ASK & DISCUSS INDEX

12 years, 8 months ago - Matthew Lawrence

Hi,

Just wanted to say a big thank you to Richard, Mark and Dave. I really appreciate your input.

Although I do like the features of the AF101, I'm leaning more towards the BMC because of the more filmic image although I'll try it out before I buy. The GH3 is also an option should I not quite save enough for the BMC.

Many Thanks,
Matt

12 years, 7 months ago - Matt Jamie

I would say the crop factor is pretty significant issue. Philip Bloom has done an extensive (and epic - 45 minute!!) review of the BMC here - watch from 8.45 mins to see a comparison of a 14mm - and that is WIDE - lens on the 5d, C300, GH2 and Blackmagic. It looks more like a 35-40mm on the BMC so if you want to shoot ANYTHING wide angle or in a confined space I'd say you're going to have major issues with the BMC. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulKP8TAjrWw

12 years, 8 months ago - Peter Ward

I'd take the GH3 over the AF100 any day of the week. I've used both the AF and the GH2 and leaving price out I the equation I still found the GH2 nicer to work with-and with a hack the quality is a lot better. Unless you have to have ND filters and balanced audio in I'd go GH.

The BMCC is more 'filmic" in the sense of offering a RAW workflow. If you have the resources to deal with RAW then Blackmagic clearly wins on quality. But recording ProRes vs high bitrate AVCHD (in a GH3/hacked GH2 and new AF) the advantage is less clear. And the Cinema Camera will take a lot more add ons to make a usable camera out of it so the starting costs are greater than they may at first appear.

My own opinion would be, don't sink a fortune, go GH for now and hold out for prosumer cinema cameras to mature.

12 years, 8 months ago - Mark Brindle

Hi Matthew,

Ive had the BMC camera on pre-order for a while now and did get a chance to play with one at BVE North in Manchester recently (although indoors only). I also owned two Panasonic AF101s for a year that we filmed a feature on and lots of corporate work and we rented out for a few more features last year. Both can be setup to use Canon EF lenses or Nikon lenses with adapters, both have a similar sensor size. The Af101s are available to buy now (unlike BMC thats already 6 months late) and aside from some usability issues like a pretty poor EVF and lack of focus zoom assist , they are pretty good. You have both HDMI and HDSDI out for monitoring and you get 60fps at 1080. Two card slots is good for most situations for long form and short form recording and you can always record externally to an Atomos or nano flash for longer recording times or higher rate codecs later. The Af101s have most of the features you want day 1 but not much chance of many upgrades - you get waveform monitoring and with the right Panasonic lenses you even get face detection AF. The downside we found was sensor size but with an 11-16 f2.8 ATx or a 20mm Nikon they were ok for wides. Aliasing and Moire, rolling shutter are not too bad at all - same as most dslrs if not better - better then 5D mkII. The sensor on the BMC i cant vouch for either way so you will have to go with reviews from those who have used it fully as it has been released to some in US already, despite lack of availability in UK.

The BMC has very little in its menu day 1 and will need firmware upgrades to get new features on to it - but expect some new features over time since witha touch screen they can add these in easily. You will need an external device to give you phantom power for mic's example. But you do get Prores onto SSD for long form recording and you do get the RAW workflow if you could ever afford to use it.. Compatible 750GB normal 2.5 inch HDDs are only £60+vat though so SSD doesnt have to be the only option if your careful for indoors, studio or any non-handheld work. The large touch screen could be an issue with finger marks over time and with reflections outdoors so you may want another HD monitor for critical focus (same you you want on the Af101 though).

For both cameras if you use primes and follow focus you will need a rail mount system. You can battery power both from external Vlock batteries and Hawk Woods and Swit have made extra power adapters for the BMC. Both have accessories - many for the AF101 didnt actually materialise, but you dont need many to run with this in non film mode, but will take same accessories as most dslrs for mattbox, Follow focus and monitoring options. Same for BMC. There are lots of BMC rig parts being made by many more companies then those who jumped on the Af101 bandwagon (or didnt jump at all) so i expect the BMC will have more longevity in terms of usage due to its wider dynamic range and RAW options and its perception as a usable cinema camera. With the right accessories you can use the BMC for other things like corporate, interviews, events etc with Prores native to save on transcoding when your done.

Dont forget you also get a free full copy of Davinci resolve 9 with the BMC! If you havent tried it then you can download a free lite version from Black magic and see if your computer hardware is up to the job of running it. They supply good PC and MAC build guides to help you get hardware capable, but its worth trying on any hardware you have as they tend to list the 'top spec' info when it will still run (slower) on other hardware too.

So.. im getting a BMC for the long form Prores recording, wider dynamic range and copy of Resolve, and RAW options (in that order probably). I would prefer if it was full frame but i have lenses to cope with it and in some circumstances this crop sensor is a bonus due to magnification effect. I have many dslr rigs and rig parts, monitors and hdsdi kit already, to make use of its sdi output too. You need to look at what you want it to do and whether you can live with the limitations of either camera. It might also help you to try out both cameras - visit BVE in London next year if you get a chance as you can make a comparison or rent one in for a day/weekend if you can actually get hold of a BMC that is..Good luck!


Mark
@ManiacFilms
www.maniacfilms.com

12 years, 8 months ago - Richard Woolfenden

Apologies Matt the link to our little GH3 film has now moved to here: http://bit.ly/12zZlFX.

Best

Richard

12 years, 8 months ago - David Key

Hi,

I used the AF101 for a student project and I was pretty pleased with the results. The downsides I found with it was that it was pretty poor in low light conditions and the transfer from camera to editing system is quite a hassle. But the image that you get when you process it is worth the wait. Also, like most things, the better the lenses you get, the better quality the image. We had a nikon and ziess mount for ours, unfortunately on our budget we couldn't afford a ziess. As I believe you may be aware already, from what I've heard of the blackmagic camera the battery life is appalling.

Hope this helped

Dave

12 years, 8 months ago - Richard Woolfenden

Hi Matthew,

I think Dave and Mark's answers are very useful and ring true with my experience. Here is my round-up:

PROS

1. Price
2. Sync Sound
3. Form Factor (although ugly it is easier to use handheld than most DSLRs)
4. Lenses - a wide variety of 3rd party lenses can be used with it and Panasonic's range is pretty good and always expanding. (I have the Panasonic/Lumix 14-140mm and the Nikon 50mm 1.2 prime).
5. 50/60fps at 1080p

CONS

1. Low light
2. Time to ingest into FCP6/7/X. (Easier in Premiere Pro apparently)
3. I have never been impressed with the manual white balance. I'm not sure even if it works properly!
4. It can only internally record at 28Mbps (after a firmware upgrade)

Mark is right. Definitely get your hands on one before buying. We shot 3 projects with one that we hired before we bought.

I don't want to mess with your BMC vs AF101 dilemma but we have just tested the new Panasonic GH3 (half the price of your AF101 offer)

The GH3, as I am sure you know, has a top data rate of 70Mbps and we were very impressed. The problem being that you are back with a small form factor. I reckon the camera is going to be very popular next year and it has only just started shipping.

Please fell free to drop me an email if you have any questions. We have posted a fun GH3 Christmas message on Vimeo in the last few seconds just here: http://bit.ly/TYNLP8. Certainly not a scientific test and we took some low light shots at 3200ISO with not particularly fast lenses leading to some image break-up but I would have to say the image quality is better than the AF101 :(

Richard
richard@xube.co.uk
@xube

12 years, 8 months ago - Will Steer

From a post production perspective, there is really only one answer: the Blackmagic.

The main reason for this is codecs. It shoots DNxHD and Pro Res compressed and also RAW.

Forgetting RAW for a second (the implementation is clunky: the really should have tried to implement Cineform rather than uncompressed RAW) shooting on Pro Res is far better than AVCHD codecs.

There are three reasons for this:

1. Flexibility in post/dynamic range. The BM camera is the only one remotely in its price range that supports true 10bit, meaning that for grading you are working with billions of colours, rather than millions.

2. Efficiency. AVCHD (aka, H264) uses only one processor core at a time to encode and decode footage. Highly inefficient and obviously a holdover to the fact that it is a consumer delivery codec designed for low bit rates. Pro Res encodes are comparatively blindingly fast because the codec is designed to leverage multiple cores.

3. Quality. Pro Res holds up very well when transcoded to a low bit rate delivery codec, H264 starts to fall apart upon recompression. This is not a hard and fast rule and of course depends on the situation, but especially is true of high detail, or high ISO footage.

Those are my thoughts from the post production POV. I'm very 'meh' on the whole sensor size and DOF issues because you can get good cheap wide angle lenses for the BM (look up Samyang VDSLR lenses).

12 years, 8 months ago - Haider Zafar

Hi Matt,

I'm sure with all the information above you're in a better position to understand the camera you want but I thought I would give my two pence worth.

With the BMC I have heard that the crop factor destroys the focal range of your lens, so a 50mm becomes 100mm etc. It doesn't match a sensor of other cameras, which could be annoying. The body and feel of the camera may also feel 'Toyish'.

I guess ultimately it entirely depends on what you want to film and achieve with the camera. I personally am a big Canon fan and have been shooting features on the 5D Mark 2 but now there's the improved Mark 3, which can be purchased for less than £1900! from HDEW cameras.

The AF-101 looks and feels like a proper camcorder and works great for online, corporate work with its XLR inputs and ND's etc. If only the image quality and data rate matched the wonderfully overpriced C300 then we would be in for a sure treat!

Do you edit on a particular platform? if you're using the latest Adobe Premiere then any format is edit ready once transferred to your computer :D

I myself have been contemplating cameras for sometime now and it really has been a struggle in what to purchase. My personal wait continues but I'm sure there'll be something early 2013 ;-)

12 years, 6 months ago - Hamish Scadding

I have been shooting with a Panasonic AF100 and although I've been really pleased with it I'd agree with a lot of the negatives listed above (low light performance - though this really depends on the lens you're using too, poor(ish) EVF but just thought I'd add a few things.

Don't discount the BMC on crop factor as the AF100 has 2x crop factor too.

I've had no trouble editing with AF100 footage in FCP but 99% of the time I have converted the footage straight to ProRes, which is very easy to do, the downside is that it takes up a lot of hard drive space. (in fact it's worse editing AVCHD footage in Premiere as it deals with the footage natively and doesn't offer an option to convert to ProRes).

I've graded footage from 5D and 7D's and IMHO the footage from the AF100, holds up to grading as well as 5D footage and far better than 7D footage.

Also the AF100 has didicated XLR inputs and is mirrorless so it doesn't suffer from moire (which I believe the BMC does but don't quote me).

The 28mbps bit rate (35mbps in USA) has never been an issue for me as I don't film a lot for broadcast but you can plugin an external recorder (Atmos Ninja, Nanoflash, etc) to the AF100 if you need 50mbps bitrate.

The only things that would put me off buying an AF100 would be whether as the camera is now 2 years old, will Panasonic update it soon with the new GH3 internals? (I think the original is based on the GH2)