One Year With The AF100

H

Hywel

Well-known member
It is a year since I came home very excited from a presentation on the AF100, having put down a deposit. In those 12 months we've shot about 50 shorts and 2 longer features with the camera, some of which have won awards at a film festival. Since I've just ordered a Scarlet to replace the AF100 as my front-line camera, it seems like a good time to sum up how I found it.

Incidentally, I am keeping my AF100 and all my 4/3 lenses, as a B and backup camera, along with one of my HVX200's and my 7D.

THE GOOD
The AF100 delivered what it promised: a large sensor, interchangeable lens digital cine camera with the features of a pro video camera. I shudder looking back at the brief interregnum when we shot on Canon dSLRs for a year, in between the HVX200 and AF100.
Let us not forget how heavenly it was to get:
XLR
Audio bars
Zebra
Waveform
Vectorscope
VFR at 1080p
built in ND
Focus in red
Clean HDMI/SDI out
A killer quality f/0.95 prime lens
No Moire
Reduced rolling shutter
Records to cheap cards
Clean ISO 1200, usable 1600


THE BAD
There's no getting around it, and I know other shooters on the board will disagree with me.
I simply do not love the images out of the AF100 :(
Despite all the help and assistance from Barry, Shooter, Editman and others on the board, I've never managed to come up with a scene file I really like.

As someone shooting with small crews (typically just two of us), fiddling about with scene files on set is impractical. Ideally I need one, or at most a few, go-to scene files which I can reliably use every time. The scene file I have ended up with gives a result out of the camera which is pretty flat, but at least allows me to do a bit of a grade to get to where I want it. I tried shooting for the look, and got horrible clipping if anything in scene was blowing out. So I've ended up dialling everything back, especially the chroma. That's pretty much solved the clipping issues but means I always need to add a lot of saturation in post.

I come from a stills background, and I am used to putting off a lot of decisions about the look to the RAW processing step. With the AF100, I really need to decide on set, and I just don't like having to do so. I also find it too much to monitor to check shot-by-shot if I should be tweaking a few things. I therefore play it safe, light a bit flatter than I'd ideally like to, under exposure just a touch for safety, stick to my flat scene file, and generally not have a particularly good time trying to get the look I want from the camera. I have a visceral feel for how an image will look based on a histogram, and "number of pixels clipping"/"number of pixels in the noise" is the information I REALLY need to get the lighting and exposure right. You get that right off the camera with my Hasselblad, and not coincidentally also with a RED.

I've also had banding issues, which I know are down to 8 bit and limited noise to "fuzz" gradients, especially with the on-board codec which has to do a lot of data reduction and ends up smearing the noise out as a result.

I've also found the limitations of the on-board codec for shots with a lot of motion. It is remarkable how good a job AVCHD does, but it *IS* throwing away 99%+ of the data, and at some point you have to pay for that.

It's manageable. The final result after the grade is middling to good, and a few shots have been great (award winning, I keep reminding myself). But... I am not blown away. And *I* know how close the image gets to disintegrating in the grade, and I'm fed up of walking the tightrope between a flat profile and shooting for the look, between data reduction and noise, between banding and clipping and flat colours and horrid highlights.

Oh, and there are a few usability niggles:
Dual slots and cheap cards, dual record would have been a reassurance.

ISO on the back wheel, and auto ISO, would be very useful in some circumstances.

The lack of 100% zoom in to confirm focus is a critical failing and is the biggest cause of missed shots for me. Focus in red is not an adequate solution, and focussing on a full-size monitor (we use a cheap 21" TV which runs off 12 V) isn't always practical.



FIXING THINGS

In my opinion the root causes of my pain with the AF100 are:
1) 8 bit
2) Baked in curves, gamma and WB settings
3) 420 colour (not in itself a big deal but contributes to banding and smearing when graded aggressively)
4) Too much compression in the codec

I decided to address these somehow in 2012. I was going to try an external recorder (the Samurai seems like the best fit) as the 422 colour and much bigger bit rates of ProRes would allow a more faithful recording of the camera's noise, which paradoxically should give a much more pleasing rendition than the slightly smeared-and-banded look you get out of AVCHD when it gets stressed.

It may be that that would have solved the most egregious of my niggles, but I was wary of spending thousands of pounds on an external recorder plus media which would definitely not address the fundamental limitations of 8-bit processing path and baked in settings.

That's why I hired a RED One to shoot for a day, and fell in love with the fat data rate and the RAW-like post production flow, and why I put the money in the Samurai fund into a Scarlet instead.


CONCLUSION
The AF100 is a good camera at a great price point. I've had a good time shooting with it for a year (MUCH better than we had with the Canon dSLRs!) but in the end it is time for me to step up a price category.


Cheers, Hywel.
 
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P.S. I should add that I'm not expecting miracles from a new camera. I've also upgraded my standard lighting rig from cheap, daylight balanced LED panels to super six-colour LED Gekko Kelvin Tile panels, which is helping a lot with the all important skin tones already, and of course I know we need to keep improving our production design, sound, lighting skills AND SCRIPTS!

:)

Hywel
 
Great feedback on the camera Hywel! I also agree with you on most of the points. I have been able to dial in the look I wanted with the Af100 but the lack of resolution for me leaves me wanting more. Next year I will probably upgrade to Sony/Canon option unless.... Good luck with Scarlet. If I wasn't in the event field but in documentaries or film-making I'd jump on a scarlet myself. Cheers
 
Interesting thoughts on the technical issues of the AF100. As a side note NO camera is going to deliver everything without proper lighting. If you don't have the proper lighting any image, on any camera will look terrible.
 
Yes, of course no camera can deliver if the lighting is not up to scratch.

That's why the rolling review and update of lighting kit, as well as investment in training courses, books, etc. and the occasional shoot just to experiment with improving skills.

That's also why (as I said) I've already upgraded to lighting which more suits what I want to achieve. I have tried fluorescents, which I really didn't get on with despite some good characteristics, and still have a selection of Tungsten lighting, together with a heap of light modifier kit.

I've still not found anything which compares to the virtuoso light control I am used to from my Hensel flash kit. Especially the two Porty 1200 Lithium systems I have which are portable enough to carry anywhere, run on battery for 200 shots at full power and are bright enough and short enough duration to overpower direct sunlight when allied with the leaf shutter in the Hasselblad.

There just is no continuous lighting source that delivers all that from a compact, power efficient package, and my budget does not and will never allow for grip trucks and monster HMIs. I'm therefore doing the best I can with gear that is within my reach.

Given that generators, big HMIs and huge crews manning gargantuan silks and butterflies is never going to be achievable for me, paradoxically it INCREASES the benefit of having a camera which is slightly more forgiving in terms of dynamic range and ability to recover MINOR issues unnoticed on set in post. For example, half way through a dolly shot you get a specular highlight you didn't notice on a reflection on a polished table it can suddenly clip to a really ugly colour, or part way through a shot balancing natural window light with fill from the LEDs inside that the cloud thins momentarily and gives you an extra half stop of exposure you weren't expecting and highlights get clipped for 0.2 seconds in an otherwise awesome 30 second take.

The AF100 will certainly give you zebras to warn if things have gone bad, but not necessarily let you know HOW bad. Will the highlight roll off to an acceptable colour? Do we have to reshoot? Did I actually NOTICE, or was I concentrating on pulling focus while Joss was doing the dolly move, and actually neither of us spotted the second or two where the model's skin tones briefly clipped in the red channel only (not luma) in the middle? That'll make for a really ugly effect, and the reporting on the AF100 is not, in fact, monitoring the really crucial information which is "is any individual channel clipping off the sensor"?

I know, I know. The AF100 is meant for controlled lighting situations, etc.. it is just that when it goes bad, it goes bad in a nasty way and if you've got anything slightly wrong (like the white balance being slightly off when shooting a reverse and forgetting to rebalance) I've found it can take up most of your "wriggle room" in post to bring it back to something acceptable. Which leaves very little room to push the edge of the envelope to make it spectacular.

Cheers, Hywel.
 
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I've also spent a year with this camera and for starters it was a love and hate relationship. I hated the image when pixel peeping but loved to shoot with it. I hated highlights until I understood how to deal with it. I hated noise until I found out how to set a scene file to avoid it. I hated that it had no focus zoom until I got the Zacuto EVF. I started to love it when I got lenses that matched the camera.

Looking back I've got some great results this year and comparing it to other cameras with similar features I think it delivers in spades.
 
I have had a great year with my AF102 and as that anniversary comes up...I have decided that my AF102 and support kit is complete!

The jig saw puzzle is finished.

It has been productive and profitable and has led to more and ongoing work.


ie. The AF102 is what it is and I need nothing else more for it. (except continuing work of course)

Instead of camera equipment...2012 will be further development of my edit suites.

In particular - The CC Suite will be a new focus for investment and development.

Da Vinci Resolve and Adobe Speedgrade will be central to this and they are how the AF102 jig saw puzzle will be utilised (via the Samurai and BM Hyperdeck pieces.)
 
Panasonic has been good to me. I've owned, DVX100, HVX200, and the AF100. All for business that's been profitable. As for getting the most of out the cameras, I must admit that the Af100 has required the most experimentation. But, I feel very confident on using it in any situation. It's not a camera that you give a whirl over a weekend. That said, I'm going to be using mine for some time.
 
bgundu said:
I must admit that the Af100 has required the most experimentation. But, I feel very confident on using it in any situation. It's not a camera that you give a whirl over a weekend.
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I second that. That's why people who only uses this camera for brief period seldom get the good stuff out of it and thus hate it.
 
The camera sertenly did my year. would not have had any jobs without it. i love it and will not replace it for anything but af200 :)
 
I'm really happy about the year with the AF100. I kind of liken it to a motorcycle. It's agile but mistakes can get messy. I like that agility and it's worth the risk. I really think it's making me a better shooter. I can do what I want to do shooting cinema style with a pro tool. I like that it requires that I light and expose well. I like that I can shoot without all the light loss and fidgeting we had with 35mm adapters. When I do a good job the images are really great. Maybe someday I'll have a Scarlet too but that's a ways off. It's 3 or 4 times the cost just to get up and running and the post workflow would require even more upgrades there for me. It's not really comparable. The AF100 is doing the job for me and giving me a chance to build out my kit as well.

All the best to the OP. Happy New Year, guys.
 
For the price the AG-AF does what it does very well. With the Samurai it does it even better.

If Panasonic had a camera out that would do what other cameras can do which are double, three or four times the price (if that's enough) Panasonic would be a a miracle company and all other companies would be out of business.

A great and creative 2012 to all.
 
editman said:
I've also spent a year with this camera and for starters it was a love and hate relationship. I hated the image when pixel peeping but loved to shoot with it. I hated highlights until I understood how to deal with it. I hated noise until I found out how to set a scene file to avoid it. I hated that it had no focus zoom until I got the Zacuto EVF. I started to love it when I got lenses that matched the camera.

Looking back I've got some great results this year and comparing it to other cameras with similar features I think it delivers in spades.
Click to expand...

+1. Pretty much the same for me.

With all the post lately reviewing the AF-100 you would think the camera was just released. Everybody has an opinion, that’s part of what internet forums are for. We all know there’s no perfect camera (Well maybe the Alexa is :) ) and the best camera is the one you have now. For me that camera is the AF-100.

I’m never disappointed with what I come back with from my shoots. On my first shoot with the camera I overexposed the clouds in a shot with on-camera talent. Had the nasty yellow clipping. Learned my lesson and never had another issue. Know the camera and your golden.

I’m not a narrative shooter, I do commercial production and news promotion. This camera works perfect for this. I’m usually a one man band doing my own lighting, directing and camera. If i’m lucky I have a grip to help lug gear and setup stuff. Pretty much business as usually with my setups and lighting. Actually I don’t have to worry as much about my backgrounds as I do when shooting with 1/3 and 2/3 chip cameras. The AF-100 has made my work better. In the end thats all I care about. I’m disappointed when I cant use it on certain projects.

My only negative is with the form factor of all these types of cameras for handheld use. If Panasonic and Sony had a more modular approach I think this would solve a lot of the ergonomic issues.

I still cant believe I only paid 5K for the AF-100. Its just an amazing price for what it gives me. I cant wait to see what Panasonic has in store for the next version of this camera. Probably not this year and probably not for 5K. Probably we will never see a camera at this price point/value again. I hope i’m wrong.

Happy New year AF-100! You’ve been the best purchase I made in 2011, and I know you will be working hard for me in 2012.
 
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I too have a love/hate relationship with my AF100 but it's made over $40k for me this year, not bad for a $5k investment. So yes, I love it because its done very well for me business wise but I also have a Scarlet on order because I can't get a consistent image out of it that I like...
 
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