Sorry about that - I was under the impression there were adapters but they were expensive. I had not clue the "adapting" involved sending your back to Leaf to have the mount changed.
You learn something new every day!
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Bob,
That's not exactly the case as there are digital back adpateres by eco digital that will let you put a Contax mount Aptus on an RZ, or an H-1 to an RZ. They're expensive, but I've been told work well, though with the Contax there is little reason to go to another camera unless high shutter sync is needed, as since it has a focal plane shutter it will accept dozens of lenses some with adpaters.
As far as the sleep time with the Contax the camera does go to sleep after 30 seconds or so, (I've never really timed it), but the Aptus back stays on, so all it takes is a touch of the shutter and the camera is instantly ready to go, with no wait.
You get use to this very quickly and it saves on the battery consumption of the Contax which can be quite high depending on your shooting style and focus mode.
On the other question regarding the Leaf cable it's 14' but I also use a GoldX 15' firewive active extension cable that gives me 29' feet without adding addtional power.
As Yair mentions the Intel powerbooks have an issue with the firewire port voltage. Phase gets by this by using a battery to power the back, but since the leaf cable goes into where the battery would normally rest you must use a powered firewire cable on intel books.
This is one of the reasons I use 17" G4 powerbooks and V-8. I'm losing nothing as the capture speed is very fast, 1.2 or 1.3 seconds for the A-22 and the preview is also very fast in V-8.
Once apple gets a powerbook solution that doesn't require additional voltage for the firewire, and Leaf gets LC10 into a more stable and faster piece of software I will then make the switch.
Until then my workflow is seamless and very fast.
Tethered I shoot in V-8 to 17" G4 powerbooks and make tone, color and curve settings for each session. I shoot each session to a seperate folder.
For any renaming or sorting I use I-view as you can manually move the files and rename in an instance and for processing at 200 iso and below I use pscs-1.
I use 1 instead of cs2 because it doesn't require added activation if a computer goes down and I travel with two cloned and identical 17" G4 powerbooks.
Using Dr. Brown's batch script in CS1 I can batch process a full rez 16 bit tiff and a large jpeg at 17 seconds a file on the powerbook, so my workflow stays within one machine and one style.
For non tethered I shoot to cards, setting the white balance from the Aptus back which has a full operating system.
I usually shot non compressed, but the A-22 is pretty fast so that's not been an issue. If speed is required shooting compressed ups the frame rate and speed about 30%.
My Contax has the verticle grip which is the best verticle grip made, an rrs l plate and a rrs ballhead.
My system is stable, fast, cost effective. My refurbished powerbooks are almost half the price of any comparable intel book, the A-22 shoots a great file and as I've stated before with 9 lenses, two bodies and all the adapters my Contax costs less than a 1ds Mark 2.
For anybody that wants to use any of the mfdb's you MUST test them in your conditions and remember there is a learning curve to get the most out of any file.
I personally think the Leaf file is the most filmlike, but that is probably because I am so use to my system.
If you are coming from a dslr, it will take a while to get use to any medium format digital or film for that matter because it's just slower and larger, always has been, but for me it actually improves my photography to slow it up, rather than just keep shooting thousands of files trying to fix a problem that should be handled in front of the camera.
JR
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