Very depressed about AF100 test...

Do you own a Af-100 or a D7000? or are you interested in owning either one? I ask because I’m not clear what you are trying to say/ask other than get people defensive about the AF-100 in a AF-100 forum. You know that would happen right?

I’m not a fan of these camera test. I would get your hands on a D7000 and try it out for yourself. If it suits your needs and you feel it looks better then your good to go.
 
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Erik Naso said:
Do you own a Af-100 or a D7000? or are you interested in owning either one? I ask because I’m not clear what you are trying to say/ask.
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Exactly.

And it TOTALLY depends on what scene settings you use with the AF100, and your white balance. Using a warm white balance card makes a HUGE difference. You can make it look any way you want. And then you can color correct it in post. If it's a little too green, fix it!

So many options, how can you go by this one simple test. There's nothing "depressing" about it. Learn the tool.

Like the others, I preferred the original AF100 image. Looked more natural to me, if a little contrasty. But here it is, after spending less than 5 minutes doing a little brightness, contrast and color correction. NOW which one do you like better?


AF100vsNikonD7000.jpg
 
I have an AF100 i love my af100 and I'm a loyal Panasonic camera buyer. I was just disheartened when we looked at the stills without the names and both of us picked the af100 as being the least favorable image. I felt like I was cheating on my woman. And i'll be the first one to say its not about the camera, but its still fun to geek out about which is the best.
 
Then you don't understand about customization. No camera is perfect out of the box. It takes a long time to tweak the settings to your preferred look. It's a craft. You can't look at one set of stills and make a snap judgement that way. Especially if it's just a color tone difference. That's nothing. Did you see what I did with that image? It was easy. And there is no "best" camera. What there ARE are really good cinematographers and really good editors. I don't claim to be one of them , but I've worked with images long enough to know it's not about which camera you bought.

Get over the depression and just get out there and learn the camera. You did NOT make the wrong decision. You're overthinking it and having buyers remorse. We've all had that.
Don't worry, just go out and have fun and learn the camera inside out. It's a WAY better movie camera than any of the DSLRs (except some might argue, the hacked GH2).
 
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I'm sorry - but look at the skin on some scopes and the D7000 is still more accurate.

The AF100 is obviously skewing towards green in the highlights.

The skin tone is making a curve shape on the vectorscope. Whereas the D7000 skin tones are a straight line - much better.

If you correct the AF100 so that it looks exactly like the D7000, it'll be right.

Well, the D7000 image is a little underexposed, actually. And needs a little bit of green. But at least the colors are internally consistent.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
The hair looks smoother and more natural to me in the AF100 shots.

On the other hand, the lighting on the faces looks better on the D7000 shots.

I've basically learned to ignore semi-subtle differences in color between cameras because they are meaningless anyway once you get through grading.


Personally, I'd lean slightly toward the AF100 here, but on a more technical level (without doing the technical analysis), I'd call it even-up.
 
bruceallen said:
I'm sorry - but look at the skin on some scopes and the D7000 is still more accurate.

The AF100 is obviously skewing towards green in the highlights.

The skin tone is making a curve shape on the vectorscope. Whereas the D7000 skin tones are a straight line - much better.

If you correct the AF100 so that it looks exactly like the D7000, it'll be right.

Well, the D7000 image is a little underexposed, actually. And needs a little bit of green. But at least the colors are internally consistent.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
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Ha, I was editing at a Fortune 100 company the other day.
In every conference room they had either a Samsung 50" LCD or some kind of projector.
The clients were getting pissed off because he had to move to different rooms everyday
and each monitor looked different. I had to spend the first 30 mins each day trying to
match their consumer monitors to my iMac. Even if I had a decent post-production
facility I would have still had to come to the mountain.

Point is - these "tests" should all be taken with a grain of salt. Until
you can deliver a product that a client is happy with then it
is all an exercise in futility.

And on this project - I have to use crappy animations that
were dubbed from VHS to DVD and now inserting into an HD show....
Of course they want me to "make them look better".....
All I need is a $30,000 animation budget and we are there....Ha
 
Changing the curves is what the different scene files, settings, and so on are for. "Correcting" is part of the deal. If you're looking for a "perfect" camera, you're not going to find it. Try shooting an hour long event with the D7000. The AF100 has so many more pro features like neutral density filters, wave form monitor, focus assist, and so on. Arguing which camera is "better" is pointless. Buy the one that suits the style of shooting you do and customize it to your needs.

There is technical analysis and then there are my eyes. I go by what my eyes tell me. I'm not going to watch a movie with a vectorscope. In this particualar test, I prefer the AF100 image, even before color correction.
 
Turbodog said:
Changing the curves is what the different scene files, settings, and so on are for. "Correcting" is part of the deal. If you're looking for a "perfect" camera, you're not going to find it. Try shooting an hour long event with the D7000. The AF100 has so many more pro features like neutral density filters, wave form monitor, focus assist, and so on. Arguing which camera is "better" is pointless. Buy the one that suits the style of shooting you do and customize it to your needs.

There is technical analysis and then there are my eyes. I go by what my eyes tell me. I'm not going to watch a movie with a vectorscope. In this particualar test, I prefer the AF100 image, even before color correction.
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OK - but I took one look at it and thought "wow, those skintones look sickly green in the highlights on the AF100".

Agree you should never watch a film with a vectorscope :) I only popped up the vectorscope this morning. And if confirmed what I saw.

HVXguy said:
Ha, I was editing at a Fortune 100 company the other day.
In every conference room they had either a Samsung 50" LCD or some kind of projector.
The clients were getting pissed off because he had to move to different rooms everyday
and each monitor looked different. I had to spend the first 30 mins each day trying to
match their consumer monitors to my iMac. Even if I had a decent post-production
facility I would have still had to come to the mountain.
Click to expand...

Dude - the studios aren't any better!

I presented a movie main title sequence rough animation to the Head of Production at a major studio - after he had just gotten off of the phone with the head of film of all China. It was a high level meeting and I was scared stiff - famous editor was there too... we went to the his fancy office...

...and played my DVD on one of those CRT TVs with a built-in DVD player.

Well, at least it blurred out all of the stuff I hadn't finished animating! This was in the late 2000s, by the way - you know, the age of HD flatscreens...

HVXguy said:
Point is - these "tests" should all be taken with a grain of salt. Until
you can deliver a product that a client is happy with then it
is all an exercise in futility.
Click to expand...

Well, what if you are delivering stuff that makes folks happy already? Then shouldn't you want your skintones to be nice?

HVXguy said:
And on this project - I have to use crappy animations that
were dubbed from VHS to DVD and now inserting into an HD show....
Of course they want me to "make them look better".....
All I need is a $30,000 animation budget and we are there....Ha
Click to expand...

Tell 'em $300,000! They respect you more then :)

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
Let's be honest here...until you start spending real money for your digital acquisition devices (i.e. over $10k or more), you can pretty much go with whatever camera you like and be able to deliver a pleasing image if you know how to properly use it and avoid any particular pitfalls that each camera has to deal with.

Go with what you want and be confident.
 
bruceallen said:
OK - but I took one look at it and thought "wow, those skintones look sickly green in the highlights on the AF100".
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Really, I took one look at it and thought, "wow those skintones look really pasty on the D7000". Could be a difference in our monitor callibration. It could be the lighting, a whole host of things. Maybe they are using florescent lights. I have a warm card called "minus green" that eliminates the greenish cast. Both of those images need improvement. The point is, you can't condemn a camera based on one test image.
 
Once again, a simple case of someone using a "stock" setting instead of customizing for the shot. You could make the AF100 look much more like the Nikon shot (if that's what you like) just by using the cine-D gamma.

Learn how to use the camera and you can make it sing.
 
jmarkham said:
Umm ... what are you looking at dude? In almost every measure of image quality, I'd choose the AF100.
Dynamic range .. color uniformity .. i might give a slight edge to the Nikon for resolution.. but that's about it.

Look at the two women on the right .. they pop out compared to the Nikon.

The black guy doesn't .. but that's a lighting thing IMHO .. use a china light and
he'll pop out too. You can't light people of different skin tones the same and expect
similar results :-)

jeff
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Just for correction, better dynamic range means flatter image and in this case your argument is not valid, pop, contrast is the contrary of better DR. I am not saying that this test is good or bad (They had a Panasonic guy at the test if I am not mistaken), but just saying that better DR is the exact opposite of what you said. In this case, with just a little curve adjustment in post the d7000 image would be as contrasty or pop as the Af100. The contrary is much more difficult or near impossible if the highlight are blown or shadows are already crushed. If you look at ungraded best DR camera like the Alexa the image are milky and very very flat.
 
Barry_Green said:
Once again, a simple case of someone using a "stock" setting instead of customizing for the shot. You could make the AF100 look much more like the Nikon shot (if that's what you like) just by using the cine-D gamma.

Learn how to use the camera and you can make it sing.
Click to expand...
+1
You can paint what you want, Picaso. It's not the fault of the brush or the palette. The AF100 is a chameleon.
If you want to just point and shoot and not grade in post, it's not the AF100 you want.
 
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