Hi All,
Just got back from a presentation at Creative Video here in the UK. They were showing what is claimed to be a production spec AF101 which they had had for a couple of days and had been playing with. I didn't get to shoot any footage myself, but they showed us a lot of stuff they'd shot out and about, all in available light I think but ranging from frosty sunsets to people at a fairground.
On a large HD TV, the footage looked very good. The footage shot with Zeiss compact primes looked very gorgeous, the footage shot with the 14-140mm Panasonic zoom was OK but definitely neither as crisp nor as detailed. So as others have said, my first observation is that you're really going to see the benefit of better glass on the front.
They'd not had the camera long enough to do any proper profiling- as others have done, they pretty much set to Cine-V and went off and shot some stuff, so what I saw was a starting point, not the end point of how one could get the footage to look when properly familiar with the camera.
I did notice a few issues with some shots- one mid-speed pan was quite stroboscopic, not sure if that was a shutter speed issue, a rolling shutter issue or a struggling codec issue. There was some highlight clipping but it was only in extreme situations like a person on a fairground ride - the electric bulbs right next to them had clipped but the skin tones were very nice, so sign of any bad behaviour there. The footage was ungraded, and I don't think they did the recommended Cine-V standard of underexposing by half a stop, so that would improve this but as I said it was really only visible when there was a proper luminous light source on camera. And of course there was no hint of aliasing or Moire. The footage was detailed and nicely "organic" without looking digitally over-sharpened, especially the footage from the CP2 which was lush and rich with great skin tones and overall gorgeousness factor.
I was very impressed at how well the footage looked given that it was AVCHD. I've never had any of my work projected on cine screens so a big HD TV is likely a better test for me, and I was really impressed with the quality. Although the footage we saw wasn't graded the Creative Video guys said they reckoned you probably had about a stop's grace to pull the footage up before the compression really started to show. Given the scopes and zebras on the camera I'm much more confident of getting all my footage correctly exposed than I have been in fast shooting situations with dSLRs.
The form factor made a lot more sense when you see it in the flesh too, with those removable handles and grips making it much easier to build a modular system around it (for example they had it attached to a Vmount battery sitting under the camera for lots of shooting time, which seemed to work very well). If you need to add stuff like a Nanoflash there will be plenty of places to attach it.
Bad stuff? Only one really- the EVF is rubbish. The fold-out screen is pretty good, though.
The bottom line- I was sufficiently impressed to fork out my money, and I await the arrival of my AF101. After the curse of the Canons I think I'm really going to enjoy getting gorgeous footage from a properly designed camera built for video.
Cheers, Hywel.
Just got back from a presentation at Creative Video here in the UK. They were showing what is claimed to be a production spec AF101 which they had had for a couple of days and had been playing with. I didn't get to shoot any footage myself, but they showed us a lot of stuff they'd shot out and about, all in available light I think but ranging from frosty sunsets to people at a fairground.
On a large HD TV, the footage looked very good. The footage shot with Zeiss compact primes looked very gorgeous, the footage shot with the 14-140mm Panasonic zoom was OK but definitely neither as crisp nor as detailed. So as others have said, my first observation is that you're really going to see the benefit of better glass on the front.
They'd not had the camera long enough to do any proper profiling- as others have done, they pretty much set to Cine-V and went off and shot some stuff, so what I saw was a starting point, not the end point of how one could get the footage to look when properly familiar with the camera.
I did notice a few issues with some shots- one mid-speed pan was quite stroboscopic, not sure if that was a shutter speed issue, a rolling shutter issue or a struggling codec issue. There was some highlight clipping but it was only in extreme situations like a person on a fairground ride - the electric bulbs right next to them had clipped but the skin tones were very nice, so sign of any bad behaviour there. The footage was ungraded, and I don't think they did the recommended Cine-V standard of underexposing by half a stop, so that would improve this but as I said it was really only visible when there was a proper luminous light source on camera. And of course there was no hint of aliasing or Moire. The footage was detailed and nicely "organic" without looking digitally over-sharpened, especially the footage from the CP2 which was lush and rich with great skin tones and overall gorgeousness factor.
I was very impressed at how well the footage looked given that it was AVCHD. I've never had any of my work projected on cine screens so a big HD TV is likely a better test for me, and I was really impressed with the quality. Although the footage we saw wasn't graded the Creative Video guys said they reckoned you probably had about a stop's grace to pull the footage up before the compression really started to show. Given the scopes and zebras on the camera I'm much more confident of getting all my footage correctly exposed than I have been in fast shooting situations with dSLRs.
The form factor made a lot more sense when you see it in the flesh too, with those removable handles and grips making it much easier to build a modular system around it (for example they had it attached to a Vmount battery sitting under the camera for lots of shooting time, which seemed to work very well). If you need to add stuff like a Nanoflash there will be plenty of places to attach it.
Bad stuff? Only one really- the EVF is rubbish. The fold-out screen is pretty good, though.
The bottom line- I was sufficiently impressed to fork out my money, and I await the arrival of my AF101. After the curse of the Canons I think I'm really going to enjoy getting gorgeous footage from a properly designed camera built for video.
Cheers, Hywel.