especially Foreign high end ones. Lambos, Ferrari, Jags, Porsche on and on. They were too expensive to pay someone to fix them, and rich people just sold them cheap and bought a new one, or a newer one. And I made good money, and had the credit line to buy them. And buy them I did. I just happened to be able to fix them mechanically. And a friend of mine owned a body shop. Bingo. The rest is history.

Porsche was probably my favorite, like 18 of them, Lambos next,  7 of them, Corvette, I have owned 22 of them, nearly every model they ever made, and little Fiat Abarths. Rusty little buggers, Alphas, Ferrari's were nice, had 6 of them, but damn stupid expensive parts cost on them. Enzo would Only deal with you when racing season was over. A lot of stuff the factory had to Make for you. No spares. Neat cars for the money you could buy them for, but not fixing them LoL. You are not working on these new cars anymore anyhow.

I can't even stand to look at car auctions on TV. Cars that cost a million dollars now I could buy for 15, 20 thousand dollars years ago. 75 thousand dollars Corvettes today were like 4,000 dollars. I feel sorry for young people now. Anything old now is collectable, when I was young old stuff you could hardly give it away. Goofy world.

I just sold my 2008 Nissan 350Z NISMO end of last year. Damn nice car. Probably my last boy racer car I will ever own I guess. Driving a 1998 Chevy 3500 Dually extended pickup truck now with a 454 cu in in it. Original paint on it. Zero Rust. It was a Florida car. Using it to pull a 5th wheel camper RV. Gas Hog from hell. I sold my 36' Class A motor home. Just too many goofy things to go wrong on them. And hardly anyone will work on them. Too big. And I am too old now to work on them myself.

[kye]

Sigma 18-35mm 1.8 purchased!  Fast SD card purchased!

I'm planning to use ML, either in the 3x Quality mode, or in RAW.  I've got the 10 + 12bit experimental build installed and am converting to CinemaDNG with the excellent MLV App and then into Resolve Studio for editing, colour, and export.

I'm still trying to figure out sound - I had sound recording in the nightly build with 14-bit video but haven't seen it since.  I'll keep testing.  

I'll also have to work out grading the footage too.  The author of the MLV App took out the gamma conversion function due to technical issues, and I don't think it did colour conversion, so might not have been a drop-in format anyway.

Who can tell me the easiest way to grade ML RAW, once I've converted it to CinemaDNGs that is??
My preference would be to convert them into an industry standard log and then I can use the Colour Space Transform to convert it to Rec709 where I know what I am doing!

If I can't work out how to get nice colours then I might have to default to 3x Quality mode.

[ntblowz]

This is what I use on GH5S (and my 200D), the IS works fine for handheld and bokeh is nice  (Canon 35mm F2 IS USM), on XL and 5S crop it becomes 42mm F1.3 lens

 

The Sigma 18-35mm is strictly on the GH5 because of IBIS.

 

[IronFilm]

23 hours ago, webrunner5 said:

I have owned close to 300 cars in my life from Ferrari's to Fiats.

Good grief! 

I've owned ZERO cars in my lifetime. 

But then again I've owned probably nearing on two dozen bikes over my life. 

[webrunner5]

13 minutes ago, IronFilm said:

Good grief! 

I've owned ZERO cars in my lifetime. 

But then again I've owned probably nearing on two dozen bikes over my life. 

Like pedal bikes or I am going to die fast bikes? I have some good stories about both. No I have not have 300 of them each. You ought to have money out the butt if you Never owned a car. They are, well expensive to use no matter how you look at it. By the time you figure out the costs, just like a house, it can get pretty scary.

[IronFilm]

19 minutes ago, webrunner5 said:

Like pedal bikes or I am going to die fast bikes? I have some good stories about both.

One motorbike. Rest were/are bicycles.  (only still own a handful, but at one point I owned a dozen all at once!)

 

20 minutes ago, webrunner5 said:

You ought to have money out the butt if you Never owned a car. They are, well expensive to use no matter how you look at it. By the time you figure out the costs, just like a house, it can get pretty scary.

Yup, never owning a car helps have more money spare for this expensive business of filmmaking!

But I feel within a couple of years or so then simply for my career I'll need to buy a stationwagon or a transit van. 

[sam]

an enclosed trailer for your gear hitched to your bike would be way more fun! think how fast youd go down hills!

[IronFilm]

If I cared about aerodynamics I'd  have shaved my beard!

[kye]

First (publishable) test video shot with the 700D / ML RAW / Sigma 18-35.

 

It was all hand-held and low light (challengingly low light), and I've added in some grain in post to cover up the noise from the camera (different shots had different amounts of noise so it was distracting).

Notes:

• It's very hard to tell what's in focus and what is slightly off while filming - this was all F1.8 so shallow depth-of-field
• The RAW video is limited to 1728 x 786, so not quite FullHD, but I uploaded in 4K to get a bit better quality out of YouTube
• The lens is heavy!  But that helps stabilise it a bit which is a plus.
• Manual focus is very nice, and so is the rest of the design of the lens actually
• The camera has lots of video noise (which is why I bought the XC10) but in RAW the noise looks less objectionable and in a way is more like film.  This had shots up to ISO 3200 or more in it, which are challenging conditions for a camera this old.
• The lens focuses really close, which is handy for controlling perspective
• It's not likely to replace my XC10 any time soon, but it is very nice and has a different aesthetic to it
• I need to shoot with it more to 'understand' the look and work out how I want my videos to look

After we ate dinner there was dancing and singing and I ended up trying the crop mode to extend the focal length, and that seems like a great feature.  With the 18-35 without crop mode you get the equivalent of 29-56mm and with crop mode you get 87-169mm.  That really is excellent coverage considering you don't have to carry anything extra, don't have to change lenses, and the 87-169 is a lot faster than my other long lens, the 55-250 f4-5.6.  The more I film with this combination (with the Rode VideoMicro) the more I like it.