u/Spiritual-Builder606

I understand that 65mm sensors have the potential for more resolution, perhaps better low light performance, and potentially less DoF if the optics can open up, but other than that, there is no inherent 'look' to 65mm. I want to give a special 'fuck you' shout-out to Angeniux EZ lenses who just announced their 65mm line up. They just announced their 82-300 T/4.2-5.4 zoom.

Basically it's an Angenieux Ez 3 45-165mm T/2.3 but expanded for 65mm. So for you idiots at home, you could shoot s35mm with an Angenieux ez3 and get the same fucking thing you do shooting 65mm format with a 82-300 T/4.2-5.4.

99% of digital 65mm formats are a gimmick. It's mostly for downsampling and shallow DoF. That's it. We are being pushed with this format and it's not even good for anything. IMAX is good because of IMAX projection.

Otherwise this large format shit is just the shallow DoF obsessed. The idea large format renders the world in a unique way is either misinformed waxpoetic or manufacturers pushing more product

I work in film and TV. I worked on a commercial / piece a LOOOONG time ago. I can't remember what it was for but I think it was a promo tie-in for a video game? The name of the shoot was "The Oswald Theory". This is the only BTS photo I have since this was way back in 2012. The only thing I remember is this guy played a mild-conspiracy nut who talks about Oswald. You can see the workbench in the background has been set-decorated to have the classic clues and photos with yarn connecting them. I can't find my old call sheets or anything so I have nothing else to go on. Just curious if it ever came out. I can't remember even who directed it.

Figured I'd ask an Oswald fan group.

https://preview.redd.it/rmas4phb8fih1.jpg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=cc341b0a7416d32b55eb962ec39ef15db07194f5

I just finished a feature film shooting with the Panasonic S1ii camera. I am a seasoned veteran of the camera department working in film and television for nearly 20 years.

This review is mainly for people looking to make this camera a production viable model for film and television production. This camera is of course a mirrorless photography form factor camera despite how heavily they try to market it's 'cinema' abilities.

I have to warn you I'll be focusing a lot on what I didn't like because I'm used to proper cinema cameras so I'll be talking about what I'm missing more than what the camera gives. To off set this, I'll say the camera image did overall surpass my expectations I had of what the camera would be capable of when I first approached the LUMIX line.

I have said this for the last 20 years, but what makes a cinema camera isn't just image. This camera is more than capable of making fine images suitable for an audience to look at. A cinema camera, beyond the image, is a camera designed to make shooting on set reliable, fast, and efficient, which is key to moving along quickly , minimizing mistakes and thus saving a lot of money.

Form factor.

It's small, yes. You'll need a cage to attach any peripherals to it. The Panasonic L mount works well for photography, but our L to PL mount did have a little play, but luckily I didn't see it translate into image shift during production.

Lens support is recommended for almost any size cinema lens. The PL mount will push the weight of the lens further out giving more leverage on the mount and the L mount design is not robust enough or have a secondary locking ring to make hanging any PL lens over a super-speed a good idea. Especially if doing rough camera work like handheld or car rig.

We used a camera cage, 15mm LW spaced baseplate and rods, and a D-tap dummy camera battery that ran to a power plant in the back with cinema batteries to power the camera and all accessories.

Signal path.

The HDMI port is on the operator side. There is only one full size port. This means you cannot send a clean image to client and a dirty image to the AC or village. Only one flavor comes out and that is not great for any production work. We decided to go clean, which was a pain for the operator as they had to confirm a lot of status over comms instead of people just being able to see if we were rolling, or what the WB was, or what ISO we were at, etc.

Anyhow, one full size HDMI to rule them all is not amazing. First of all HDMI is a very fragile connection when compared to HD-SDI. To minimize the possibility of failure, we utilized very thin right angle HDMI cables so the cables ran parallel to the body of the camera and were very flexible. This way there was little chance of the cable being snagged or bumped into and damaging the HDMI port. Because there is only one out, the HDMI cable was run to an onboard 7" monitor which also had to have a HDMI loop-out, in order to send to our teradek transmitter. Again, on all HDMI ports we used very small and thin right angle cables to keep the profile low and protect the ports.

We did record via HDMI to recorder decks. We ran internal CF Express cards.

Even when only sending 1080p video out of the camera, the signal latency is absolutely unprofessional. The operator can feel the delay. The 1st AC can really feel the latency. I would venture to say any union 1st AC would be absolutely revolted by how this could be considered acceptable for motion picture use. In order to reduce the delay, we had to turn off HDMI audio out setting. It reduced the delay enough for us to not wholesale reject the camera for production use, but it was still not ideal and could be felt. It is appreciably more than what any professional Canon, Sony or Arri cinema camera would produce.

I did not get to test the 6k RAW HDMI output to a recording device. I cannot comment on how the latency is when outputting 4k or RAW from the HDMI port. We were downscaling and sending 1080p out of the camera. Sometimes downscaling is more processor heavy and could have added to the delay, so I would love to know if heavier HMDI output would speed latency up or make it worse. There is a good case to be made for either.

Formats.

This brings me to formats. There are a lot of flavors of formats on this camera. The list is actually dauntingly long although it's mainly just a crazy amount of combinations of the same flavors. You can pick all sorts of resolutions, color samplings and bitrates of flavors like 4:3, 3:2, 17:9, 16:9, 2.4:1 and etc.

What was most shocking is in preproduction we were looking to shoot with Atlas Mercury 1.5x full frame anamorphic PL lenses and RAW.

We were shocked to find that we could not shoot internal RAW and get the full 3:2 OpenGate. It was a big disappointment and surprise to me because I assumed we could do that thinking both of those attributes were a big selling point of the camera. My current understanding is that this is possible with an external recorder. We did not go that route.

In order to get internal recording large resolution OpenGate, we would have had to drop to ProRes 4:2:2. Not even a 444 option.

The director really liked the wider-than-widescreen aspect ratios we got with 1.5x on 17:9 RAW, so we embraced it and shot in that aspect ratio.

Squeeze:
I want to reiterate that the camera can NOT send out a desqueezed image. While there are desqueeze options in the camera, it is only for the LCD screen. It will not send desqueezed image over HDMI. You need your external monitors to do this for you.

Data:

Do you need RAW? For most productions, no. It's unwieldily heavy codec. We shot 2tb a day on a single camera production. It's a feature, so we did the best codec we could onboard without needing a recorder. If I were back in preproduction today, I would have investigated more into recorder options.

Audio/TC... same port.

The audio port is a 1/8th inch mini jack. The camera is capable of bluetooth TC but both of our audio professionals did not enjoy the experience and ended up using the 1/8th in audio mini jack. This records the TC to one of the audible tracks. I understand TC is audio, but typically on normal cameras it's embedded and not just on the audio track. For those who don't know, TC audio sounds like what the CIA would make you listen to for hours at a time to torture a state secret out of you.

Menu.

This might have been the worst part of the camera. Learning new menu's always leaves more to be desired at first but my biggest complaint is this camera remembers NOTHING.

Saving camera configuration profiles to a SD card is VERY important. Every-time you power cycle the camera, it will reset menu preferences you previously set. For instance, if our camera would give overheating warnings we would set our fan to fast/high mode. We would then switch a battery and turn the camera back on (off for five seconds at most) And when the camera booted back up, the fan would be back to auto. The same goes almost all other settings we were intermittently changing like WB, stabilization, lens profile, etc. We found that we needed to re-enter these settings / check them after every power cycle or create more saved profiles.

And if you want to shoot slow motion, you have to switch the camera with a physical switch into a third mode called S&Q. None of your settings will transfer. They advertise this as a benefit, but it's not. At all. We had to re-enter all of our settings again and save yet another profile lest we need to do it every-time. I've never had a cinema camera with such a dangerously short and stubborn memory. On an Alexa, if I change the fan setting and do a battery swap, the fan setting is where i left it when I boot back up.

Overheating.

This camera has a really awful heat management system, being a tiny mirrorless camera. We had to keep our camera fan set to high and that mainly solved the problem. We weren't shooting anywhere out of the ordinary. It wasn't 90* + outside or anything. I flipped the LCD panel out and away, in order to have access to the true back of the camera. I applied some air flow there and a little ice baggy. Only two or three times during the entire production did the camera cut itself and give the black screen functionality cut warning. Again, I've experienced this with other cameras, like the Fuji GFX100ii but at least that had a fan module you could add to it. Not great. Not cinema.

Stabilization.

This camera has internal stabilization and it's not bad under certain circumstances. We found it was best when handheld but not a lot of panning or tilting. We tried it on dolly shots with bumpy old floors and while it worked, it would occasionally make the wrong decisions and when the shot is very smooth and deliberate these computer mistakes can be felt. When doing light handheld, these small mistakes in the stabilization are better hidden.

Overall the image quality was the best part about the camera. We did not use extended DR.

I just wanted to dump my experience here for any AC or DP out there thinking about exploring this camera for more traditional cinema work.

Roll Stop.

We gave up trying to find a way to get RUN-STOP control. I've read online the nucleus has a solution but we were using a single better system, those systems rely on 3-pin or BNC connectors. With more prep time we might have had a solution but the rental house wasn't used to cameras like the LUMIX so ready solutions were not available. If anyone has a link to a working solution, I'd appreciate it.

That's about it. I wanted to dump my experience online for anyone looking into using the camera.

The image was pretty good. The camera was excellent for the cost. But when a producer is paying thousands of dollars an hour, the importance of a cinema camera that performs like a cinema camera outside of just the image is also important, and while we made our camera look and act like a cinema camera the best we could, the shortfalls did create a work flow that was less smooth and reliable than a cinema camera should be.

The images keep getting better and the manufacturers keep wanting to push these cameras for narrative filmmaking purposes, yet they can't seem to offer a form factor body that actually helps the camera department use this camera on set without a lot of reconfiguring without adding 00's to the price tag.