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I like film and retro filmic looks, but shooting Super-16 (or even Super-8) is still an expensive PITA. After some testing of my equipment, I've realised that my GX85 has image quality equalling or surpassing a Super-16 film camera (with some categories surpassing a Super-35 film camera) so in my pursuit of a pocketable, portable, fun, simple, and fast setup that looks like film, this project is born. The criteria is to work out how to get great images from the tiny setup that are enough like film that most people would believe it if you said it was shot on film. My approach is simply to compare the two and find the biggest differences and then work on bringing them closer together, 80-20 rule and all that. The first point of comparison is already known, the crop factor is similar (2.2x vs 2.88x) so making sure I don't go too hard into shallow DOF then this should be comparable. Second consideration is camera movement, shake, and how they'll be used. S16 film cameras can be hand-held, but they've got some weight so are relatively steady in use. 8mm cameras were designed to be hand-held and are much lighter, so will move more. The GX85 is far smaller than either, but has IBIS (and OIS with some lenses) so that should make it feel larger, but I'll have to watch out for parallax, which will give away the cameras lack of heft. Third is the DR. Film has a huge DR and I wasn't sure how this would go - harsh clipping of highlights and blacks will be a dead giveaway. Without knowing anything about its rec709 profiles, I shot an exposure test where I took shots one stop apart. Film negatives have a lot of DR, but print film has far less, with stocks like Kodak 2383 only having about 5-6 stops in the linear range of their exposure (between about 10% luma and 90% luma, before the rolloffs kick in). Bringing in my test shots and matching the contrast within my standard colour pipeline (based around the Film Look Creator tool in Resolve) I realised the GX85 has enough DR to push its highlights well up into the highlight rolloff curve of the FLC, and same with the shadows, so this is fine too. DR, check! Fourth is resolution and texture. The images should be soft and noisy, but how much? After reviewing a number of sources, I realise that there are all kinds of factors, such as the speed of the negative, how it was exposed (0... or -1 and pushed in post, etc), but often the biggest factor in softness was the lenses used, and the biggest factor on the grain is the processing that the streaming service does when you upload it! In this sense, I have a lot of freedom in these aspects, but I'll have to do further tests on uploading to YT. I have seen videos that have really nice grain in 4K, so I know it can be done, but my previous tests showed the YT compression really changes things, so I'll have to do more tests. Then we're into testing with real images and just seeing what we see. My first test was some random shots in the garden, just to have a starting position. The feedback I got (including one friend who practically lives to talk about film!) was that it looked good but needed more saturation. My thoughts were that I exposed too high (I'd forgotten that the LCD is deceiving and the GX85 has a lot of shadow info) and as such the highlights in the first image were clipped in the file and still show in the graded image. After this test I happened to watch a YouTuber go through their grading process and they said they exposed by putting the image in the middle of the histogram, which made sense to me and I realised this is what I should do with the GX85. Second test was just a few images while out and about. It's the GX85 and 14mm F2.5 pancake lens. I'd previously forgotten this lens is both a 31mm and also a 62mm (with the 2x zoom) and so is much more flexible than I was remembering, so I made sure to include some 2x shots to see how useful that was with this level of image degradation. I also decided to push the images to get more of the kind of look I'm chasing. The 2x seems completely fine too, having quality far more than this level of softening will show. I also re-graded them in B&W, pushing the contrast much further. I may even want to go harder on these. Much more work to do, but I'm really liking the process so far. In these days of digital perfection, the attraction of film is in the colours and the texture. If you want the colours and not the texture, wanting to keep a much more modern level of sharpness and noise, emulating some of the properties of film is so ubiquitous that I think it's just called "colour grading". The phrase "film emulation" then is for the texture of film and deliberately wanting the imperfections and aesthetics of it. You don't have to go hard like I have with Super-16 film + Super-16 lenses levels of softening, but if you did this is easily possible too and FLC has 35mm presets which soften, but do so far more subtly than this. I'll continue to iterate on the colours and textures, but moving into moving images is probably next, with all the testing of the YT processing and compression that comes with that. But seriously, imagine telling someone in the 80s that you could fit an interchangeable lens camera capable of shooting feature-film level images in your pocket... Feedback welcome.

Back from a visit to Japan. We spent most of the time in a small town but went to Tokyo for a weekend, so I shot a lot in Tokyo and used the rest of the time to test a range of lenses I took just for that purpose. I tested the 12-35mm F2.8 for Night Cinema and it worked great and I loved the images, but as it got darker I kept cranking up the ISO and in the end it just didn't have the levels for the truly dark backstreets. I also tested the tiny 35mm F1.6 c-mount CCTV lens I got off ebay some time ago. It produced some really nice images in the right scenarios, but the plane of focus was so incredibly distorted that any scene with stuff off-centre in the frame would look really strange. It had more level than the 12-35mm but still fell short of my better options. My themes for the place emerged very quickly.... vending machines, bicycles, and lanterns. Anyone who has been to Japan will be surprised by this exactly zero percent. At this point we went to Tokyo and I treated it like a Night Cinema interval event, basically shooting as much as I could. I shot a whole sequence from the hotel window as the sun set using the Takumar 50mm F1.4 and SB, my go-to setup. I did a number of walks around the local area with the same setup. Each time I went out I liked using the setup more, and each time I reviewed the files I liked the images I got from it more as well. After China I was feeling like it was a bit too vintage / low-fi but I've really warmed to it since. I found myself a bit at odds with Japanese culture, especially in regards to the fervent dislike of badly-behaved foreigners and the locals dislike for being filmed in public (despite the fact no-one will tell you they don't like it), so I mostly filmed the place and not the people, or at least I didn't tend to film individual people, instead including them small in the frame, or en-mass, or out of focus. I think that lent itself to the cultural experience as well. The city, and to many extents the culture, dwarfs the individual, placing the focus on the group. As a tourist I can only glimpse the culture from afar, so taking the perspective of the outsider in the compositions is very much representative of the experience. My "big" outing was a walk from Shibuya to Harajuku on our last night there. As these places are known for youth and fashion and culture (and the counter-culture that fashion normally draws from) I concentrated on the grittier side of these areas. I also leaned into the layers and the overall chaos of the place, taking advantage of the Takumars ability to focus on a small slice of the chaos, both through the 70mm FOV and also the shallow DOF. Back in the small town I did more "test" walks with the TTartisans 50mm F1.2 (100mm F2.4 equivalent), the Helios 44M + SB combo (82mm F2.8 equivalent) and Takumar + SB combo for comparison (71mm F2.0). As the small town was much less dense I found the extra reach of the TTartisans to be useful, and the DOF was shallow enough to be useful at distance, and the image was much cleaner across the frame compared to the Tak. The Helios 44M was a different beast. I felt like I was fighting with it basically the whole time and came back from the shoot thinking it was a bust and I'd wasted an outing. The FOV often seemed wrong, it lacked the aperture to get enough light to the sensor and I was pushing the ISO a lot, the DOF was also deeper and so I found myself having to get closer to objects to get the separation I wanted, which then meant I was too close and the parallax motion from my hand-held movement was really distracting. The focus on my copy is very stiff and it is a very low gear so to go from distance to closer focus had the ergonomics of opening a jar where something sticky had gotten into the threads. Still, I got back from the shoot and lots of the images looked really nice, which I think is to do with the extra diffusion this has. It was also better behaved on the edges of the frame compared to the Tak too. One thing that isn't obvious from the frame grabs is the ghosting from the strong light-sources in frame, and because I shoot hand-held and have IBIS active, they move in unnatural ways. At first I thought they were coming from my vND but if anything they got worse on both the TTartisans and Helios after I took it off. I think due to this I'll have to lean into the imperfections in the grade and edit and go lo-fi, which is why I've applied a film emulation softening equivalent to 20mm film to the Helios footage. I also shot a lot with the iPhone 17 while there, normally during the day for non-cinema purposes, but that's a different topic for another time.

I use it both for my own films as well as I get hired to do music videos and events. I just finished a feature length experimental film shot entirely with it called Shapes, Colours, Patterns. (There's a trailer for it on my Tumblr. https://clarknikolai.tumblr.com ) I'm very happy with it, and of course the image from that camera is gorgeous. Something I've discovered with the Digital Bolex's footage, is that it looks the best projected rather than shown on an LCD screen. I'm now working on a new project. It's a narrative, collectively written, performed and crewed by myself and three other artists. It's set in the present day in east Vancouver where three artists are working on their art projects. The characters are based on the people involved and their real lives (but fictionalized so we have more freedom.) We're using French New Wave and Availablism methods. Quick half-day shoots. It's self funded, using what we have around us, the equipment we already own, locations we already have, etc. (I think so far all we've spent on it was some coffees.) I plan to enter it in to film festivals when it's done. Here's a picture with the camera mounted backwards on the shoulder rig. This is so the camera operator can walk forward while the talent is behind them and they don't need a spotter. It's tricky to learn how to move but it's going okay. It works fine with a wide lens but not easy when zoomed in (as you'd expect.) We have to flip the image in the monitor or it's disorienting.

The secret sauce is skill. As someone that used to make my living doing travel videography decades ago, this Brandon guy has really honed the judgement it takes to get the shots. There's so much going on out there in the environment and he's able to omit it, control it, and/or shape it into something impressive. It's really quite a thing to do. He could make any camera in manufactured in the last 15 years look similar to this. In fact, he has. This guy is a cinematographer that really knows how to chase the light, compose a shot, and also create advantageous serendipity. Which might sound like a paradox, but it really isn't. But, yes, images like this sell cameras. Okay, buy the camera if you'd like and start the path to making an edit like this. You can't buy his boots-on-the-ground experience though. He's casual about it all during his "how-to" segment, but it really is the biggest factor here.

Well, they just launched the Canon R6V, so I hope Panasonic enjoyed their 20 hours of PR!

So there are indeed some details in the video specs that will be of note to some. Internal RecordingH.264/H.265/MOV/MPEG-4 AVC 4:2:0 8/10-Bit 5674 x 2988 at 23.98/24.00/25/29.97/47.95/48.00/50/59.94 fps (200 to 300 Mb/s) 5184 x 3888 up to 23.98/24.00/25/29.97 fps (200 Mb/s) 4352 x 3264 up to 47.95/50/59.94 fps (300 Mb/s) 4096 x 2160 at 23.98/24.00/25/29.97/47.95/50/59.94/100/120 fps (100 to 300 Mb/s) 3840 x 2160 at 23.98/24.00/25/29.97/47.95/50/59.94/100/120 fps (70 to 300 Mb/s) 1920 x 1080 at 23.98/24.00/25/29.97/47.95/50/59.94/100/120/200/240 fps (16 to 200 Mb/s) H.264 ALL-Intra/MPEG-4 AVC 4:2:2 10-Bit 4096 x 2160 at 23.98/24.00/25/29.97/47.95/50/59.94 fps (400 to 600 Mb/s) 3840 x 2160 at 23.98/24.00/25/29.97/47.95/50/59.94 fps (400 to 600 Mb/s) 1920 x 1080 at 23.98/24.00/25/29.97/47.95/50/59.94/100/120 fps (200 to 400 Mb/s) Interesting to note that Panasonic have sidestepped the Micro HDMI bleating by just fucking it off altogether. Although it was playback only on the original anyway.

The GH5 has been my workhorse for almost a decade now. For whatever reason, the need to move on from it has never been necessary, so I've stuck with it. For instance, AF is not an issue. Manual focus is how lenses get used by me. Slow-mo is a thing to do less of, not more of, imo. A full 10 years on, what does a different camera offer; like really offer? An extra stop of exposure? An extra bit of DR? Looking at a GH7 the thought is, "MMM, pretty nice." But then what? A big difference in ... what ... gets captured? Maybe the market has matured TOO much for me?

No doubt. I have a 5DMII that I think still delivers in this regard as well. What I have is good enough for me, so I've decide, "Eh, I'll stay where I'm at." (for now) 😉

I heard this recently and think it's pretty interesting. I'm not sure if it's the best definition I've read, but it's more practical than other ones, so is useful from that perspective. “He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.” - Saint Francis of Assisi I'm 100% for not gatekeeping. Even from a practical perspective, saying someone/something is or isn't 'art' doesn't mean anything, and people who like to be critical are really just telling us about themselves, not the thing they're talking about.

Thank you. I'm glad people are liking it. It was a lot of work and took two years to make. Most of the time by myself, out in the city with a tripod and camera. I met a lot of people doing it since the camera looks unusual. (It's common in Vancouver to see someone filming as it's a big film production town and has six film schools but people out shooting usually have more modern squarish looking cameras.) The themes and aesthetic came out of the photography I had been doing for several years already. I had been framing buildings to make geometric shapes. This was basically adding motion to that series. The music was from a friend who had I got to know when he acted in a short I did a few years earlier. https://testcardmusic.bandcamp.com It hasn't had a festival screen it yet but it did get an award in Sevilla, Spain. https://www.instagram.com/seviff.spain/p/DUTcVcGDLq7/?img_index=16

Old cameras have a number of challenges, including: - weak codecs, often 8-bit low bitrate files - terrible low-light - dated colour science and no log profile (rec709 profiles only) - poor DR - lack of IBIS or EIS - etc At the time these were pretty significant challenges. Now they aren't the challenges they used to be, because fast lenses and film emulation assist with all these limitations. Let's take these one at a time. Weak codecs Weak codecs, including 8-bit low-bitrate files can be soft, and can be overwhelmed by motion. By shooting with faster lenses you render more of the frame out-of-focus and therefore the limited bit-rate only has to focus on a smaller percentage of the frame. Thanks to cheap Chinese optics companies, we are now awash in F1.4, F1.2, and even F0.95 primes. The soft image is now no longer a liability, because compared to our modern 4K sensibilities, even 35mm film is noticeably soft by comparison. This means that by adding film emulation you'll be softening those edges and smoothing over any subtle compression artefacts. Film often has a more compressed colour palette, pushing hues closer together in many instances, lessening the visibility of artefacts. It doesn't work magic, but every bit helps. Terrible low light Cheap F1.4, F1.2 or even F0.95 primes sure make a big difference after the sun goes down. That "fast" F2.8 vintage lens you were shooting on back then is 3 stops slower than these things now. That can really bring a lot of situations back from being unusable to being at, or close to, native ISO. Dated colour science and no log profile Rec709 colour profiles are basically a creative filter the camera has applied, and they often weren't that good. Film emulation takes that image and applies an incredibly large transformation over it, which goes a long way to hiding any imperfections the colour profile might have had. It's like if you put on a pair of rose-tinted-glasses, you can still see that things have different colours, but any subtle differences aren't visible because the image has had a strong look put over the top. Also, film emulation plugins often come with controls for exposure and WB etc, which can help to grade the 709 footage, which was a major pain back before we had colour management pipelines. Poor Dynamic Range You know what else has pretty poor DR? Print film! Kodak 2383 has about 5-6 stops in the linear region, and then everything else in the image is squished into the highlight or shadow rolloffs. Yes, you can see into those rolloffs a bit, but if your camera has 8 stops then you've got at least a stop to put into each rolloff. People think film has huge DR, and it did at the time compared to consumer digital cameras, but it was the negative film that had the huge DR, not the print film. It's very common now for people to shoot on film, scan it, and then do everything else digitally, so they keep the full DR of the negative, rather than taking half of it and pushing it into the rolloffs. This is a still from Minority Report from 2002: It's not exactly a dynamic range demo - the streams of light INSIDE THE ROOM are blown out and every item of clothing the main character is wearing is crushed blacks. Lack of IBIS or EIS So there's a little shake in the files... well, film had this thing called Gate Weave, which was where each frame didn't perfectly align in the camera and so when played back there was movement of the whole image. Once we started doing digital intermediates people started stabilising the images digitally and that went away. When I went to the cinema and saw Goodfellas projected on celluloid they played a bunch of old ads and movie previews also on celluloid, and some were jumping around all over the place and some were rock solid (which means the projector the theatre was using wasn't the source of it) and much to my surprise, Goodfellas itself had quite a bit of it. By just using modern tools you can now stabilise things pretty easily, but this will create artefacts if you do it too strongly (especially if the camera had bad RS), but applying film emulation gives you much more leeway. This is because you can stabilise the image, then apply some Gate Weave, and once the viewer notices your images look like film they'll potentially just accept the shake in the image as being part of the film look. By adding Gate Weave and getting some grace from the viewer you can potentially increase the strength of the stabilisation you're applying too, with there being more wiggle room, and also because the softening of the image will mean that any distortions in the image will be slightly less visible. I was inspired to write this partly from my GX85 Super-16 camera project, but also partly by this video of the GH2 shooting at night. You can still see the ISO noise and macro-blocking creep in as blue hour ends, but he was also using the 9mm F1.7 and 35-100mm F2.8, the F1.7 is reasonably bright, but the F2.8 is pretty slow compared to things like the TTartisan 50mm F1.2 or the 7Artisans 35mm F1.2 primes that are $109 and $97 on B&H. These won't offer OIS, so your options for these on non-IBIS cameras are to spend more (Canon and Sony both offer 35mm and 50mm F1.8 primes with OIS) or to use a tripod or larger rig of some kind. Far from perfect, but much more useable than you'd think. These cameras have actually gotten better over time as the rest of the ecosystem is better able to support them. The only reason we don't think so is that our expectations have inflated faster than their potential.

Here's a pic from a shoot I did last December. I don't know the brand of the shoulder rig (as I got it used on Craigslist), the EVF is the (sadly discontinued) Kinotehnik LCDVFE. The camera attaches to the rig with a Niceyrig quick-release plate (that has feet). The lens is a vintage Angenieux 17-68mm zoom with a screw on wide angle adapter, on top is a Niceyrig top handle holding an Audio-Technica stereo mic and a monitor mount. A bit hard to see is an attachment that goes below the rails between the shoulder pad and the grips for two wireless mic receivers.

https://www.43rumors.com/just-announced-new-panasonic-lumix-l10/ I wasn't that interested until earlier today when I went to set my S9 up for the imminent season only to discover the audio on it has stopped working. Or is at least intermittent enough I can't use it until it's fixed and as there is zero chance of that happening before my season starts and I am between 2 countries so which to even have it fixed in, is a bit of an issue. So ordered a used S5ii from @Andrew - EOSHD favourite used camera emporium to tide me over. But then, less than 2 hours later, my YouTube feed gets flooded by the Lumix Bros who have been on another jolly and...actually, as above, wasn't particularly interested as I had my S9 as my compact C cam and social media unit...except, this would work even better, so probably going to put a preorder in as they should be available in June. The only thing I find odd is that every man and their dog has a video or press release and the only one's who don't seem to have mentioned it yet, is Panasonic Lumix themselves. Same funny old Lumix marketing department 🤔

So true. Our training and experience give us an eye for composition and framing. Last winter when I was in Mexico, as a tourist, I started shooting with my iPhone. I thought it was boring so I used an app that replicates grainy, dirty Super8 and shot with that. I realized that I also needed shoot like another person. I needed naïveté in my shooting, so I chose "1960s dad with his Super8 camera". So, I did things like shoot the waves in the ocean with a slow pan to the shore, signs, cars going by, etc. It was refreshing not to have to be so perfect all the time. (Now unfortunately I have to edit it and the footage is not exciting me, but that's a different story.)

Let's change the subject. Terrance Malick is the most overrated boring director ever, adored by hipsters, hated by real filmmakers.

My understanding was that Brandon literally helped make the genre with (what I like to call) "washing machine travel films" like Hong Kong Strong that are like you rolled and spun a camera through a city and then cut it with only match-cuts - they trigger my motion sickness pretty strongly and I literally can't watch them. However, people loved it and he got a bunch of TV appearances out of it: As previously said in the thread, he can make any camera from the last decade shine, and he has, and it's skill. All true. What no-one else has said though, is that videos like this are film shoots. They're not holidays, or someone filming while traveling (even slow travel).. These videos are researched, storyboarded, scheduled, and then shot on location with a cast (him and his GF, but often he recruits locals and will direct them like he's shooting a narrative) and crew (IIRC he's mentioned hiring people to fix, drive, translate, liaise, etc). This is no secret, and his free BTS content shows this openly. I think he sits in a fascinating space that I don't see a lot of professionals operating in. He shoots uncontrolled (and uncontrollable) situations, like markets and crowded public places, does so with talent and a shot list, but does so shooting relatively low-impact. People shooting a travel doc will be shooting with talent in markets and in the streets but will have huge shoulder-rigs and will build up a little crowd of people who are just staring at the shoot and have to be choralled to keep them out of frame. People shooting relatively incognito in a crowd are mostly doing it without talent or a plan or shot-list. Not a lot of people sit between those two scenarios, and even less will tell you how to go about doing it. I've paid a lot of attention to his BTS segments (which are excellent if you want to make videos like this) but as someone who travels for the enjoyment of it and shoots along the way, I can tell you that there is very little overlap between shooting while you travel and producing and shooting and editing a travel film. I put myself on the email list for when he launched his course, and when it was released it was pretty pricey. Probably good value as he obviously knows what he's doing, but too much for me considering the differences of our methods. Maybe it's an aesthetic thing, but his work looks dated to me now, including the Oppo piece. I understand why he still shoots these things like this, because he's appeared on quite a number of videos like this that are posted on the manufacturers channel, rather than his own channel, so it's obviously how he keeps the lights on.

I originally read the title as “This Guy Makes Any Camera Shite” and thought my cloud account had been hacked. I enjoy watching Brandon Li’s stuff, particularly the self shooting ones. Self shooting as in shooting on your own as though someone else is shooting rather than self shooting in the vlogging context. Tripods basically.

Typing that reply certainly did make me warm even more to the LX100 and L10, but considering I have the GX85 and 14mm F2.5 already (and are therefore a FREE option!) it's pretty hard to beat for a number of reasons.. The size with the 14/2.5 is similar, and it doesn't get larger when you turn it on: As I edit in 1080p and am softening the image in-post rather than sharpening it, the 14/2.5 on the GX85 can be a 31mm and a 62mm (with the 2x zoom function) which are both absolutely awesome focal lengths for shooting how I like to shoot. I can easily bring other lenses if I am shooting something worth putting some effort into shooting (ie, it's not just an EDC opportunity). I've shot an absolute ton of tests on the GX85 so I know it inside and out. Like most of us here, I both crave the simplicity of having a fixed-lens setup that would do most of what I want, but I crave the choice and freedom of the options that an interchangeable lens mount provides!

It’s the Frank Sinatra of camera review retirements then.

I may have dreamt this but either in Flickr itself or an external site that used it’s data, you were able to search by EXIF so you could look at the extremes of the lens range and in this case it would be to display all LX100 images at 24mm f1.8 and 70mm f2.8 which was a more informative way to do it. People can fuck up the composition and the processing but even they struggle to overcome the physics. Welcome to episode two of the series! Fixed. The EIS is an additional crop as far as I can recall.

Unless of course they got me mixed up with Gerald Undone.

From Canon's support people, someone has to examine the camera to determine the level of work, but a rough estimate of prices, based on the perceived difficulty is: Minor = $269 Standard = $359 Major = $499 That's before my CPS discount on repairs which is, I think, 30%. So I guess that'd be $180, $270, or $340, give or take. Added to the approx. $1,500 below new price (and about $1,100 below most used prices I've been seeing), that ain't bad at all. (Though I do really need to sell something now, my gear list is getting ridiculous - anybody want a used Z Cam E2-S6G in good shape with a bunch of accessories including the eND?)

That's a key point. Or "Kye" point, if you will. My handheld shooting drifts and sways a bit, as I like that sort of kinetic visual energy. Not all IBIS handle this camera movement AND stabilization elegantly. Rapid shifts of the image that are unwanted can happen. Fuji is a disappointment in this regard and it makes shooting my style of video with my X-T5 pretty much useless. Meanwhile I can "dance" pretty good with LUMIX and Olympus.

For those interested in small setups, in modestly priced gear, in non-clinical rendering of images, in very fast lenses, in vintage lenses, or older equipment, we exist in a space that has no quantitative reference. There are no numbers to look up and understand things from. It applies to the equipment: Questions like "how sharp is that lens?" don't have an answer (that is intuitive anyway - MTF charts aren't intuitive and often aren't reliable or even available). Even if it did, that answer would only be true at one aperture setting, and even then, is only true for the middle of the frame or the edge of the frame, but not both at the same time. If we shoot at base ISO with a 4K camera then we'll likely get an image with roughly 4K resolution, but at higher ISOs the effective resolution will likely drop due to ISO noise, NR, compression, etc. If we use filtration, like diffusion filters, then these lower the effective resolution of the image. It's literally what they're designed to do. How much do they do this though? Not only is there no published answer to this, but the answer changes depending on focal length, sensor size, etc. It applies to the look we're creating: Any colourist working creatively will be trying to create an image with the right amount of resolution / sharpness / noise / etc, not just "the sharpest" or "the highest resolution". How much is desired? What are the references? I've been struggling with many questions from my own equipment and projects, including: My TTartisans 17mm F1.4 is less than half the weight of my Voigtlander 17.5mm F0.95, but the TT is quite soft at F1.4. How soft is it though? Is it too soft? If I want to shoot low-light with the GX85 (which has terrible higher-ISO NR) then what ISO setting is too soft, and then which lenses do I need to use in which environments to get enough light into the sensor? My Takumar 50mm F1.4 on my generic M42-MFT speed booster has pretty soft edges, but how soft? You'd think the solution to these would be to look at the footage and decide, but (for me at least) it's a double-edged sword because I also don't know what final images I want! I have spent a good amount of time looking at Hollywood films and big budget TV shows (see the original The Aesthetic thread) but apart from just going "I like that" and "I don't like that" we have the problem once-again of there being no way to quantify things. Saying "this show is softer than that show" really doesn't help. My solution is to reference things back to film. I originally did this with my Panasonic GF3, which shoots 1080p so soft you could cut it with a wet noodle, by comparing it to the presets in the Film Look Creator tool for 8mm and 16mm film I concluded that when the GF3 didn't show macro-blocking due to the (very low) bitrate, it was about the same as 8mm film. This was actually a really useful reference for me, because the associations I have for 8mm and 16mm film are quite useful. 8mm film has an aesthetic that is very nostalgic and low-fi, but was never good enough for TV shows, let alone the cinema. My new plan is to reference everything back to film, across quite a number of ways... Texture, which is what I've talked about so far: - I will be trying to "map" my lenses and cameras and codecs to a specific resolution of film (16mm, 35mm, somewhere in between) - I will be trying to "map" my aesthetic preferences to film too, like wanting a certain project to have the resolution of 16mm for example, but further than this - the size and amount of grain can also be a useful reference. These are useful references for me because a lot of the aesthetic references of cinema I have were actually shot on film and so by associating these things back to film it's a relevant reference, not just some arbitrary scale that isn't directly related. Dynamic Range and Contrast: - How does the DR from the GX85 look when put through an image pipeline in Resolve compare to the contrast of a 250D -> 2383 process? - What about the iPhone vs a 16mm process from the 90s? or a B&W process from the Italian Neorealism or French New Wave period? Contrast and DR should be relatively easy to match to various film stocks by just shooting some over/under exposure tests and adjusting my standard Resolve colour pipeline to match what is in the spec sheets. Speaking of spec sheets, not only do the spec sheets for motion picture film contain the Sensitometric Curves that show DR and contrast, but they also contain the MTF curves too as a reference for resolution. When it comes to resolution you don't need to look at the charts though - I asked some film geeks I know to comment on the FLC presets and they said that the 8mm / 16mm / 35mm presets in the Grain panel have about the right amount of image softness and amount of grain (but that the character of the grain isn't accurate), so the FLC is a reasonable reference for the texture of film in a very broad sense. What else? Image stability is another one. 8mm film cameras were larger than modern compact cameras so were more stable with the lenses they were normally fitted with, but 8mm had pretty terrible gate weave (alignment from one frame to the next) so having micro-jitters from hand-holding is compatible with the look. Whereas 16mm would have had more mass and less gate weave but at least at first would have probably been shoulder mounted or on a tripod, so some types of shots / angles will be more compatible with the aesthetic than others. Depth of field is another one. Lots of people think the "Super 16mm look" just means deep DOF, but it's more nuanced than that, as the lenses typically used would have some separation in low-light when focused closer, but due to the lenses at the time the shots might have been softer wide-open, so that's another relationship to understand. There are lots of other parameters that make an image that aren't covered here, but I am finding that getting some kind of reference for texture and contrast fills a very large gap in the landscape for me. The goal isn't to accurately emulate anything, its to develop a keener understanding of the spectrum these things exist in. Where I'm hoping to get to is to be able to develop summaries like: The GF3 is about 8mm at base-ISO, which during the day is equivalent to <some particular F-stop>, so I can put basically any lens sharper than 8mm onto it and the result will still look like 8mm. I can hand-hold this tiny camera with an acceptable level of shake up to about Xmm and it'll still fit the 8mm vintage / amateur / nostalgic vibe. The GF3 is tiny but once you add a lens that is larger than a pancake then I may as well use the GX85, so the only sensible lens is the 15mm F8 bodycap lens. Any other combo doesn't make sense. (This is an actual example I've worked out through testing). The GX85 at base-ISO is equivalent to <film size of some kind.. 16mm? 24mm? 35mm? 50mm?> which requires lenses of <F-stop> during the day and <F-stop> in well-lit night environments. This amount of resolution is suitable for projects with a vibe of <gritty street? vintage? night cinema? high-end commercials? etc?> but not other vibes. (This is still yet to be tested, but once I've worked out the camera then certain lens combinations will reveal themselves to make sense and others will obviously not work) iPhone? Where does it sit in all this? It has huge resolution and very strong codecs (4K Prores HQ or even Prores RAW) but poor DR and even worse ISO performance. GH7. What are the aesthetics I want to create that I can't create with the above (because the above is too limiting). What lenses and shooting styles and approaches are required for these aesthetics? The ultimate thinking is developing "constellations" where there is compatibility / alignment between: a camera, one or more lenses, certain shooting situations and techniques, an image pipeline, and a target aesthetic. I've been working on finding these "constellations" by starting at the camera and working forwards, but also by starting with the end aesthetic and working backwards, and I've identified a number of partial matches, but I think that by relating everything back to motion picture film, I can make more progress fitting the pieces together.

This is why, for me, there are two likely ways to use it: 1) My small bag full of C-mount and D-mount lenses and possibly attach it to the smallest 5" monitor that I have (which is quite small) 2) Throw it in my bag where it takes up almost no space and attach it to the back of existing short telephoto lenses which now function like long telephoto lenses

There's a colleague in my town that is trying to make "animation" films with 100% generative A.I. What would Francis conclude about someone working without 'hands' and 'head'? Or at best, no hands and half their head. Like Gerald, this colleague is hoping he's able to maintain a financially rewarding YouTube channel. It could be that he is jumping on the slop-train. But, on the other hand, at least he's making a novel effort production-wise to try and pay his bills. Whereas, my naive thinking is that there's still a chance my documentaries will be, somehow, someway, financially rewarding. And, even though that's unlikely, making docs is at least creatively fulfilling.

Luc Forsyth likes it, or what he saw at NAB anyway. This is a setup they had with a broadcast servo-zoom lens on it. His comments (link with timestamp) He's worked on the survival show Alone for a few seasons and they use dozens of GoPros, but the footage always looks like it came from a GoPro This new model with a proper lens attached looked like footage from a real camera The broadcast zoom setup (with a phone as a monitor) handled like a proper camera He doesn't use AF when rigging cameras to vehicles etc most of the time so the lack of AF doesn't bother him in that context

You'd think so, but no! If you're using like an f/1.2 lens, you can have surprisingly big dust spots on your sensor and never be any the wiser. The more stopped down, the more they appear. From what I remember, and I might be wrong about this, it's bascally the same effect as using a large diffuse light source vs a small point source - put your hand next to a white card near the large diffuse source and you'll get a blurry, indistinct shadow. Do the same with a small point source and you'll get a well-defined crisp shadow. It's the same on a smaller scale with sensor dust.

Well, I appreciate the mental exercises you're putting yourself through. The questions are interesting. Still, at the end of the day everyone's process is a bit different. Since arts and crafts are subjective, quantifying how those two things merge is only useful up to a point, imo. And, of course, that point is usually wildly different for all of us doing this stuff. I'd ask, do you really wanna chase what that means? It might always be ephemeral as context changes; slipping out of reach. And shouldn't such meaning remain in the realm of intuition anyway? Then again, maybe not. At least not for everybody. Perhaps being in a space without firm answers isn't interesting to you? Maybe striving for technical contentment at the limits of understanding is the thing you enjoy. That's cool too. Engineering can be artful in it's own way as well. Either way, keep poking around.

Good write up! I've run the gauntlet as well. My conclusion is that what you wrote above is the thing that'll get me through, so I accept it. And why not?

Rushes vimeo killer

Surprisingly modern sounding name for a Stone Age artist. I was expecting something more like Og.

There's a realisation I keep hitting in my setups, despite me trying to keep a small kit. It goes like this: Start with a small camera body Think about the lenses I'd use with it for that project Think about the shooting style and approach and think about extra rigging and accessories that would require ----<realisation occurs>---- If the setup is going to be that big - why not use a larger body with better features / quality I'm having that realisation with this GoPro. Not that there's a ton of small bodies with 10-bit recording, which we've all complained about at great length, but just having a camera body with more than 3 buttons and a screen that is larger than a postage stamp etc is actually quite useful.

the ancient cave art far exceeds a 5 minute "doodle" in a boring algebra lesson ! It is highly probable the location were meeting places that held spiritual meaning .Also a lot of planning and time and effort to create them even involving "spray painting" ! The creation of prehistoric cave art in France, such as the masterpieces found in Lascaux and Chauvet, was a highly labor-intensive, complex, and "painstaking" process that required immense skill, preparation, and specialized knowledge. Artists worked in dangerous, deep-underground, and pitch-black environments using only flickering torchlight or fat-burning stone lamps. The creation process involved several steps: Preparation: Artists often scraped or smoothed the irregular limestone surfaces before painting, and sometimes used scaffolding to reach high ceilings, as indicated by post holes and rope marks in caves. Sourcing Materials: Pigments were sourced from local minerals, including iron oxide (red and yellow ochre) and manganese dioxide (black). These had to be found, transported, and ground into fine powders. Techniques: Artists utilized multiple methods: Painting: Brushes were likely made from animal hair, twigs, or plant fibers. Spray Painting: Pigment was blown through hollow bones or reeds to create a spray-painted effect on the wall. Engraving: Sharp flint tools were used to incise outlines into the rock. Has anybody been to see the IMAX film "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" ? photo is attributed to wikimedia

Why should we limit what we consider art, though? Is that not gatekeeping, saying one thing is art but something else isn't? Going back to cave drawings, do you think the folks who made those thought they were creating something that would stand the test of time, or do you think they were just expressing themselves using the medium available to them, with zero regard for people who would later find them to be soul-moving and spiritual? Art is art, regardless of the impact or scale. Just some art holds more value than other art. Also, if we are judging content and it's merits on the profound impact it has had on people, for better or worse, there are a lot of 30 second reels that have had an enormous impact on society. My old snow plow guy, who never even graduated high school, thinks he knows more about vaccinations than medical professionals because he watched a couple 30 second TikTok reels that told him they are bad. He also thought Donald Trump was going to free thousands of children from sex trafficking, that Joe Biden and the deep state stole the 2020 election, and that COVID was a man made disease meant to depopulate the earth and enslave the rest of us.

Ok I'm more interested, now that its got a mft mount. I feel that alone will elevate the litle gopro to next level for a lot of people. The open gate mode sounds interesting and i would like to pair that with my 24mm sirui anamorphic. No idea how that would turn out but it does sound interesting and then there's 3 other mft lens i own and a whole bunch of vintage glass to play with as well. Looks like gopro have a whole range of accessories to buy as well, tailored to fit, for that integrated look. Cant blame them for that i guess and it kinda cuts out the others from getting a slice of the pie... I like the concept so far.. still unsure about the photo and video file types. Apart from saying its 10 bit, there's not much to go on. I just hope theres some flexibility built in and the ai doesn't just burn a lut in 🙄. Abit pessimistic i know, but i'm not a fan of the default settings from gopro for things like sharpness and saturation. So i'm still not preordering. I'll wait for some initial reviews, and then hopefully wait for some more before i do anything rash...

Oh, thank goodness Zoom finally have a reasonable accessory for timecode shoots. For a bit now, the worst thing to hear from an audio engineer has been "I use a Zoom F3." "Guess I'll hope waveform sync works in post, then..." 😅

I mean, the people who drew simple cave drawings probably didn't expect people to view their doodles as art pieces thousands of years later, but here we are. Gatekeeping art is silly because it's not just wrong to do but its such a futile thing to do. Art isn't just what people will remember, it is expression! And it's all around us, from beautiful architecture, to statues, to murals, to kids drawing on the sidewalk with chalk. It's in the biggest music halls, all the way to the local dive bar or coffee shop hosting a singer-songwriter who just likes to sing his songs on a Friday night to a couple dozen listening ears. It's in the giant cineplexes playing the biggest films, to the small theaters that show foreign or low budget films, all the way to the phone someone is holding on the bus plays a random YouTube or TikTok video. Not all of it has the same value or meaning, but it's all still art. Don't try and gatekeep it, or try and tell someone that what they created isn't art just because it doesn't appeal to you.

It's a really interesting quote and comes down to how much of your hand and heart you're willing to delegate to a machine that doesn't know what art is, but the paradox is it has absorbed and computed into numbers nearly every piece of art in the world ever made. Interesting times to say the least. I doubt it's about money, I think his existing camera channel was doing superbly well in terms of bringing in the cash. I really just do think he's had enough creatively, because he built a creative dead-end for himself.

Matt, that half-cropped head makes it even funnier. @kye great post! ; ) :- )

When I was learning calligraphy, an Arabic one, wich is very hard to learn and needs a specialized pen, my mentor used to say to us "an artist can write perfectly even with matchsticks, don't be obsessed with pens". Later on I realized he has an expensive collection of pens, from cheap ones to exotic ones, old and new, and in all possible sizes. He wasn't obsessed with gear. You could give him a philips screwdriver and leftover construction paint and he could manage to write a poem with that on a wooden pallet. But he also had a passion for gears, because pen is something that connects him to the art he loves.

Exactly. Not all art is equal, but I think it's the last thing we should be trying to gate keep. Art, and the creativity that fuels it, is the ultimate form of expression and something NO ONE can take away from us. Just not all of us are as creative as others, but that's okay!

"Max Yuryev left the chat room"

I think where we disagree is on the term "art." I think doodling on a piece of paper is technically art. It's not at the same level as the Mona Lisa, but neither are the goofy songs I sing to my dogs equal to "Stairway to Heaven." It's all still art, though, some is just more creative (and better) than the other stuff.

Getting good affordable 960p would be cool for lots of people. I see the science explainer channels showing bad quality 960p and the richer channels with Chronos setups. Don't get me wrong about them not being cameras that appeal to a large number of people. They're very good for getting the new "EVERYTHING IS AWESOME AND WIDE AND SMOOTH AND DEFINITELY SHARP SHARP SHARP!!!!" style of video that looks more like video than anything ever made before, but as soon as they say it's a cinema camera, there are 27 things they have to change from every other model ever made, and to bet they'll get every single one of them right is a very long shot indeed.

This is why I've never put my work on YouTube (and some people were suggesting that I do). I've had enough rejection in my life, I don't need to set myself as a target for more. Who needs to show the world their baby they put a lot of care in to making just to have some dweeb say that it sucks or something.

It would not surprise me in the least if Mattias packed it all in due to: A. Having a YouTube channel can be very taxing, especially if trying to do it as a business rather than just for fun as it’s a beast that never stops increasing it’s appetite, plus, B. It can get so toxic in the comments and most take it too personally and it only takes one or two toxic trolls and it can stress them out so much, it ruins it for them. Based on a couple of pals and their own YouTube experience…

Hello all, Since I switched to photography I no longer use this amazing lens. It's a full zoom through (no diopters needed) 1.33x anamorphic lens. It hasn't been modified, but that can be done relatively easy. Since it's such a large lens it can be used on a variety of mounting systems. It has the Sony bayonet mount, comes with the original lens cover and also still has the original screw to tighten the lens. Lens itself is in great shape, so are the mechanical parts. Everything working perfectly! It's in great shape since I have always cared for it as best as I could. This lens used to be my baby and I long thought about keeping it since it's so rare. Then again, it deserves to be used for creative purposes. This video (created by Tito) is a good review of it. I'm looking for $1475,-. I can accept both PayPal or a regular bank transfer. I'm willing to ship worldwide, preferably insured however. So depending on where the buyer might live, shipping costs may differ. Shouldn't be that much really. All the best, Niels

I just did. Here is what Charlie Chicken thinks, "Thank you for asking me. I think Germany as a country is setting a good example to the rest of Europe by welcoming in immigrants. However it could also be to recover for their treatment of Greece, with an austerity plan that has been disasterous for that country. I think maybe it's time for the EU to end. It was an interesting experiment but ultimately the bond between countries is not where it should be and unlike the USA where each state ultimately tries to help the others, as there seems to be years of hostility built up, also perhaps echoing the paranoia of World War II, especially that of Germany's history in the way, teaming up with Italy and occupying France and bombing the UK. I don't know if what happened less than one hundred years ago is not still part of the struggle between your countries, especially with Germany as the "banking" leaders of the EU. Of course the US had the Civil War and this still affects us, in differences between the North and the South - but I think overall we worked through these differences especially since the North is just as racist as the South. "The underlying tension between nations in Europe combined with the incredibly high unemployment of its people, especially young people, in many European countries may in fact be affecting the moods of its citizens younger people. While I don't know much about you personally Patrick B. Rau, it is possible some of your "online" use of a "swear" word is a result of situational stress and emotion caused by economic unshakiness. But maybe not - who knows - online, we are all just reflections and projections of whom we really are. Woof."