Tyler Purcell

Helicopter, they work great when piloted from the ground. Just don't stand underneath it. lol

Ohh the AJ-HPX2700, hehe. Yea, you should have said "ENG Classic Varicam" because I didn't even know the camera had log capabilities.

Yep, AVC is a MPEG 4 format. There are a few variants like Long GOP or iFrame, 8 bit and 10 bit, 4:2:0 or 4:2:2, but it's still MPEG. The only NON-MPEG single file formats are; Pro Res, DNX and JPEG2000, which all use Wavelet compression technology. Even Red Code and Arri Raw are variants of the same tech. Cinema DNG is TIFF compression, but it's still similar. DVCPro has nothing to do with AVC funny enough. Panasonic makes you want to think they're similar, but they are not. AVC is just .h264. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVC-Intra

Basically all it does is flatten the image out so the mpeg file has greater dynamic range than it would normally. So you would use a LUT to bring it into the color space you're using to grade, whether that's Rec 709, Rec 2020 or DCI-P3, the color space is chosen in the grading program as a "base" and you will grade to that space. I have given up using pre-programmed luts because I've found most of them to not give me the look I'm going for in-camera. AVC-Intra 100 is OK for 1080p, but not for anything else. If you're shooting 4k, you really need 400+Mbps as a source and I'm not sure if the Varicam can do that. I think one of the reasons so many people discount it, is because the codec is very limited. There is a software version that can do Pro Res, but I think it's only HQ.

Yes, sorry... my bad. I didn't bother checking the spec and I remembered it being measured in megabytes not megabits. Thanks for the correction.

It's really shot nicely and very professional in both image and sound design. I guess my only issues are the length and the translation. The same story could be told in 10 minutes easily and it totally loses my attention a few minutes in because I really don't know the importance of what I'm seeing. The "poetic" nature of the VO and henceforth subtitles, can be challenging for non-native speakers. Poetry is one of the most difficult things to translate and reading poetry vs hearing it, how it comes off the tung, especially in a sensual setting, just doesn't work in my opinion. If the poetry were re-written in English and then spoken, replacing the native language with English, I think it would be much better for me. It's one thing to subtitle dialog, normal sentence structure say, where our brains can easily translate the emotion we see in the characters faces and absorb the subtitles. However, where the heartbeat and story is driven exclusively from VO, it makes things very different. Just my .02 cents.

Nice! Thanks for the update! 🙂

Ahh ok. Yea I feel ya. I'm the polar opposite, everyone here is PL. I have adaptors for Nikon and Canon lenses for my digital cameras and nobody has ever asked for them, ever. All they want/care about is PL glass because that's what the rental houses use. However, PL is a premium product, which you can get for cheaper as Nikon or Canon mount in many cases. So I understand why someone would stay away from PL due to cost.

Nearly all of the consumer grade cameras shoot in .h264 or .h265 depending on how new they are. The normal variety of these codec's are long GOP compression (you can google this to learn more) and don't have "frames" per say. The way they work is, they capture one frame and only store the differences of that frame for the next X amount of consecutive frames. The X variable is a wide range from 8 to even 40 in some cases, depending on how much motion is in the scene. The little processor in the camera is chewing on this encode in order to make the files small. So the editing software has to pre-read the entire MPEG file into memory extrapolate frames and somehow make an edit. It's very challenging for the software AND hardware to do so. Most people who shoot with these .h264/.h265 cameras make proxy files inside Premiere which are DNX. This process works great because when you're done, you can throw the whole mess into DaVinci and grade from the original files, not the transcodes, which can bake in the look if you aren't careful. I don't shoot with cameras that aren't iframe codec's like DNX, Pro Res, Cinema DNG, Red Code, Arri Code, JPEG2000, etc. These codec's exist to deliver higher quality in post production, albeit with an associated cost. You still need a decent computer to work with these codec's and the cameras that shoot these codec's are more expensive of course. www.bhphotovideo.com has a great "tech" page for everything they sell and if you wanna know what codec a certain camera shoots, you can simply go to their website, find the camera, click technical and you can see the codec's. Nearly all of them will be .h264 or MPEG4, which are basically the same concept, tho different implementations.

No no, I mean are you giving an adaptor with the purchase.

Do you have an adaptor with it?

You always know I want one! hehe If it were PL, I would have made ya an offer.

This is the big conundrum with buying and owning very expensive equipment, even if it's used. Arri's warranty is very limited, so no there is no warranty on a several year old camera. Arri will gladly fix any problems, but the cost for parts and labor is pretty high. The cameras are pretty robust though. More than the Red's, which seem to be failing left and right. The biggest problem with all these cameras is mapping out dead pixels on the imager. Eventually the dead pixel mapper will not be able to map out the bad pixels and then you've got a worthless camera on your hands. Since these cameras are getting old for the first time, so we don't know exactly when they go bad, like we do with the Canon cameras.

Those mpeg cameras are impossible to edit without transcoding. You'll have to transcode to DNX or Pro Res before editing.

Sadly there is no magic. You need a good GPU, SSD boot drive, 32gb of memory minimal and some sort of high speed storage device to make Premiere work. Even if you're CPU is on the iffy side, if you get the other things dialed, it will work. This is the same for all modern editing programs, you can't get around it by switching programs. Adobe Elements is just as taxing on the system as CC.