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Unboxing of first production model AG-AF100 in LA


Alan Rencher

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I deleted Alan's "unboxing" post from yesterday and this one will go tomorrow if Alan doesn't contribute more information than pictures of him unpacking his new toy.

 

Adding "No Unboxing Threads" to the forum guidelines now.

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I deleted Alan's "unboxing" post from yesterday and this one will go tomorrow if Alan doesn't contribute more information than pictures of him unpacking his new toy.

 

Adding "No Unboxing Threads" to the forum guidelines now.

 

Really?

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Here's a noise floor comparison between different ISOs and DRS settings if anyone's interested. Granted, the video has been compressed for vimeo, but I feel it's useful information for anyone wondering what breaking points are in the electronic gain settings. Keep in mind that these were done with gamma in Cine-D, which raises the toe more than the other options.

 

http://vimeo.com/18359615

 

I've been testing my AF100 out with a HotRod PL mount and Zeiss CP.2s, and the overall quality is impressive at its price point. The big sticking point with me is the lack of pixel-to-pixel focus expansion found on RED and Canon DSLRs, or even a pop-in focus assist found in the Panasonic HVX/HPX series. Instead, the AF100 offers a "focus in red" for sharp contrast areas of the picture which, while useful, still makes me long for pixel-for-pixel zoom.

 

As for the noise floor, unfortunately I have not found any settings that give me as clean blacks as I'd find in either R3D or Alexa footage. The AF100 does give pleasing looking blacks all the way up to 800 ISOs when shooting clean exposures, but boosting the shadows will inevitably reveal a good deal of artifacts. This is not surprising to me, though many Panasonic enthusiasts seem to insist that the noise is not there. Regardless, I find the camera to be a great value, especially in its compact form- while I love working with RED raw, the light weight of the AF100 makes working with a smaller footprint far more feasible.

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200 ISO, Olympus 14-41mm 3.5-5.6, Panasonic 45-200 4.0-5.6

 

This isn't a very controlled test. I just took the camera out for a spin. I also forgot to set the black balance before I went out, so that may factor in.

 

The camera is ver similar to Panasonic's other AG cameras, but the new feature pose for a bit of a learning curve. So far it's impressed me. I'll get more controlled tests soon.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVY9AKI7R9g

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One of the BEST features of this cam over the DSLR is that it has REAL sdi out. Meaning that day 1 when I hooked it to a monitor and felt a HUGE letdown on image quality due to horrible mid-blacks, I could at least hook it to a waveform to find out what was happening. do not DO NOT use Cine-likeD. EVER. Its a horrible curve and somehow adds noise, even on the uncompressed output. Cine-like V is fine, all the others are pretty ok too. But unless you like HIDEOUS noise in the 20-30 ire range, stay away from CineD. I know the purpose of the D setting, but to me - it makes that range unusable enough that no fix in post will clean it up. Obviously this cam is no alexa, but for what it is - it can look incredibly good. Hook it to a good scope, run through the menus and see for yourself, but I'm happy now that I discovered the noise issue is only with CineD. Also disable DRS!

 

Oh - I believe long ago someone looked at the Cine-d curve on earlier pannies and discovered that it doesn't ACTUALLY add any dynamic range to the picture, only bad clipping and color shifts in the 75-90 ire range. Gross.

Edited by Jaron Berman
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No in-camera manipulation can ever "add" dynamic range, except by compromising the noise floor. It may make the lack of dynamic range more acceptable by rolling off highlights, but that simply means you've increasing the apparent brightness of what were shadows, which is where the noise is. It's a pretty straightforward relationship.

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One of the BEST features of this cam over the DSLR is that it has REAL sdi out. Meaning that day 1 when I hooked it to a monitor and felt a HUGE letdown on image quality due to horrible mid-blacks, I could at least hook it to a waveform to find out what was happening. do not DO NOT use Cine-likeD. EVER. Its a horrible curve and somehow adds noise, even on the uncompressed output. Cine-like V is fine, all the others are pretty ok too. But unless you like HIDEOUS noise in the 20-30 ire range, stay away from CineD. I know the purpose of the D setting, but to me - it makes that range unusable enough that no fix in post will clean it up. Obviously this cam is no alexa, but for what it is - it can look incredibly good. Hook it to a good scope, run through the menus and see for yourself, but I'm happy now that I discovered the noise issue is only with CineD. Also disable DRS!

 

Oh - I believe long ago someone looked at the Cine-d curve on earlier pannies and discovered that it doesn't ACTUALLY add any dynamic range to the picture, only bad clipping and color shifts in the 75-90 ire range. Gross.

 

I noticed that too, and then I compared it to an HPX-170 to find similar results. I'm still trying to find the best shooting set-up. Do you have any suggestions on what we could do to get the most out of the footage on the AF100?

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