AF100 Arrives, shooting today

[dazapper]

Having signed up months ago for the camera, the AF100 arrived today. Out of the box I'm thoroughly excited to be able to attach any and all of my Nikkor lenses with a purchased adapter. I'm just playing around with the very simple menus within the camera, menus that are much more intuitive than any camera I've ever used, pro or prosumer. Was surprised to see a lack of a dedicated TC BNC connection, just an HDSDI one. The manual says it's a menu item and is connected through the video RCA connection, will try that soon.

I'll be shooting with the camera later today and tomorrow, experimenting for a client to see how it will fit into their workflow. Will advise later on its use.

 

[zac love]

I look forward to it.

Already a couple questions: What type of Nikon lenses are you using? Ones with an aperture ring? If not, does your adapter give you control to adjust it?

Also, how is the back focus? If you have a zoom lens, does it stay focused throughout the zoom?

When you set the lens to focus at 10' is it focused at 10'?



thanks!

 

[dazapper]

I purchased the Nikon adapter with iris control for the camera. All of my lenses are high end AF or the old AI lenses and have their own manual iris. The newer DX lenses are electronic iris and don't have an external iris ring so the adapter works really well with them. My widest Nikon lens is the DX 10.4mm, effectively about 18mm when you factor in the conversion. Looks like the 17-35 f2.8 will be the go to lens with more of a "normal" focal length. The 80-200 has a great telephoto range, can't wait to see what my 400 f2.8 will bring.

Didn't have any apparent issues with backfocusing, everything seemed fine. DIdn't get the chance to see if the measurements were accurate. My client seemed very happy to see the images created in the viewfinder.

 

[ChrisFigProductions]

@dazapper When will you be able to post footage from AF100? I've been patiently waiting for B&H to have it in there showroom, but nothing as of yet.

 

[dazapper]

Here is the first test footage shot a couple of weeks ago. It was edited by my son thus it's under his name on the server. Since then I've shot for four different clients and the only complaint thus far is that the codec and format is so new that the editors need to download it for their systems. Once that has happened, they and the producers for whom things were shot are ecstatic with the pix. Some have said it looks better and richer than the settings on my HDX900. I have yet to shoot with it in conjunction with my Varicam, but I have no doubt the AF100 won't be as rich.

http://vimeo.com/18574194

 

[couryhouse]

I played with one at EAR in Phx the other day! ....

there is no power zoom rocker switch finger thingie... did i feel odd as my fingers clawed open air space....

but other than that the thing seems to kick ass.. I love the large eye finder compared to the one on my z5 sony.

I DO NOT like the avchd codec though for shooting to the silver screen!... cumbersone due to high compression and lossier than I like. the hd/sdi out to a computer interface probaby will do really great things though.

 

[zac love]

I DO NOT like the avchd codec though for shooting to the silver screen!... cumbersone due to high compression and lossier than I like. the hd/sdi out to a computer interface probaby will do really great things though.

Hopefully if you're doing something for the silver screen, you can afford something better than a $5k camera. If you're doing something for the big screen, you need a big budget.

I think AVCHD is good for the price. Just know the limitations of it & shoot accordingly. When you see the limitations of AVCHD, then know that you're also seeing the limitations of your budget.

My annoyance with AVCHD is that it takes longer to get into FCP than MPEG2 footage, but I assume that in 2-3 years computers will get fast enough to edit more easily in native h264 w/o a transcode if you need to run-n-gun, as it is pretty easy to edit in native MPEG2 today (or even 3 years ago).

I do wonder why Panasonic didn't have a 10-bit HD-SDI output on this camera. My only guess is to push people up the scale to higher models. But again, AF100 + NanoFlash / Ki-ProMini even in 8bit, will make nicer pictures than what AVCHD is limited to.


Over all thanks for sharing the footage dazapper, looks very nice.

 

[ChrisFigProductions]

@dazapper Thanks for posting the AF100 footage. Some beautiful shots really showcasing the shallow DOF. I'm looking forward to going down to B&H soon to test it out.