Hi Ben,
I don't have a who's who quote list to help reassure you in my abilities, nor any night and day examples from the AF100 but I can say humbly that i have been lead to believe that none of those achievements you have above would feature 24mbs AVCHD footage? i was lead to believe that it was a minimum of 422 at least at 50mbs for BBC HD acquisition? you're the man to put me right on this so please do.
For me, the difference in the various gradient and macro blocking examples was enough to convince me there was a difference in the image, even on the AF100, I just wasn't going to pay £1500 or more for that visual increase with a Samurai or Nano Flash. When the shuttle gained prores I thought £400 for the actual recorder, cables and media was worth investing in, for the workflow experience as much as the small increase in picture quality on the AF100, my curosity was affordable (to me anyway).
I was really after the robustness of the codec, the 8bit 422 is no RAW, anyone thinking that is fooling themselves, the noise pattern is better (hence the better gradients) and a few of the scene file options can be used safely as a denoise pass in post will be a little more accurate as there is next to no compression artifacts but largely on a small monitor it looks the same, Projected to a large cinema screen on the other hand is a different thing and the image blow ups you see on the web give you a good example of what that may look like on a larger screen. Yes you may not be shooting for the cinema screens but others are.
Where these devices really make sense to me at least (samurai included) is the freedom to use them with other cameras. All of a sudden, no matter what camera you use you are recording at the same data rate, on the same media, to the same codec, free of compression artefacts, for me thats almost the benefits of film stock. How ever little the improvement on the AF100 it is still an improvement. If you are only going to shoot on one camera, that might not be enough, if like me you aspire to and often use other cameras you may enjoy the extra features these simple recorders unlock such as, higher colour resolution, higher bit depth (F3), proxy recordings (RED) and Broadcast HD (any camera shooting under 50mbs)
There are a few other workflow benefits, backup/dual record arguments that could be made but ill stick to the visual comments as that seems to be the direction of your posts.
Ben, can you share you're test? There's more than enough for the why it does on the web, why it is not worth it would be just as interesting for me and others to see.
I don't have a who's who quote list to help reassure you in my abilities, nor any night and day examples from the AF100 but I can say humbly that i have been lead to believe that none of those achievements you have above would feature 24mbs AVCHD footage? i was lead to believe that it was a minimum of 422 at least at 50mbs for BBC HD acquisition? you're the man to put me right on this so please do.
For me, the difference in the various gradient and macro blocking examples was enough to convince me there was a difference in the image, even on the AF100, I just wasn't going to pay £1500 or more for that visual increase with a Samurai or Nano Flash. When the shuttle gained prores I thought £400 for the actual recorder, cables and media was worth investing in, for the workflow experience as much as the small increase in picture quality on the AF100, my curosity was affordable (to me anyway).
I was really after the robustness of the codec, the 8bit 422 is no RAW, anyone thinking that is fooling themselves, the noise pattern is better (hence the better gradients) and a few of the scene file options can be used safely as a denoise pass in post will be a little more accurate as there is next to no compression artifacts but largely on a small monitor it looks the same, Projected to a large cinema screen on the other hand is a different thing and the image blow ups you see on the web give you a good example of what that may look like on a larger screen. Yes you may not be shooting for the cinema screens but others are.
Where these devices really make sense to me at least (samurai included) is the freedom to use them with other cameras. All of a sudden, no matter what camera you use you are recording at the same data rate, on the same media, to the same codec, free of compression artefacts, for me thats almost the benefits of film stock. How ever little the improvement on the AF100 it is still an improvement. If you are only going to shoot on one camera, that might not be enough, if like me you aspire to and often use other cameras you may enjoy the extra features these simple recorders unlock such as, higher colour resolution, higher bit depth (F3), proxy recordings (RED) and Broadcast HD (any camera shooting under 50mbs)
There are a few other workflow benefits, backup/dual record arguments that could be made but ill stick to the visual comments as that seems to be the direction of your posts.
Ben, can you share you're test? There's more than enough for the why it does on the web, why it is not worth it would be just as interesting for me and others to see.
