Z Cam E2 will have ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FPS in 4K??

[webrunner5]

Wow some good looking footage. Hmm.

[KnightsFan]

That first one I saw the other day. I'm not in love with the color grade, but it looks good.

The second one is the first clip I've seen from the global shutter variant. I wonder how the DR and low light compares? Isn't it also an even smaller sensor?

[mercer]

1 hour ago, IronFilm said:

 

 

I, actually, quite liked that.

Interestingly, I think I may like that image better than another camera’s image that’s all the rage. Too bad it doesn’t have a screen and shoots h.265. Oh well, maybe next year BH will have them on sale for $200.

[webrunner5]

11 minutes ago, KnightsFan said:

That first one I saw the other day. I'm not in love with the color grade, but it looks good.

The second one is the first clip I've seen from the global shutter variant. I wonder how the DR and low light compares? Isn't it also an even smaller sensor?

Yeah but to my eyes it looked like you would see it in real life on my calibrated monitor.. And the pans had almost no smearing, and the motion cadence looked pretty natural. Looks like a damn nice camera to me. A  little pricey since the PK4 is out, but the 16 Stops with WDR sounds enticing as hell.. That is dream stuff for 2 grand. That is up there in Red, Arri territory!

[IronFilm]

10 minutes ago, mercer said:

Interestingly, I think I may like that image better than another camera’s image that’s all the rage. Too bad it doesn’t have a screen and shoots h.265. Oh well, maybe next year BH will have them on sale for $200.

No chance. 

The E1 started off at a much lower price point to begin with. 

Plus I think there is more interest with the E2 than there was with the E1, so their prices will drop slower than the E2 did. 

Would be a bloody miracle and a half if 18 months from now it is half the price. Kinda don't even see that happening. But who knows, maybe I'll eat my hat.

[KnightsFan]

29 minutes ago, mercer said:

Too bad it doesn’t have a screen and shoots h.265.

To each his own... for me, those are both benefits! 90% of the time my camera is rigged such that I can't see the screen, and I use an external monitor anyway. H.265 packs so much information into so little space, it's a dream come true for my hard drive.

23 minutes ago, webrunner5 said:

Yeah but to my eyes it looked like you would see it in real life on my calibrated monitor.. And the pans had almost no smearing, and the motion cadence looked pretty natural. Looks like a damn nice camera to me. A  little pricey since the PK4 is out, but the 16 Stops with WDR sounds enticing as hell.. That is dream stuff for 2 grand. That is up there in Red, Arri territory!

Yeah, it's realistic, but I would have done it differently. It's not a problem, I've downloaded enough SOOC files from this camera to prove that I can grade it to my taste. Rolling shutter on this camera is something like 11ms if I recall correctly, so yeah it should have nice pans.

Agree about price. Is it really worth $700 more than the P4K? Is it really worth $500 (plus resale on my current camera) more than the XT3? Since all my lenses are full frame, I'd need a speed booster. And CFast is expensive. The E2 is my favorite camera of the year, but it's really hard justifying double or triple the gross cost, compared to the P4K or XT3.

[webrunner5]

11 minutes ago, KnightsFan said:

To each his own... for me, those are both benefits! 90% of the time my camera is rigged such that I can't see the screen, and I use an external monitor anyway. H.265 packs so much information into so little space, it's a dream come true for my hard drive.

Yeah, it's realistic, but I would have done it differently. It's not a problem, I've downloaded enough SOOC files from this camera to prove that I can grade it to my taste.

Agree about price. Is it really worth $700 more than the P4K? Is it really worth $500 (plus resale on my current camera) more than the XT3? Since all my lenses are full frame, I'd need a speed booster. And CFast is expensive. The E2 is my favorite camera of the year, but it's really hard justifying double or triple the gross cost, compared to the P4K or XT3.

Yeah I don't see how they are going to sell many of them. The PK4 and the Sony A7 mk III have put a stake in the heart for a lot of things. Then add the X-T3, Z6 and wow.

I was thinging yesterday that when X amount of people decide to dump their PK4's they  are probably going to be selling for like 800 bucks. You really can't re sell the Studio dongle if you registered it, I don't think, and if I already have it I don't want the Dongle anyways. So you talk about driving the price down for stuff, Wow!

So at 800 dollars for a used PK4 over a 2000 Dollar E2, man that is a hard sell, at least to me.

[KnightsFan]

1 minute ago, webrunner5 said:

Yeah I don't see how they are going to sell many of them. The PK4 and the Sony A7 mk III have put a stake in the heart for a lot of things. Then add the X-T3, Z6 and wow. I was thinging yesterday that when X amount of people decide t dump their PK4's they  are probably going to be selling for like 800 bucks. You really can't re sell the Studio dongle if you registered it, I don't think, and if I already have it I don't want the Dongle anyways. So you talk about driving the price down for stuff, Wow!

I don't know, the E2 has a lot of unique features. They want to have ProRes at some point, apparently it's just a matter of waiting for licensing. Once that's implemented, the more legit productions will be much more interested. The E2 would occupy the unique position of having the most efficient codec, and the easiest to edit codec in the same camera.

Unlike any of the competition, the E2 is built for livestreaming, 3D rigs (they have a "pixel level" sync for multicams), and has a deep learning engine. They had some demo I think where the camera was on a mechanical arm and automatically followed a person as they walked around a room, all the panning and focusing and everything was automatic. I wouldn't be surprised if they pull off some update with AI-based AF or something. They're targeting every video market at once, from cinema to industrial.

Maybe none of that will translate to actual sales though.

[mercer]

21 minutes ago, KnightsFan said:

To each his own... for me, those are both benefits! 90% of the time my camera is rigged such that I can't see the screen, and I use an external monitor anyway. H.265 packs so much information into so little space, it's a dream come true for my hard drive.

Yup, I don’t like rigged out cameras, but that 3.5” Ikan wouldn’t be too unwieldy with the E2. H.265 sure does save space, I used to get hours of footage with a 32GB card on my NX500. But storage is cheap, processing power is expensive and it would take forever to transcode those h.265 files to ProRes LT.

[webrunner5]

5 minutes ago, KnightsFan said:

I don't know, the E2 has a lot of unique features. They want to have ProRes at some point, apparently it's just a matter of waiting for licensing. Once that's implemented, the more legit productions will be much more interested. The E2 would occupy the unique position of having the most efficient codec, and the easiest to edit codec in the same camera.

Unlike any of the competition, the E2 is built for livestreaming, 3D rigs (they have a "pixel level" sync for multicams), and has a deep learning engine. They had some demo I think where the camera was on a mechanical arm and automatically followed a person as they walked around a room, all the panning and focusing and everything was automatic. I wouldn't be surprised if they pull off some update with AI-based AF or something. They're targeting every video market at once, from cinema to industrial.

Maybe none of that will translate to actual sales though.

Yeah but there is a Ton of competition in the industrial segment because it has the potential of being a Huge, no expenses spared, cash cow. And to the average person a lot of the magic is of no actual need to them. I don't envy them now that stuff has dropped in price in the last year.

[mercer]

However I will say the E2 may just be the comeback camera of the year. It would be a lot nicer at a grand though. 

[webrunner5]

This video is pretty good, and it shows how well the Wide DR thingy works. Pretty impressive. AF, eh not great, I think in better light it might work better? But it at least does have Continuous AF unlike the PK4..

 

[KnightsFan]

3 minutes ago, mercer said:

Yup, I don’t like rigged out cameras, but that 3.5” Ikan wouldn’t be too unwieldy with the E2. H.265 sure does save space, I used to get hours of footage with a 32GB card on my NX500. But storage is cheap, processing power is expensive and it would take forever to transcode those h.265 files to ProRes LT.

Yeah, this is one of the few cameras where you NEED a rig. Forget the smug "you need a rig to use the BMPCC effectively" where everything applies to every DSLR, you will have a very difficult time using an E2 without a rig.

I still prefer H.265. For example, I shot ~450GB on my NX1 for a single project last summer. 4k at 80 mbps. Prores would be over 6x that rate. I would have needed a 3TB drive to store the project. Add another for backup, and that's at least $160 on drives for a single project. After a couple projects, the expensive processing power of a GTX 1080, which can edit 4k H.265 with minimal lag, is a comparable investment.

[webrunner5]

The water cooled GTX 1080 is not TOO terrible.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B01KSE3VT4/ref=dp_olp_all_mbc?ie=UTF8&condition=all

 

[FreshGiant]

The CEO of Z Cam told me in the FB forum yesterday that ProRes 10 bit 4:2:2 internal is "100% happening" and when I asked him on a timeline he said "weeks". Not sure if that mean 40 weeks or 4, but that is what he said. They released this yesterday too. He said the triple native ISO (which seems like bad marketing) is that the native ISO is 200 and 800, but when they do wide dynamic range (which does look promising for static shots like interviews in front of windows) the native is iso 80.

If E2 really gets ProRes 422 internally and starts to lower their price closer to GH5 levels, I think it could be a real rival to the Pocket. Lots of people like me just don't really need or want RAW, but they do want ProRes 422. And 5 inch 1080 monitors are so cheap now, having an articulating one is just such a huge advantage. I've said many times I'd actually pay more money for a Pocket 4k camera that doesn't have a screen (battery would last probably 2x as long)!

 

[IronFilm]

15 hours ago, FreshGiant said:

If E2 really gets ProRes 422 internally and starts to lower their price closer to GH5 levels, I think it could be a real rival to the Pocket. Lots of people like me just don't really need or want RAW, but they do want ProRes 422. And 5 inch 1080 monitors are so cheap now, having an articulating one is just such a huge advantage. I've said many times I'd actually pay more money for a Pocket 4k camera that doesn't have a screen (battery would last probably 2x as long)!

This. At the moment $2K is a tough ask from an almost unknown brand, but if they can at least bring it quickly down to say US$1.5K to match some pretty common pricing we're now seeing for the GH5 (and not too far off the X-T3 & BMPCC4K as well) then they could be a strong contender again.

[newfoundmass]

I think it looks decent, but I think you can get better, or at the very least equal, looking footage from cameras that are significantly less. The only thing that really intrigues me is the 4k 120p, but not enough for me to consider buying it at this price. ProRes, unless they are able to add ProRes Raw, isn't really a big selling point for me these days given how well I'm able to edit and work with GH5 and G85 files. 

[Kisaha]

I am affraid the P4K and every modern camera is going to outsell this by the thousands, or even dozens of thousands. 

It is just too expensive for this new world of cameras, needs a lot more rigging than any other camera - and more (expensive) accessories to make it work out of the box - while it is not the only H265 offering in town (NX1 and X-T3 do too) and BRAW is coming to most BM cameras, which it can be a game changer in the industry.

This is going to be vaporware. I envy the US customers that would buy this for 699€ in a year or two from B&H!

[Emanuel]

12 hours ago, Kisaha said:

I am affraid the P4K and every modern camera is going to outsell this by the thousands, or even dozens of thousands. 

It is just too expensive for this new world of cameras, needs a lot more rigging than any other camera - and more (expensive) accessories to make it work out of the box - while it is not the only H265 offering in town (NX1 and X-T3 do too) and BRAW is coming to most BM cameras, which it can be a game changer in the industry.

This is going to be vaporware. I envy the US customers that would buy this for 699€ in a year or two from B&H!

Yes, you're right : ) They will need to adapt themselves. "PRO" world as we were used to is gone. Thing of the past. Only high-end still resists. Because of the brand value. While Hollywood chooses ARRI, they can sleep well by night. This is 2018, not first half of the current decade we live : -)

[Kisaha]

12 minutes ago, Emanuel said:

Yes, you're right : ) They will need to adapt themselves. "PRO" world as we were used to is gone. Thing of the past. Only high-end still resists. Because of the brand value. While Hollywood chooses ARRI, they can sleep well by night. This is 2018, not first half of the current decade we live : -)

Seriously, I have set my heart to the P4K for my next buy, but I worry that until then there will be 3-4 new cameras that will do the same, and more!

What small camera under 2000euros can do in the 3rd quarter of 2018 was just unimaginable a few years ago. Yes, Canon 5Dii revolution happened, but right now we live on a sound and sight revolution happening on a much bigger scale that start from a few hundreds€ phones, goes to 1 thousand and a few hundreds € for raw cameras (!), and we have all the other ultra cheap accessories (drone, wireless follow focus, monitors, Edelkrones and what not), that make incredible content a possibility for everyone.

Interesting times. I miss the seriousness and discipline of the past, but I love going to shoot something with only a ?!!