Af-100 footage analisys: I bloom´s, crews tv´s, alfa romeo´s. Vex1 & hvx comparison.

we ran the mp4 vimeo file out hdmi from a 11" macbook air to a Pioneer Elite plasma.

pretty impressive footage. not what we would shoot, but pretty impressive
 
Everts said:
Paul try to download the mts file from here , it's the one straight out of the camera . Thanks for posting that Barry .
and compare it to native footage of any camera you have ?
Click to expand...

Thanks, my analisys comes from that mts file. I have watched it on VLC Player on Mac.
 
i gotta admit. af100 looked disappointing to me but then i watched 5dmkii video and then af100 right afterwards and i thought i was watching red one. was like a whole new world. maybe i'm being too hard on af100.
 
Homunculus said:
i gotta admit. af100 looked disappointing to me but then i watched 5dmkii video and then af100 right afterwards and i thought i was watching red one. was like a whole new world. maybe i'm being too hard on af100.
Click to expand...


Kind of puts it in perspective, huh?

When it comes right down to it, despite what people are saying on here, the AF-100 is going to turn out to be a fantastic little camera. I suspect it will rule it's domain for quite some time. Those who want or need more - be it resolution, color, bitrate, etc. - will have their options soon enough.
 
Homunculus said:
i gotta admit. af100 looked disappointing to me but then i watched 5dmkii video and then af100 right afterwards and i thought i was watching red one. was like a whole new world. maybe i'm being too hard on af100.
Click to expand...

Either guys like me, Philip Bloom, Filippo Chiesa, and many others, are blind idiots -- or, yeah, perhaps you guys are being a little hard on the AF100. It's not perfect, of course, but we sat there watching the footage projected on a 25-foot screen and some of the clips were gobsmackingly delicious. Some were clipped, some were noisy, nobody really knew how to run the camera or draw the best from it yet obviously. But when the pieces fell into place, it was delicious.

How you view the footage makes a difference too. It looked great to me in-camera, then I imported the footage into Premiere and saw all sorts of noise issues, and I went to the engineers and basically said "hey, what the hell?" And we took it over to a professional 25" monitor and played it directly from the camera, and I sat literally one foot away from the screen, and fell in love all over again. It looks really, really good. Not perfect, of course (and for those who want "perfect", good luck with that -- you're in for a long, long wait). But the camera was a pleasure to operate, it was fun to shoot with, and it delivered great results. I don't know what you guys plan on doing with it; I'm looking at spending more than most American households make in several years, all combined, to make Jack Stanley's feature film debut, so I was pretty critical on the AF100, and I'm pleased with what I saw for the most part. It's plenty up to the task. I have thought this would be the low-budget indie/guerilla filmmaker dream cam, and I'm still confident in that assessment. I was worried when I saw a hailstorm of noise on my computer monitor, and all it really took was proper calibration to watch that all magically meld into the background, to where the worst -case scenario was some very mild noise in the blacks and deepest blues. Which, by the way, is about maybe half as much noise as in a modern 35mm film print. Still bothered? Run "neat video" and reduce the noise to nonexistence if you have to. But there isn't anything out there that offers the combination of performance, features, flexibility, shallow DOF, beautiful footage quality, and everything else, at the price point or anywhere near to it. So I'm content to use it and looking forward to it.

What I'd like to do next is learn exactly how the settings work and tailor it to get the best looks for the types of scenarios I'm going to be shooting in. And I'm going to get one to our DP for him to experiment for a few days with. We didn't have that luxury on this trip. We picked up the cameras, and we went and shot with them. Do you want to know how much research Philip Bloom got to do with the settings? He said "Hey Barry, before I go shoot with this, do you have any recommended settings?" We didn't sit there for a week with professional testing instruments and live models and lighting gear and big monitors, like I would do when profiling a new camera to learn it. So I said "well, I don't know exactly how this model responds, so I'll tell you what I've been using on other Panasonic cameras and on the prior models" and I rattled off some suggested settings. Sight unseen. He experimented a little bit and decided that what we've been using for for the last 5 years with the HVX, detail -2, was too edge-enhanced for his liking. I tried it out that night and indeed found that I thought it was a bit too much as well, and I went with -4. I don't know what he ended up using. I know he likes it flat and used a master ped of zero, I like bringing the blacks down to pure black and I found that happens at -2. I suggested cine-D gamma -- which, as we all know, sucks when blown out. There is ZERO rolloff protection in cine-D. So if there's overexposed/blown highlights, cine-D is not the gamma you want to be using. On a film set, with controlled lighting, cine-D is the pimp. Outdoors wandering around, not so much. Maybe I should have suggested to him to use b.press with a low knee, that might have really tamed the highlight rolloff, and a whole lot of people wouldn't be complaining like they are now. I don't know. We'll have to try it. We shot for one day, and had no monitor to review, and so we got what we got, and he edited what he edited.

All I know is that it will only get better from here, as we get experience with it and learn it and figure out how to extract the best from it.

Frankly, I don't know if Philip will even come back here after the reception he got on this last film. But if he does come back, he'd be the first to tell you that he thinks the camera's great, he thinks it's going to be a huge success, and he doesn't know it well enough to get the best results from it yet. None of us do. I should know the most about it, but it hasn't been in shooting form yet, and things have been changing, so I wasn't that far ahead of everyone else because my years of experience with the other cameras don't necessarily directly translate to this one.

Anyway -- I'm still in Japan, grabbing a little net time while waiting for the 14-hour plane flight back. Don't really have time to go through everyone's posts and see what the latest complaints, whines, gripes, or twists and turns are, or that have taken place -- I mean, last I saw, Homunculus was ragging hard on the AF100, and in this very post I'm responding to, he's acknowledging that the AF100 looks like a "Red One" as compared to the 5D Mark II, so that looks like a pretty good roller-coaster twist right there, so maybe things aren't that bad on the boards now, I don't know... but look, here's the bottom line: nobody should be buying anything based on what I, or Philip, or anyone else says. Evaluate the thing on your own terms and on your own merits. Do your own tests. And if you think it sucks, but I say "I'm buying it", I don't want anybody to say "well, I guess I'll hold my nose and buy one, because Barry knows what he's doing and he's getting one." What I get, has no bearing on what you get. Nobody is (or should be) exerting any pressure on anyone to buy anything -- well, except maybe Jan, because she sells camcorders, but - whatever. Buy what you like, and don't buy what you don't like. But for the love of pete, let's stop the insanity and the bitchfest. If the tone of the board is such that it's driving a moderator away, then there's a problem (and the problem isn't with the AF100, it's with the behavior of the membership, thankyouverymuch).

Anyway - final words... I cannot possibly wait to get one of these. And that's based on critical review, going through my own rollercoaster of highs and lows, and learning what it can do, and learning what we did wrong, and planning on things to try to make it sing. Whether I even bother to post those results is, frankly, in doubt. I'm not here to sell anything, it doesn't really matter to me whether you all decide to go with this or go with that or go with the other thing, to each his own. I just have to satisfy myself, the end viewers, and the investment of six or seven figures of money on Jack's debut feature film. And regardless of how everyone else is feeling, I'm feeling okay with it right now. And I know it can only get better.
 
I just rewatched Phil's Japan stuff for the third time today. And it really holds up.

This is an indie tool for people that pay the rent with day jobs and can throw together a few days a month for a passion project. It's cheap enough to own and learn and grow with, and when the time comes you can really make it sing. It's also great for the budget minded professional that wants a bulletproof video camera that won't break the bank. The images it produces are more than enough to create amazing images -- don't like the the colors change it in camera or shoot neutral and push in post.

If you're nervous about the codec or anything else, rent a higher priced solution. Will it be better? Perhaps yes, perhaps no. It'll just be a different tool that you won't be as acquainted with as if you own it.
 
hey barry I'm boozing up a bit and can't read your post right this moment I will read it later but just want to say, it's probably our faults for expecting Red One at 5k price point. part of the disappoint stems from the secret hope that today's technology at 5k$ can do what 3 years ago technology did at 17,500$ (R1). And although it's a bit closer it's not quite there yet. Either way I'm still interested because there's brief flashes of brilliance in all the videos. And honestly I have a decent amount of $ invested in gh1 lenses (for me anyways) and would love to be able to just use them and not have to buy a whole new set for canon dslr. So I'm still on the gravy train, or at least half way!
Just would like to see direct comparisons af100 and ex1 and hvx200 somehow
 
barry I just read your post allow me to make one small qualification of what you said. yes bloom will say the camera is great. he just said so in his comments section on his site (he encouraged someone to pre-order it when asked if that person should do so?) but ont he other hand Bloom DOES unequivocally still believe that the 5dmkii produces a better image than the AF100, period. He says so multiple times in the past in his comments, and hej ust said it today in the comment section. He said the 5dmkii still produces the (TO HIM, read: subjective) most pleasing and best image out of any camera he's used.
There's still something to the canon skin tones that they're getting right to me...the panasonic (gh1, af100) facial tonality/skin tones....something is off, it seems too mushy and orange I can't quite describe it. But we'll see if that holds up with final version etc
 
Homunculus said:
but ont he other hand Bloom DOES unequivocally still believe that the 5dmkii produces a better image than the AF100, period.
Click to expand...
Well, wait -- aren't we supposed to exterminate any opposing viewpoint? Isn't that the point of a forum, is to have only one viewpoint? How dare he disagree with me... or, I with him, I guess. [/sarcasm, for those who can't tell]

I don't find the 5D's image all that pleasing, in many instances. Sometimes it's great, but frequently I find it artificial and aliased and tedious, and I simply don't like the hyper-shallow DOF, to me it's too much. If Philip likes it better, well, by gum, that's gonna have to be okay with me. And here's the thing -- what he thinks, and what I think, don't matter. It's what you, the buyer, think that matters.

He said the 5dmkii still produces the (TO HIM, read: subjective) most pleasing and best image out of any camera he's used.
Click to expand...
Sure, fine... and he also has extensive experience with it. It would be interesting to see if his opinion stayed the same after he's had extensive use of the AF100. I'm not saying it would necessarily change, only that at least it would be a more even basis for comparison.

Anyway, doesn't really matter -- the image from the 5D would have to be one screamingly holy truckload more awesome, by an order of magnitude, for me to consider using a stills camera instead of a pro video camera, for the purposes of producing moving images. I've already said that even if the AF100's image wasn't as good, as long as it solves the imaging problems (aliasing/moire, soft res, stuff like that) then I'd still reach for something like the AF100 every single time, because it is (my subjective opinion) vastly superior to work with, and the results are (in my opinion) beautiful.

Actually, I find it interesting that you said this, and then comparing it with another of your posts where you said you rewatched the AF100 clip and watched some 5D stuff, and in comparison to the 5D you thought the AF100 looked like the Red One. See, that's the kind of thing I'm trying to get at -- who cares whether Philip likes the 5D's image better than the AF100's, or I like the AF100 more than the 5D? Only thing that matters is what YOU like.

There's still something to the canon skin tones that they're getting right to me...the panasonic (gh1, af100) facial tonality/skin tones....something is off, it seems too mushy and orange I can't quite describe it. But we'll see if that holds up with final version etc
Click to expand...
There's all sorts of settings, there's the color temp and chroma phase and color matrix settings. At one point I posted a photo that showed the 24 different looks that you can get out of a DVX100, from just the in-camera settings. The results are radically different. The ability to paint the image in-camera is extensive. Give me three models with different skintones in a studio for a day with a professional production monitor, and let's see if we can't dial in some pleasing skintones. Or, barring that, you know what I'd really like? I'd really like someone who's a 5D master, who loves loves loves the skintones, to shoot a standardized color chart like a Chroma Du Monde, and send me the raw image, so I could try my hand at matching it. Who knows, I may very well be able to come up with a scene file called "5DMKII" that exactly matches the look that you like about the Canon.
 
Last edited:
I would agree with the OP. I'm not a huge fan of the way the AF100 has dealt with the highlights in the footage I've seen so far. I'm sure, however, that once the image has been dissected and we have some idea of ideal settings for shooting for grading, we will see the best out of this camera.
 
digitalfilmmaker said:
This is an indie tool for people that pay the rent with day jobs and can throw together a few days a month for a passion project. It's cheap enough to own and learn and grow with, and when the time comes you can really make it sing.
Click to expand...

Yes, exactly! You just summed up why I'm so excited about this camera.

You see, I feel like the AF100 was designed specifically for people like me. I'm just getting into the industry, and while I work fulltime as a video editor, not a shooter, I love to shoot. Occasionally I get paid to shoot small pieces (some live events, short doc-style promotional pieces for nonprofits, that sort of thing), and I often work with a couple of friends on these gigs. I also have a number of personal projects that I've done and there's so much more I want to do in 2011: comedic shorts done with a crew of three and a couple of actors, one-man-band pro bono work for tiny local nonprofits, video art experiments...I have so much I want to do and all I need is a good camera. Not a perfect camera. Just a good one that I can afford.

So if you look at the market from my point of view, it's very different. The Red One and the Sony F3K are simply irrelevant. I've been shooting with an EX1, which I really like but don't own, and I want something with image quality that's in the same ballpark or better, but with shallower depth of field and interchangeable lenses.

The 5D and 7D impress me quite a bit (yes, I'm aware of the rolling shutter and line skipping artifacts, but my personal experience shooting with the 7D was great). However, I want the long recording times, built-in XLR inputs and audio monitoring, focus and exposure tools (zebras, peaking, etc.), and really good overcranking that the AF100 offers. So whatever its flaws (and all cameras have flaws), I don't see another option out there that suits my needs better.

If I still feel this way when I try the camera out in January at the local rental house, I'll buy it from them. If not, I'll go with a DSLR or something else. It's that simple.
 
Barry_Green said:
Or, barring that, you know what I'd really like? I'd really like someone who's a 5D master, who loves loves loves the skintones, to shoot a standardized color chart like a Chroma Du Monde, and send me the raw image, so I could try my hand at matching it. Who knows, I may very well be able to come up with a scene file called "5DMKII" that exactly matches the look that you like about the Canon.
Click to expand...

I hope that after the camera is released, you or Tim Dashwood cook up that scene file and place it as a sticky on this forum.
 
A local post production house here graded a film that used different cameras. From d21, 200, 300 to a d90. You couldnt tell the difference on the big screen in terms of COLOR

With the power of post grading i dont see the problem of colors anymore. The only thing to worry are exposure of luma and chroma
 
Maybe someone can enlighten me, but wasnt the guy who hacked the GH1 (Vitaliy Kiselev) dubious on Panasonic claims that the AF100 would be miles ahead of the GH1/GH2 in terms of video quality for the $4K higher price. I wonder what he thinks of all the latest news.

(unless he's already posted somewhere).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top