Originally posted by vonBaloney Yes. Full manual. You want it to act as if it is a dumb mechanical old movie film camera. Shutter speed should be absolutely fixed, ISO fixed, the camera should not react to changes with the lens. (No WB changes either.) Changing the aperture during a shot is a little weird -- that would have been challenging when I was doing cinematography with film. Is that common now w/ video?
I mostly shot news and sports where the camera moved a lot and the lighting conditions changed and tweaking the iris while shooting was standard because unlike a RAW still you really could not "fix it in post". Even now since the DSLRs, other than the cameras from Black magic, shoot in compressed formats teaking exposure in post is a very iffy proposition. The Samyang cine lenses remove the clicks in their aperture rings to allow smooth stepless aperture adjustments to nail the exposure. They also have consistant rotation direction and amount of turn for focusing across the line, I think its a 160 degrees, which allows more fine adjustment than the short throw AF stills lenses, which are optimized for quick AF response by the camera body. They also have a uniform front filter ring size and dampend focus reistance unlike modern AF stills lenses.
You can lock the Pentax cameras but you cannot be sure what shutter your actually set at. To lock it down you basially have to fix a certain lighting condiditon on a gray card lock the exposure and then start recording .......... and do this with each and every time you roll to get consistand shutter speeds.. There are some links on the net where someone has created a chart after testing what the EV is that the Pentaxs run to get a true filmic shutter speed if you want to go through the hoops. The canons have full manual and don't have to do this.
Not every junior Speilberg or Bay who shoots with a canon DSLR actually knows what their doing but the ones who do steer away from pentax for this reason. The effect trickles down and the less sophisticated just hear Pentax is not suitible for pro video work and takes it at gospel with out even knowint the reason why. plus things like lens selection, avaiablity and support. Canon actually opened up a pro support center in LA just to suppor the cinema crowd .... not sure Pentax even has a pro support network for their stills users.
The problem with disabling the HDMI port on the camera during record is a big deal.On most narrative style, commercial, corporate type shoots the video of what is being recorded is fed to extrenal monitos for the director and others in the crew to view as the shot happens. this is refered to as the "video village" With the Pentax this imortant practice on the set is disabled.
Like others have said the images from the pentax are just as colorful and sharp as the others, but the other details that are important to the pro users to ensure they get consistant quality footage are missing in the Pentax cameras for the time being.