Thanks again,

- Alex

Thanks for reading!

- Alex

Because of budget sensitivity, I approached the Charleston Promise Neighborhood video project as a one-man band. While I had a little bit of help with setup and carrying gear, for the most part I was a crew of one.

Here’s how I tackled it.

GEAR

My approach to microbudget production is to sacrifice complexity, not quality. In order to do that, I need to bring along everything I need, but nothing more.

I shot b-roll in four different elementary schools. I knew that I wanted to be as unobtrusive as possible, and that I would have to work with available light. I decided to use the Canon 5D Mk II because it has excellent low-light sensitivity, and is less exotic-looking than my Panasonic AF100.

I wanted to get a mix of student closeups and classroom wide shots, so I used the Canon 24-70mm f/2.8 as my primary lens. I also brought along the Canon 20mm f/2.8, which I’ve found works very well for hand-held work, and the Canon 50mm f/1.4, which is the fastest lens I own. I wound up doing a view hand-held shots, but primarily I shot from an inexpensive Manfrotto tripod, which is light and easy to carry and adjust quickly.

Aside from the camera, the three lenses and the tripod, I did not bring any equipment into the schools. I considered bringing an external microphone, but since I did not envision using the classroom audio for anything (and suspected that the children would be distracted by the sight of a shotgun microphone), I decided against adding that additional piece of equipment.

I had more flexibility in the interview setups, so I wanted to light and mic them properly. To this end, I brought along a case containing my Panasonic AF100 and a few Canon FD lenses (I wound up using the 50mm f/1.4 to shoot all the interviews), my “Production Kit in a Toolbox” full of gear, a shotgun microphone on a boom, the tripod, two light stands, and a C-stand (to hold the mic boom). This is a pretty stripped-down kit, but it still required two trips to load and unload. The main problem was the various stands. I have a cheap golf bag that I use to hold my stands, and I probably should have brought that along to ease my gear transport.

SETUP

I like to keep interview lighting style consistent throughout a video, if at all possible. Sometimes, that means using all natural light, sometimes it means using very dramatic hard light. In this case, I decided to go for a mainstream-upscale lighting look: a soft keylight and a moderately strong backlight. This is a lighting setup that is used – with only slight variation – constantly in every type of media from movies to TV shows to video games.

This is a diagram of the lighting setup I used for all of my interview subjects.

In all cases, the keylight was a Tota light shooting through a Tota-Brella, and the backlight was a  Lowel Pro-Light shooting through a sheet of “tough spun” cine-gel (clothespinned to the barndoors of the light) to soften the quality of light slightly.

And this is what it looked like. Even though the four interview locations look very different, I used the same lens, the same style of lighting, and similar framing to tie them all together and subtly reinforce that they’re part of the same project.

Getting clean audio while conducting the interviews was a bit of a challenge: I set up a C-stand, which held the boom over the interview subject’s chair, positioned as low as possible without being seen in the shot. The mic itself was slightly in front of the subject, and aimed at his/her chest. This part was easy.

Since I didn’t have a dedicated audio operator, I plugged the microphone directly into the camera, wore headphones to monitor the sound quality, and kept an eye on the audio meters in the AF100’s LCD display to make sure the level wasn’t too loud or too soft. This was made somewhat more difficult by the fact that I was also conducting the interviews! Since I didn’t want all the interview subjects facing the same way (camera left), I had to sit on the opposite side of the camera for two of the setups, meaning that I couldn’t actually see the LCD. This is EXTREMELY risky, and I do not recommend it at all. At the time, I was trying to see how light I could travel, but in retrospect, I definitely should have brought a small external monitor. I was lucky that I didn’t have any focus or audio issues as a result of shooting blind.

Because of this, I’ve been whittling down my kit to the bare minimum. I’ve managed to get to the point that I can shoot a typical web video with little more than the contents of one standard-sized toolbox, plus a camera case and a cheap golf bag full of light stands.

The camera case contains a camera (currently a Panasonic AF100), with lenses, memory cards, microphone and headphones. Nothing particularly special about that. But the contents of my toolbox might be interesting to folks looking to build their own minimalist production package. Here’s what’s in my kit!

This is just a normal, medium-sized toolbox that I bought at K-Mart. It’s about 24″ wide. The only real criterion I use when shopping for a toolbox is that it must have two metal clasps. Plastic clasps are unreliable, and a single clasp isn’t strong enough.

This particular toolbox has storage compartments in the outer lid. I find that these flimsy plastic doors tend to flop open, so I don’t put anything too small or expensive in them. Here I have some electrical tape (for fixing frayed cords and marking my cables) and extra clothespins (for lighting gels). This stuff could easily go inside the box, if I didn’t have the lid compartments.

Most toolboxes have a tray that lifts out. I use it to keep small and delicate items from rattling around. Here, I have the following items:

Spring clamps.
One spare bulb for each of the lights in the box.
Two “ground lift” adapters, so that I can plug three-prong cords into old, two-prong outlets.
A bunch of rechargeable AA batteries wrapped in a plastic bag.
A bag of audio adapters.
A Sony wireless lavalier microphone, with extra clips & windscreens, and a few strips of moleskin.

In the main compartment of the toolbox, I’ve stuffed the following:

A sturdy XLR cable.
A triple-head extension cord.
A roll of gaffer tape.
An assortment of cine lighting gels, clipped together with clothespins.
A white Tota-Brella
Two Tota lights (with power cords).
One Pro-Light (with power cord).

Underneath all this, I have a towel lining the bottom of the case to shield its contents from shock (and to clean up accidental spills).

Here’s a better look at these items, spread out on the floor.

Obviously, the toolbox is too small to hold a microphone boom pole,  light stands or c-stands, which is why I use a $25 golf bag to roll them around. Generally speaking, I can carry the camera case, toolbox and pull the golf stand, all in one trip from the car.

In future posts, I’ll show how I use the contents of this toolbox to light interviews and corporate videos.

That doesn’t work for me. I’ve developed a setup that uses two lights (and some odds and ends), and 9 times out of 10 requires zero retouching.

1. Set up a white background. I like to use seamless paper, but in a pinch you can make do with a large piece of posterboard thumb-tacked to the wall, with another piece on the floor.

2. Set up a piece of glass or plexiglass just in front of the paper, and a few feet off the floor. You can use chairs, sawhorses, whatever you want, as long as it’s stable. Put your product on the glass.

3. Set up your camera and lamps. I used the Canon 24-70mm EOS lens for all the shots you see here. Use one lamp to illuminate the background, and another lamp to illuminate the object. I’m using Photogenic monolights, but any sort of lighting instrument would work.

4. Set up your lighting modifier of choice. I’m using a fold-out silk from a 42″ 6-in-1 reflector kit here. You could also use an umbrella, a softbox, or a white sheet.

5. To keep the background light from flaring the camera, I like to set up a piece of black foamcore (available from any art supply store) on a stand. Depending on how your elements are arranged, you may not need to do this.

6. At this point, take a moment to balance out the strength of the lights. You want the background to be completely “blown out,” 100% white, but not so incredibly bright that it flares your lens of blurs the outlines of your product. A good rule of thumb is to get the background bright enough so that the edge of the glass is no longer visible. The beauty of this setup is that the product light can easily be adjusted to compensate for the darkness or brightness of the object. That’s what allows you to shoot a clean image of a white object.

Indeed, you could stop right here, and have a very nice photo.

7. To get a little more detail out of dark objects, I like to set up a piece of white foamcore as a “bounce card,” on the opposite side of the product. This fills in the shadow areas of the product, which can be important if you’re working with dark metal or plastic. Now, snap away!


8. Keep a couple of pieces of foam core on hand. I use white foamcore, held directly under the camera, to bounce light in from the front, and I use black foamcore to block light from hitting portions that are getting blown out.

You can play with depth of field to good effect, but be careful: some clients might be expecting every bit of their product to be in focus. That will usually mean shooting at f/16 or higher.

The first step in any marketing/promotional/business/fundraising video is to determine:

Why the client wants a video;

What they’re want to communicate;

To Whom the video is addressed;

How the message will be delivered;

and When they need it.

During my initial meeting with the CPN leadership, I determined the following:

Why: To introduce the organization and encourage donations.

What: Explain the CPN goals and strategy in a compelling and inspirational way.

Whom: Potential donors, and the general public.

How: Through interviews of people involved in various ways with CPN.

When: At an opening reception about a month thence.

In my opinion, a video like this is much more effective when it uses unscripted interviews, rather than a carefully-crafted voiceover. A script works well for times when companies need to be careful that they say exactly the right thing. But for this type of project, I prefer to let people speak from the heart about something they believe in, thereby sacrificing a little precision for a lot of authenticity. This gives the video a much greater potential to connect with the viewer in a meaningful way.

The basic technique is to combine brief segments from different interviews in such a way that they form a sort of conversation: one soundbite leads logically to the next, and the program flows from one topic to the next.

This sequence of soundbites comprises the skeleton of the piece. Sometimes, that’s all you have (and it can be enough). But, whenever it’s possible to include them, it’s nice to include supporting footage (“B-roll”) and/or additional elements (photos, graphics, animation, etc.) to flesh a video out, add visual interest, and reinforce the speakers’ points.

There are different ways to approach this type of project, but this is mine:

1. Write a simple outline that lists the key “bullet points” the video needs to cover. I often structure this in a “past, present, future” paradigm, although I don’t know if that’s a widespread practice.
2. Ask interview questions designed to elicit the information needed to hit the bullet points.
3. Sort the resulting footage by topic, and string together the best of the best.
4. Add b-roll, graphics, music, etc.

For the CPN video, this was my outline:

I) Past

1.  The Need that exists in this community to increase school/student achievement.
2. The Proven Strategies used by the Harlem Children’s Zone and others.
3. The Founding Vision of the Charleston Promise Neighborhood

II) Present

1. The Current Activities of the Charleston Promise Neighborhood.
2. The Metrics, as they stand now.
3. The Unprecedented Collaboration behind the Charleston Promise Neighborhood.

III) Future

1. The Goals and Strategy of the Charleston Promise Neighborhood
2. The Vision of the “Ideal School”
3. The Need for Investors

I wrote different questions for each interview subject, and I won’t list them all here, but my fundamental approach was to say, “Tell me about [this bullet point].”

“Tell me about” is a great way to start an interview question because people are very likely to respond to it with an answer of a useful length, as opposed to an impossible-to-use, one-word answer like “Yes.”

Armed with my outline and interview questions, I set out to shoot interviews and b-roll. In Part 2 of this post, I will discuss the equipment and techniques I used during the production – or “principal photography” – stage of the project.

The Lumix only opens up to a maximum aperture of f/4.0, and that rapidly diminishes to f/5.8, which means it can really only be used for daylight exteriors, unless you’re bringing in a lot of light, or don’t mind cranking the gain all the way up. (By the way, that “5.8″ is not a typo. What’s f/5.8? A little bit darker than f/5.6, apparently.)

First, I planned to do an apples-to-apples comparison on an interview shoot. But, I wound up being 20 minutes late, and when I saw how the Lumix looked at 50mm – dark, and with an unattractively deep depth of field, given the background I was working with – I didn’t even waste time trying to dial in the correct amount of gain and exposure to compensate; I just popped on my Canon FD 50mm f/1.4, opened the aperture all the way, and shot the interview with lovely selective focus.

“Well,” I thought to myself, “maybe this is really an event lens.” So, I figured I’d take it out for a spin on one of the very few events I shoot. But, after careful consideration, I realized that I needed the ability to smoothly zoom in and out while recording. Since the lens has no servo control on the AF100, there’s no good way to do that. So, I wound up using my old Sony HVR-S270. Ah, trusty ol’ HDV!

So, I gave up on using the Lumix on a real gig, packed up a bag of lenses, and went out to shoot scenics.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, Canon’s “FD” series of lenses are optically very similar to the current, “EOS” line, but instead of electronic focus and aperture control, each lens has manual focus and aperture rings. This makes them ideal for adapting to third-party cameras, because you can maintain complete control over the lens, without sacrificing optical quality. Better yet, there are a vast number of these lenses floating around, and they can be purchased quite inexpensively.

I didn’t kill myself trying to do a scientific head-to-head analysis of how the different lenses compared at identical apertures. DP Review can do that kind of thing. I’m more interested in real-life use, so I found a few different shots that I might plausibly want to use for b-roll, and shot them with both lenses in the way that I would actually do it normally. To me, this is much more relevant of an evaluation than a technical comparison.

I found that dialing the Lumix lens to a specific focal length was actually somewhat challenging. It seemed to jump from, for example, 132 to 138. For the most part, I was able to deal with this, but you’ll see that the shots at 135mm are not as close a match as I would like. Because I was using whatever aperture I would use in real life, I matched the exposure as closely as I could by eyeball, and although they aren’t exact, I am confident that any of these shots could easily be graded to match any other.

As you can see in the video, the Lumix 14-140 is an excellent lens. It delivers more color than the FD primes, and is extremely sharp. The FD lenses, on the other hand, allowed more opportunity for selective focus, and – in my opinion – consistently shot images that seem more film-like than the somewhat clinical-looking Lumix footage.

Unlike my discovery that the Sigma 12-24 was significantly softer than the Lumix 7-14, I found that the 20 year-old FD lenses were just as sharp as the state-of-the-art Lumix lens. Moreover, this was true even though I was shooting the FD lenses at much wider apertures. This isn’t surprising, of course; as I explained in an earlier blog post about zooms vs. primes, the increased number of optical elements in a zoom lens means less light and less clarity.

The Lumix 14-140 is certainly a sharp lens, but I found it difficult to focus with on the AF100. This camera BADLY needs an expanded focus function!

Ultimately, what this means for the AF100 shooter is that you can go out and get a set of Canon FD primes which will be faster, sharper and cheaper than the state-of-the-art Lumix lenses, and feel good about it. The Lumix retails for almost $1,000, so if you put that money towards FD primes, you could get the lenses I used in this test – the 20mm f/2.8, 50mm f/1.4 and 135mm f/2.5 – and still have about $400 – $500 left over!

Most of my work is commercial in nature, so I manage to avoid events, most of the time. However, for a couple of my old clients, I still pull out the trusty HDV camera and fire away.

One such client is a local ballroom/social dance studio. Twice a year, the students and teachers put on a two-hour “showcase” performance, featuring several dozen dance numbers. I shoot these showcases, and put them on DVD. Part of what makes this client so happy with my work is that the DVD I give them has a detailed chapter menu with the names of the student and teacher in each dance. Since there are upwards of 30 individual dances in each showcase, the last thing I want to do is sit in DVD Studio Pro and create 30 individual buttons, labeling and programming each one. Instead, I let the electronic monkeys in Final Cut Studio do the work for me.

First of all, a tip for anyone who does performance videos that involve pre-recorded music: get a copy of the music CDs from the studio, and then use the Pluraleyes plugin to automatically sync the original music tracks from the CD with the ambient sound you recorded on the camera. This will give you a very clean, “live” sounding soundtrack, complete with applause and crowd noise, but without most of the echo and excessive noise that you get from a purely camera-mic’d event.

Once you have your music sync’d up, and your footage edited, the fun begins.

1) Add chapter markers to your timeline (press the “M” key with the timeline selected, and the playhead where you want the marker to be placed), wherever you’re going to need a DVD chapter. To make the rest of the process work, it’s vital that you click the “Add Chapter Marker” button here.

Whatever name you give the marker in this dialog box will be the text that accompanies your DVD menu button, so keep it short, and watch for typos.

2) Once you’re finished with your markers, click File -> Send to -> Compressor

3) Within Compressor, open the Settings window, and open Apple -> DVD -> DVD Best Quality 120 minutes (of course, if your event is less than 90 minutes, you can use the 90 minutes setting).

4) Drag and drop the two settings from the DVD Best Quality folder onto the icon that represents your project. If you’re used to dumping Final Cut MOV files directly into DVD Studio Pro or iMovie, this will seem odd. What you’re doing is creating separate tracks for the audio and video of your sequence. Compressor does a much better job of creating these tracks than DVD Studio Pro does, so your final DVD will look much better. You won’t have to wait hours for DVD Studio Pro to convert the file, but you will have to wait for Compressor to do it.

Compressor is a system hog, so even though I have an eight-core Mac Pro, I usually set it running and then go to lunch or leave it overnight. Otherwise, everything else will run slowly, and the conversion process will take forever.

5) Once Compressor is finished, open up DVD Studio Pro. Go to Window -> Configurations, and make sure Advanced is selected. This will show you all the windows you’ll need to see to get the job done.

6) Whatever name you save your project with in DVD Studio Pro will become the default name for the DVD (which your customers will see, if they put the DVD in a computer), so make it short and clear.

7) In the “Assets” window, click the Import button, and bring in the two files that Compressor created. Usually, Compressor will put the files it creates into the same folder as your original project, but sometimes it will put it in the root directory of your Macintosh HD. I have no idea why. You can specify a destination in Compressor, but it’s unduly complicated (you have to create a destination button, and then apply it to your project batch), so I usually don’t bother.

8) At this point, you can either turn the default “Menu 1″ into your main menu, or you can create the main menu later. Since creating it later opens the door to a few “gotchas,” I’ll take you through that process. Once you’ve done this, it’ll be obvious how you can make the main menu first. In this case, we’re going to create all our submenus first. Simply select the video (“[filename].m2v”) track in your Assets window, and drag it onto the menu pane. If you hover for a moment, instead of releasing the mouse, you’ll see a small dialogue window pop up. Select “Create Chapter Index.”

9) Now, you will be prompted to select a theme from the DVD Studio Pro theme library. Any of them will work, but, depending on how many chapters you have, and what type of event you’re doing, some will work better than others. For this project, I used the “Leader” them, and used the “Leader Index” for these submenus. All you have to do is click on the theme you want, and sit back.

10) At this point, the magic happens. The video and accompanying audio file will automatically be added to the DVD project’s Track. Compressor, by default, transferred your Chapter Markers to the m2v file it created, so now DVD Studio Pro detects these markers, creates individual menu buttons for each one, and adds menu pages until every marker has a button.

11) Since Apple hasn’t bothered to update DVD Studio Pro for several years, it still defaults to a 4:3 aspect ratio. To fix this, you need to individually click on the name of each menu in the “Outline” window, and change the Aspect Ratio in the Properties window to “16:9 Letterbox.”

12) These submenus are great, but they’re missing a “Play All” option. So, let’s create a main menu. (As I mentioned above, you could also do this before creating the submenus.) Right-click on the Menu icon in the Outline window, and select Add -> Menu. In this case, because DVD Studio Pro had already created 7 menus for me, this new one was called Menu 8.

13) By default, this new menu is just a black screen. To make it more interesting, drag and drop one of the themes from the Theme window onto it. (As you did before, hover over the menu until the pop-up dialog appears, and then select “Apply To Menu”)

14) Next, customize your menu by typing in the correct text, and deleting all but two of the buttons.

15) As you did before, make the Main Menu letterbox by clicking on the Aspect Ratio option in the Properties window and selecting “16:9 Letterbox.”

16) Go ahead and rename the menu to be “Main Menu” while you’re at it.

17) Now let’s make the “Play All” button. Click on one of the buttons on the main menu page screen, and make the following changes in the Properties Window (which will change from Menu to Button when you click on a button): Click on Target -> Tracks and Stories -> [name of your track] -> Track (this signifies the very beginning of a track). Also within the Properties window, change the “Name” and “Text” of the button to “Play All.”

18) Creating the “Chapters” button is similar. As before, click on the button and change the “Name” and “Text” to “Chapters” in the Properties Window. Then change the Target -> Menus -> Menu 1 -> [Menu] (you could select a specific button if you wanted to, otherwise it defaults to whatever the first one on that page is).

19) Now the menu structure of your DVD is complete. It takes a lot longer to read how to do this than it does to actually do it. Once you’ve built a couple of DVDs this way, it will only take you a few seconds to get to this point in the process. Let’s dress this up a bit now. As you can see, most of the DVD Studio Pro templates are full of blank gray boxes. These are called Drop Zones, and you can put video in them. You can create individual little movie files for each one, but that’s a waste of time. Instead, we can do everything we need just using the original event video file. Drag it from the Assets window to the first Drop Zone, and hover. When the pop-up appears, select, “Set Asset.”

20) If your video starts off with a fade up from black, all you’ll see is a black screen in your Drop Zone. That’s because DVD Studio Pro defaults to the first frame of video. No problem here, though. In the Properties window, you’ll see an option for “Start Frame.” Change that time to whatever time in the video you want to show. If you want a freeze-frame instead of a little box of video, uncheck the “Motion” check-box.

21) Repeat this process with the rest of the Drop Zones on your Main Menu. Just by selecting different start times for each Drop Zone, you can create a very elaborate look with minimal work.

22) The Main Menu is finished. Now we need to ensure that it shows up when it’s supposed to. Click on the DVD icon in the Outline window, and change the “First Play” option in the Properties window to “Main Menu.” This way, when the DVD is put into a DVD player, the first thing the viewer will see is the main menu, not the submenu. Next, you want to make sure that if someone pushes the “Menu” button on their DVD remote control, it will go to the Main Menu. Still in the Properties window, change all the Remote Control options to the Main Menu.

23) When the program is finished playing, it needs to go back to the Main Menu. Confirm this by clicking on the video track icon in the Outline, and looking at the Properties window again. “End Jump” should be Menus -> Main Menu -> [Menu] (or a specific button, if you prefer).

24) Let’s turn our attention to the Submenus. Click on the first one, and customize the title information.

25) As you did before, add the video file to the Drop Zones.

26) Here’s where DVD Studio Pro does you a huge favor. Since you’re using the same video file that the Drop Zone’s button is linked to, it doesn’t default to the first frame of video in the program, it defaults to the first frame of video in that chapter! All you have to do to quickly and easily create a video preview of each chapter is to add a minute to the Asset Start Time in the Properties window.

27) As you go through the submenus, adding video to the Drop Zones, you can copy and paste your Title text from one page to the next. This saves some typing. Also, watch out for chapter names that are too long to fit on the screen, or run into other chapter names. Fix these by making the font size smaller.

28) You’re close to finished now. Click the “Simulate” button and look at all your menu pages. Fix any text that doesn’t look right.

29) I don’t like to have complete silence during the main menu, but I’ve found that importing a regular MP3 or AIFF into DVD Studio Pro results in menu music that is much louder than the actual program. So, I usually make a 30-second clip of music in Final Cut, and lower the level to the same volume as my main program. I export that as an AIFF, and bring that into DVD Studio Pro as an Asset. Whatever you decide to do, if you bring in a music track, drag it onto the menu screen and hover, then select “Set Audio.” It will play in the background, without interfering with anything else.

30) Finally, you’re finished! Select “Build & Format,” and let DVD Studio Pro burn your disk. Unlike iMovie, once DVD Studio Pro has “Built” your DVD, it never needs to process it again. For subsequent disks, you can simply reopen the project, select “Format,” and it will quickly burn another copy of the DVD.

If you’ve been shooting with a 5D Mark II, this 2x crop means that what the lenses you’re used to using now work in very different ways. One of my favorite lenses on the 5D is the Canon 20mm f/2.8. It’s wide enough to be very forgiving for handheld work, and to give a dramatic feel to scenics and lifestyle shots, but fast enough to use in conditions with limited light. On the AF100, however, I can only see the middle half of that 20mm lens image, as the rest is “cropped out.” That great, ultra wide lens is now just an okay, slightly wide lens.

A couple of years ago, I bought the Sigma 12-24mm lens, primarily for architectural interiors. Since it’s the widest lens I have (aside from a Peleng 8mm lens which is so soft that I haven’t been able to shoot anything usable with it), it’s been my go-to lens on the AF100, when I want to shoot wide, which is most of the time. However, I’ve been hearing good things about the dedicated Lumix lenses that Panasonic actually intended for use with the AF100, so I set out to do a head-to-head comparison between the Sigma 12-24 and the Lumix 7-14mm, to see how they stacked up against each other.

Speed

Neither of these lenses are fast: at 12mm, the Sigma will open up to f/4.0, and that drops to about f/5.6 at 24 mm. The Lumix is a little better – it will maintain f/4.0 throughout its 7-14mm range.

Field of View

Obviously, the Lumix is much wider than the Sigma. Here’s what that looks like, in a real shot. The camera was in the exact same position for both images; I only switched lenses.

In order to compare apples to apples, I shot a number of scenes with both lenses at 12mm. This allowed me to compare clarity and color in largely identical images.

Aperture Control

The drawback of using an EOS-style lens like the Sigma 12-24 on the AF100 is that there’s no way to control the aperture electronically. The adapter I purchased has a built-in iris, which allows for some control, but it vignettes terribly, and there’s no way to tell exactly what aperture you’re shooting at. It’s crude, but better than nothing. Often I juggle the Neutral Density (ND) filter and gain settings to get the exposure as close as possible, so that I can keep adapter-aperture adjustment to a minimum. For this comparison, I wanted to leave as many variables unchanged as possible, so I did not change the gain, which meant I had to be a bit more agressive with the adapter. As you’ll see in the comparison video, some of the Sigma shots exhibit quite noticeable vignetting. In my mind, that’s part of the reality of using this lens, so I think that’s fair.

On the other hand, using a Lumix lens forced me to use the AF100′s electronic aperture control, which is an extremely awkward plastic dial on the front of the camera. It was stiff and unresponsive, and I had to poke it with a fingernail to make fine adjustments. It gave me cleaner and more precise control than the EOS adapter, but I was surprised by how clunky and unfriendly the interface was.

Image Quality

When I was operating the camera, I didn’t notice any significant difference in the color or clarity of the image between one lens and the other. I did notice that the Lumix lens seemed slightly easier to focus, as it seemed to have more of an obvious difference between almost-in-focus and in-focus. Focus has been my biggest issue with the AF100 in general: the camera badly needs an expanded-focus feature. Even after shoots in which I’ve used an external monitor and carefully checked the focus of each shot to the best of my ability, I’ve discovered that some shots that were just slightly out of focus. After getting used to being able to jump in 10x on the Canon 5D2 to check focus, I find this limitation very frustrating.

When I got the footage into my computer, I looked at the clips more closely, and I found that the Lumix footage was significantly sharper than the Sigma footage. This is a little disappointing, but not particularly surprising: remember, everything shot on the AF100 with a 35mm lens is essentially zoomed in to the center of the image, because of the 2x crop factor. Here are a few frame grabs. Because of the EOS adapter, I wasn’t able to match the exposure precisely, but you can still clearly see that the Lumix shots (second image in each set) are sharper.

Color, on the other hand, seemed more natural and appealing on the Sigma. The Lumix lens gave a blueish cast to all the images (white balance was unchanged), and – perhaps because of the increased clarity – highlights appeared more harshly clipped. In general, I thought the Sigma gave a warmer, more filmic look to the footage, while the Lumix gave a cleaner, more HD-like look.

I was also a little surprised to see that the Sigma actually had less distortion at 12mm than the Lumix did. If you look at the frame grabs, you’ll see that, with the camera in the same position, there’s a slightly more pronounced taper to the architectural verticals in the Lumix shots (the second of each pair of images).

Conclusion

If I didn’t own either lens, and the AF100 was my primary camera, I would have no reason to purchase the Sigma. Although it’s $80 cheaper than the Lumix, it’s not as wide, it’s slower and softer than the Lumix, and being forced to use a lens adapter is a hassle. However, since I already own the Sigma, I’m not 100% sold on buying the Lumix 7-14. Although I’d like to be able to get those extra-wide shots, and I would like to have the sharpest glass possible, a maximum aperture of f/4.0 is pretty underwhelming for a dedicated $979 lens. And, although the level of distortion in the Lumix lens is not much worse than the Sigma, I would expect it to be better, so the fact that’s it even a little worse is a mark against it.

I enjoyed shooting with the Lumix, and I love how wide it is, but it’s a little too slow and a little too expensive for me to break open the piggy bank. I’d rather muddle through with my Sigma 12-24 until I see what else hits the market. If someone releases a reasonably priced 10mm f/2.8 that would be the equivalent of my Canon 20mm, I’ll snap it up. Until then, I’m adopting a wait-and-see attitude. After all, if I really need a wide shot, I can just put the Sigma Lens on my 5D Mark II.