This camera is the Panasonic AG AF-101 and it's a new type of camera and it solves the problem
presented for videographers of being able to achieve creative use of shallow depth of field
by utilizing a large sensor which is about the same size as the Emulsionon 35mm movie film.
So you've got a similar depth of field in terms of creative effects that you can get with 35mm
film. What's unique about this camera is it brings us down to a price point which many people will
find affordable. This is a proper video camera which has been designed to record video. There are
some people who are using digital stills cameras with the capability of recording video and really
they're compromises by virtue of the fact they have to do both high resolution stills and low
resolution video because video is only two megapixels or so whereas a camera like a Canon 5D
for example has an 18 megapixel sensor and the way the Canon camera produces its video is to
skip lines of resolution so this is obviously the cheapest way they can bring the resolution down
from 18 megapixels to 2 megapixels by taking every third every fourth line of detail and
throwing away any detail that's in between and unfortunately this creates something called
aliases sort of false detail which isn't actually in the picture. Sack the runner whoever came in
that door. So the problem with these aliases for instance if you have a diagonal line a diagonal
line will become a flight of steps because there's no detail in between the lines of information
which you're keeping and this means that there's more sharpness more detail in this staircase
which throws more false information at your compressor causing the quality to drop significantly
and the other problem with aliases is they get worse throughout the production chain as you
recompress for instance if you do grading or if you recompress for for distribution on Blu-ray or
for transmission the problems just get worse and worse so what Panasonic have done is they're
using a large sensor in order to get this this lovely depth of field but they put an optical
low pass filter directly in front of the sensor that's something which you can't do with a stills
camera because suddenly it wouldn't be able to take your lovely crisp 18 megapixel stills anymore
but because the AF-101 is designed purely to do video they can afford to throw away that that extra
resolution but softly gently so that your diagonals remain diagonal so that any complex patterns which
on a 5D would fall apart stay true to life and produce a very naturalistic very nicely defined
picture without any of the aliasing and also without Moiré patterns which are other issues
created by the by the CMOS sensors the AF-101 uses the micro four-thirds lens mount which was
developed by Olympus and Panasonic now you can use Panasonic Lumix lenses which are micro four-thirds
mount and there are some lenses which have have various zoom settings as we've been playing with
a 14 to 140 here which because of the size of a sensor and the cropping factor will give you the
equivalent in 35 millimeter terms of a 28 to a 280 which is a great zoom range and that for a lens
costing about four or five hundred pounds but to get the ultimate in quality you can use lenses
called compact primes and and these lenses about two and a half to three thousand pounds each or
you can buy a set of them and have have a fixed focal length there's no zoom on them at all and
you use them the aperture manually there there's no autofocus but these are ultimate quality in
terms of the picture you get off them and with with these lenses you can create cinema quality
footage with with the AF-101 we're using a Zeiss compact primal on this interview at the moment
which is a 35 millimeter lens and this lens is probably about two and a half to three thousand
pounds but it is possible to get the same subtle depth of field effects with much cheaper lenses
there's a lumix 20 millimeter pancake lens which is a tiny little thing which will give you f1.7
apertures so you can get subtle subtle autofocus backgrounds for for about 270 280 pounds or so
so you don't have to spend a fortune also you can get lens adapters so if you have a pile of old
Nikon lenses or or hopefully soon there'll be a Canon EFS lens adapter we've heard this will be
ready for release about the time the camera comes out in December 2010 and with those adapters you'll
be able to use the photographic lenses you have already the problem with the Canon lenses is they
use an electronic aperture so in order to be able to set the aperture you'd need a lens adapter which
has the electronics built in older Canon lenses have got the aperture on the barrel so you can
manually adjust them as long as there's a a x lens mount to micro four thirds adapter on the market
and believe me after this camera comes out there'll be many many lens adapters which which adapt to
micro four thirds then you're able to use the camera but do bear in mind the crop factor so from a 30
for instance an 11 mil ultra wide angle on a on a something like a Canon d5 will be a 22 mil on the
af-101 but that's still a very wide lens especially for movie making they very rarely use use lenses
that wide in any any film you see unlike the appalling ergonomics you'd get with a digital
stills camera which is obviously set up to do stills we've we've not only got better ergonomics
in a video camera I flip out screen for lcd monitor but also we've got the the connectivity
sort of high-end broadcast connectivity like hd sdi for for our picture output as well as a
simultaneous hdmi so we can monitor and record to nano flash or p2 gear recorder and in addition
to this xlr audio and the af-101 has some high-end audio features it records uncompressed audio so
rather than the rest of the abc cam range which records ac3 audio this will record totally uncompressed
I think the only only problem will be at Christmas is that Santa won't be able to get his hands on
these because most of them are pre-sold but we should shortly be getting large amounts of stock
through and I want one myself even even if I have to pay for it
