Which cameras can deliver this stunnig quality and breathe-taking scenes at affordable prices as seen in the following link:
YouTube - Porsche 918 Spyder Concept Promotional Video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0ysj81EjAo&p=92A0766716A106E2&playnext=1&index=59)

Hard to say for sure as the video posted only plays at 480p maximum resolution and if 480p is all you need the Canon 5D Mk2 with appropriate lenses and mounting apparatuses will do. If you need to have it look that good at 1080p I guess you would need at least the Red One plus all the required accessories, which I can hardly say "affordable". The Red One system nevertheless seems to be the cheapest to yield that kind of look, the high frame rate capability (to get a smooth slow motion effect), and the tonality that comes very close to film. Some other digital systems shoot even better looking footage but every one of them costs much, much more.

The Arri Alexa will give you the best bang for the buck. Great quality, very usable, simple post workflow. Pricing is around $50k or $60k, plus lenses.

That was shot on a Canon 7D. Cost: US$1500

If I use Canon 5D Mark II with EOS 24-105mm f/4 lens and set it at Full HD, is it possible to attain this quality with this cinematic look?

If I use Canon 5D Mark II with EOS 24-105mm f/4 lens and set it at Full HD, is it possible to attain this quality with this cinematic look?

With a few years of practice.. sure. That "cinematic look" is the combination of gear and skills. There's no "easy" button to get you there.

As mentioned, the camera is just the tool, you have to learn how to use it and then apply the imagination and creative energy.

SI2K rig with the bells and whistles might be cheaper than a RED or Alexa. Most professionals don't accept H.264 as a professional medium of source, so I would rule out 7D/5D unless budget is a huge issue.

If I use Canon 5D Mark II with EOS 24-105mm f/4 lens and set it at Full HD, is it possible to attain this quality with this cinematic look?

Usually these cameras are used for a shallow DOF,( which also helps reduce the moire patterning artefacts when shooting video), so prime or fixed focal length lenses are normally used rather than a relatively slow (f stop wise) zooms intended for stills.

F4 on a 5D is going to be very much like F1.8 on a 7D. It's pretty darn shallow.

Pretty much in a ball park of each other, perhaps a bit more on the 5D at f4. But are people using the 5D shooting at f4 or are they tending to use wider apertures when shooting for commercials?

Certainly pulling focus would keep you busy..

Overall, the folks using these cameras in the industry are shooting at higher stops (i.e. more closed down) than folks in the indie world. I myself rarely go below a 2.8 and usually deeper, especially with the 5D. I'm always fascinated when I read about people raving about their f1.4 lenses. No clue how you guys are achieving critical focus, we have a hard enough time with it at a 4.

"Most professionals don't accept H.264 as a professional medium of source"

These cameras are in use on many high-end commercials, music videos etc. and make plenty of appearances on TV shows these days. No-one loves the codec or the other issues with the cameras, but it's the flavor of the month and they are being used for many surprisingly high-end jobs (like this Porsche one) where the budget could obviously manage a more "appropriate" camera. What we see more often than not is a camera package owned by a director or producer being brought to these jobs; they get the rental and that's that.

Somehow I'm not too surprised about the ownership of the camera package.

Overall, the folks using these cameras in the industry are shooting at higher stops (i.e. more closed down) than folks in the indie world. I myself rarely go below a 2.8 and usually deeper, especially with the 5D. I'm always fascinated when I read about people raving about their f1.4 lenses. No clue how you guys are achieving critical focus, we have a hard enough time with it at a 4.


Charles...
It's called FocusLite(tm).
It's new.
It's like critical focus, only not.
Since indie folks rarely rent HD monitors to check focus, and most indie DPs don't know the numbers on the lens mean something, no one ever notices 'till post, and at that point the editor (usually the director) is too scared to say anything.
So when someone asks "you sure that shot is in focus?" You can answer, "Yeah, it's FocusLite."

I should make a rail mount FocusLite device...

EPIC!!!!

FocusLite(tm),

I'll take one for each lens please!

Would be even funnier if it wasn't so damn true (like the Xtranormal clips like "cinematographer vs producer").

p.s. the numbers on the lenses DON"T mean anything, at least on still lenses. But point taken, the indie crowd is used to ignoring them anyway (they never meant much on a 1/3" camera).

Oh yeah, forgot that the indie crowd (and yes I include myself) never rent the lenses where the numbers mean something,.. just the ones with with the F-stop closest to 1...

FocusLite 2.0 is coming. It'll have a rear spoiler that goes up when your aperture opens past f2.8

One of the parlor games I occasional play to keep myself occupied on set when my focus puller runs out the tape measure is to try and guess what the distance is. My own focus pulling career was brief and uneventful (meaning I wasn't very good at it) and a hellaciously long time ago, but this sort of thing can rub off over time. It's fun to be able to estimate a distance within a couple of inches. Fun for me, because I don't have to do it for a living!

Every now and then I think about the scene in "The Shining" where Nicholson is running through the hedge maze and the Steadicam is preceding him in a medium shot. From what Garrett Brown has described (and I can well imagine), it was extremely difficult to run through ankle-deep styrofoam snow with the rig in Don Juan, taking corners and trying to keep Jack dead center in the frame, the way Kubrick liked it. But then I think about Doug Milsome pulling focus with the barely functional first-generation WRC-4 wireless controller (I had one myself years ago and it was all but unusable), running somewhere in front of Garrett, pulling focus all but blind. That shot was on a 50mm, no better than a 2.8 and probably even less, and yet when Jack leans into the camera, the focus is dead on--you can see it racking with him. Amazing job.

Sometime soon I'm going to start posting some behind-the-scenes videos--one of them will demo how the Preston HU3 is able to map the Zeiss ZE lenses so that instead of having 6 vague numbers on the barrel, it interpolates down to inches so you can pull focus with dead-nuts accuracy. It's sort of magical.

A full frame 35, *76mm lens at f1.4 (having an equivalent Angle of View to a 35mm motion picture 50mm lens) can't be too far off in depth of field terms to the f 0.7 50mm used on "Barry Lyndon, Also focus pulled by Doug Milsome.

Untitled Document (http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/sk/ac/len/page1.htm)

* I suppose the nearest to that being a Leica 75mm Summilux-M f/1.4

The camera is only a (small) part of what makes a movie look "cinematic"

Framing, movement, lighting, and overall composition are what make the "cinematic" look.

What it boils down to is you can have a RED Epic, an ARRI Alexa, Sony F35, or whatever the flavor of the month camera is, in inexperienced hands it will look amateur. I've seen a few indie films shot on RED that look absolutely horrible in spite of being shot on what's considered the holy grail of digital filmmaking.

Likewise, I have seen AMAZING results from a simple HV40.

It's whats in front of the camera and who's behind it, not the camera itself that makes a (video) look like a (film)