You're juggling alot of unrelated film terms around, presumably to demonstrate you know what you're talking about. If you're actually referring to DCP (Digital Cinema Package) encoding and delivery, camera hacks and such have little to do with it. Spend some time actually researching the subject, then come back with some pertinent questions.

Cheers mate.. I really appreciate your view about Sedna and FM. cause I kinda feel the same way too. But since Sedna eats through the card, I also use Cluster 6. Try that as well if you haven't. FM is definately right up there as well. How many hrs of video can you get on a 64gb card with Sedna? I mainly make short films and since I wanna ultimately have it projected, I was wondering the same thing. I'm torn between FM and Cluster 6. Any idea which handles grading better? Keep us posted with your grading results.

Quality of the lens being a factor makes sense..however I'm confused about the transcoding process. Isn't it true that the whole reason you transcode is to make it easier for your CPU? If transcoding works better than mts files in terms of quality, why would Adobe spent so much money to enable native editing? Don't get me wrong sir, I'm merely wondering and not questioning what you said.

Hi!

And thanx @hay and @Aashay! All this is valuable info for me. Sorry for such a late reply, but I've been really busy last few weeks. Should been editing one commercial as I write this... :)

By "Big screen" I mean DCP deliver for Cinemas. Workflow will be digital from start to end. But what set up, I'm not sure yet. Common compression seems to be jpg2000, but I have to ask this from colorist, he is going to do final mastering. So in January we are about to do some testshooting, grading and output too - I will give a feedback at that moment how things went in grading.

I'm going to convert all material to proress 4444 before editing starts. And about Lens - Panasonic Lumix G X Vario 12-35mm F2.8 ASPH. I haven't use it yet, but I'm hoping it will work out great. I'm choosing zoom lens to shoot fast and easy, when situation is on. And specially when I'm using steadicam, there is no time to balance camera each time I change a lens.

Great to hear that You have liked FM2. It takes little less space in card and seems to be a best choice for a fast action and camera movements in Real Life Situations. Any thoughts about FM2 in low light? I have liked how noise looks in Sedna. And Aashay - Sedna in 24H mode gives You aprox 55 min. recording time.

Cheers, MisterJ

I have been dealing with open source DCP solutions for about two years now. The first open source tools that I used were Open Cinema Tools. They were great, but the creation of the Jpeg2000 files was very slow. With the introduction of another project, OpenDCP, multithreading was added along with a better GUI. I consult for a theater chain that does their own in house content creation, they bought Cineasset from Doremi. It is very fast, but has it's drawbacks. There is a great open source project that I discovered recently, Fnord's J2K plugin for Premiere, After Effects and Photoshop. It has been around for awhile, but just recently added support for the Digital Cinema specifications for Jpeg2000.

So, here is my new open source workflow:

Edit in Premiere

Color correction, effects, etc. in After Effects (Workspace color "sRGB IEC619...")

Export as Jpeg2000 files via Fnords J2K plugin (Output Color "DCDM X'Y'Z' (Gamma 2.6) 5900K by (Adobe)", J2K Digital Cinema 2K setting at 250 Mb/second)

Create audio/video MXFs in OpenDCP

Create DCP in OpenDCP

One of the key parts of this chain in getting content from editing and onto the screen is the conversion from RGB color space to the XYZ color space for DCPs. Cineasset has this option built in, but after viewing many DCPs created by that program, we noticed some problems with the final color levels. It seemed that the conversion was not working correctly, and tests bore this out. This lead me to testing Adobe's "DCDM X'Y'Z' (Gamma 2.6) 5900K by (Adobe)" color conversion. This looked much better. Now I had to create a sequence of 16bit TIFFs in XYZ space to use in Cineasset for DCP creation. This is is when I stumbled on the updated Fnord J2K with support for Digital Cinema. Have not looked back since.

If After Effects is not in your workflow, OpenDCP can do the conversion from RGB to XYZ Jpeg2000 files, but the color conversion is not on a par with what you get by doing it in After Effects.

If you are interested in all of the parts that go into making a DCP, here is a link to the first open source DCP project:

http://code.google.com/p/opencinematools/

Here is a link to Cineasset:

http://www.doremilabs.com/products/cinema-products/cineasset/

More importantly, here are the parts that I use now:

http://www.fnordware.com/j2k/

http://code.google.com/p/opendcp/

@MisterJ I'm not sure what your experience with steadicams/glidecams/etc is but I have found that even zooming a lens requires rebalancing most of the time. To this end it makes no difference using primes or zooms..

@vicharris , have you read steadicam's operators manual? If you fart, you gotta learn how to burp all at the same time to rebalance it. There's other way but I find it even less appropiate and it's only for man and way too grose.

@MisterJ As willieturnip said, I really don't get the reason to use that zoom lens (which is a good lens, but not a cinematic one, my personal-view) as you WILL need to rebalance. So, you are not gaining time, but you might be compromising the look a tad bit compared to using few primes. I've read it's even sharper than Oly's 12mm, which I have and don't really like (will be soon selling it to buy a SLR Magic 12mm).

Even so, if you're sticking to the 12-35, you probably already know (as this post has been rescued back from december) it's a really sharp lens and also has some jitter if you zoom in during recording (no zoom-in or zoom-out shots is a real bummer, sometimes zooming in is cool, ask Tarantino about it hehe).

Also, being a sharp lens as it is, you should try some of those soft looking patches by Driftwood.

I believe those are wise options you took in order to get more of a film-look. And yeah...operating a steadicam seems easy when you see proffesionals doing it but it's a nightmare to learn how to do it propperly, it takes a lot of time. I'm starting too with my Laing steadicam + vest. Patience and practice are the only tools to learn how to use it, that's what I've learned for the moment.

Keep updating this as you advance with the project, would be nice to know how it works out. Best of luck!