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In the meantime, here's another one: crazy reviewer, he doesn't give a damn for NDAs... No idea for you but to me it is a clear win-win, so bye-bye to my One X2... Let's not forget these guys are the same who have produced the Osmo Pocket 3. I agree with the guy. You risk to no lose anything when going with these people. Hard to beat them and their products IMO : ) Seems the time you can easily match these small capture devices to any other camera of your arsenal has finally arrived.

Looks like that was the same NDA footage from Benett Graezer that leaked on YouTube before July 31, not an official publisher review. The title didn’t really reflect the actual results, so it’s more of an apples-to-oranges comparison. DJI’s 10‑bit footage never showed those kinds of artifacts when handling heavily processed input on the X5. Either way, both sources have since disappeared from the web.

Context matters in film production. You have more context. What you possess through experience is an asset. --Might be a minor asset that doesn't really matter much, but it's certainly not a liability.

Sure, on the opposite. Right on the spot as @PPNS said :- )

There’s a whole language baked into those Hollywood classics frames: actors, wardrobe, blocking, lighting, set design… every element supports the tone. Even a single still says so much because it’s built around subject, not just color and grain. Also checked the Mexico & Tokyo Gawx videos. What’s cool there is how different the tools are (one shot on Fuji, one literally on an iPhone), yet both look super filmic. That’s not just the grade in DaVinci, it’s how he shoots. The variety of angles, the rhythm of edits, the way shots alternate between wide/symmetrical and close/intimate. There’s a real visual language there, and the music choices help carry the mood. Kinda Wes Anderson meets lo-fi travel doc. All of which kind of reinforces the point that gear and grading matters, but what you point it at and how you frame/cut it matters a whole lot more. Vintage lenses and power grades are dope, but the film look really comes alive when there’s composition, movement, and some intention behind the shots. As someone else mentioned above, it’s hard to judge when youre shooting plants or the kitchen. Nothing wrong with testing gear but cinema’s called motion pictures for a reason. If nothing’s moving, not the subject or the camera, it starts to feel more like still photography with a film LUT on top. You don’t need actors either, just find something with a bit of energy or make the camera do the work. For further inspiration, there’s a young travel filmmaker on YouTube whose shorts are very cinematic (albeit clean digital, not in any retro lofi aesthetic). I found him as I was looking for Canon R5ii 4K SRAW footage. This probably won't help you in the chased 35mm film anamorphic look aesthetic but in the end what really stood out is how mature his visual language and storytelling is, and his last video breaks down his inspirations and techniques:

After 4+ yrs of shooting on my trusty Nikon Z6 I decided it was finally time for an upgrade. I wanted internal 10 bit and better IBIS. I felt I had pushed my Z6 really hard and taken my due diligence to use it on tons of shoots and really make the most out of it, so upgrading felt fine to me haha. Originally got a Canon R7 and Sigma 18-35; I filmed a lot on a Canon R5 and loved it. I equally love the r7, decent lowlight for a crop sensor, great ergonomics and image, really fun camera to shoot with. But then I found the deal of a lifetime…a Panasonic S9 AND the 20-60mm for only $700?!?!? How?!?!? I’m fortunate to have a good reputable liquidation auction in my area and they happened to have the Panasonic S9 open box with this lens up for bid. I bid on it and won and am picking up today; if I love this camera, I return or sell the Canon R7. If I prefer the R7, I can literally sell the Panasonic for a profit. But seems like such an insane camera for the price even what it normally goes for on eBay. But $700 for this pair is insanity; I could sell the kit lens if I wanted to and be paying under $600 for an S9 body haha…now we are almost in what used to be Panasonic G7 pricing territory (my first camera). So pumped for this camera; I can overlook its flaws for how cheap it is for me. I never been use an EVF and I don’t take photos enough to really miss the electronic shutter or lack of a hotshoe. For me the excellent IBIS, full frame, lowlight, 6k open gate etc etc make this camera appealing. I ordered the smallrig cage with a grip; this will be my a-cam and I might keep my OG Nikon Z6 as a b-cam, since with the ninja v its full frame 10 bit image will match well with really any camera I get. But yeah, can’t get over how good of a deal this thing is. Picking it up from the auction today, will make a more detailed comparison post against my R7 and document what I decide to keep.

no one gives a rats ass about anything and most people in the industry have side hustles to survive or pay the bills.

Then, to go from the ridiculous to the absurd... But it's like that saying, all's well that ends well.. and Chopin seems to like it.

Sirui first light.... I'm not 100% sure I've done everything correctly, so take these with a pinch of salt. Also, the Sirui has a vND on it but the normal shots don't, so that might account for the WB and polarisation differences. The advice I heard was to set the taking lens to infinity and then focus with the adapter (single focus setup) but the AF on the taking lens seems to work just fine and Uncle ChatGPT says that setting the taking lens to infinity is more likely to be an optimal setting rather than the only setting that will work. Here's a shot where I set the adapter to minimum focus and then focused closer with the taking lens.. I don't think it's properly focused though, and the bokeh isn't squished much at all, so this is probably quite far from optimal settings, but also possible. Obviously I have a lot of testing to do, but if I can still use the AF to fine-tune the focus then that's even better as I can sort-of zone-focus with the adapter and then shoot quickly with AF like I normally do! Overall though, a very promising start.. despite it being so big and heavy!!

I guess to get the cinema look you have to do everything that feature films do, because if things didn't contribute to it somehow then they wouldn't be doing those things, so that makes sense. Whatever part of the look I'm chasing doesn't seem to require lights or even diffusion though, as demonstrated with the below video from Gawx: and to a slightly lesser extent, this one: Even this one still doesn't trigger my "amateur video" gag-reflex despite having many ultra-wide hand-held moving shots: They all seem to have this incredible texture and feel to them. In other news....

I kept this secret for almost 15 years because it wasn't about music, but now I’m looking for interesting features, short and docs to score, maybe it could be useful. Before becoming a film composer I was a stunt double and background actor in a film with famous people involved. The producer is one of Ferrari(2023) producers; costume designers also worked for Sarah Jessica Parker; I'm in several scenes with famous italian actors, and one of them collaborated with John Debney and Diane Warren. We have been together for a month so I could live the film making experience from inside, how it feels and how angry directors could become :D even if I was an actor and not musician (I was stunt double of a musician character anyway :) You can clearly see me in some scenes as myself and as stunt.

I couldn’t say for sure as it was 6-7 years ago, but it was mentioned that I believed it had some kind of sensor issue.

Just as a matter of interest. what grading did you suggest for this knowingly faulty kit?

I've sold them probably 15k+ over the years and just sold them 2 bodies and 4 lenses and they upped the quote on the 2 bodies even though I selected 'Excellent' for my OG quote, raising what they were going to pay me by nearly €150. I was 'happy' with the OG quote and wasn't expecting another cent...but I'll take it with thanks! No going back now, I'm now officially 100% L Mount. Didn't think that was going to happen and just 3-4 months ago, I would have said I would probably be 0% L Mount in 2026. And before some wit says, "you still might", even if you're paying, I don't think so, - never had a better set up and can't fault it other than one more tweak too the exact combo of bodies and lenses to make. There is nothing else comparable for me that exists at this time and if it did, it would only be a sideways move at a lot of expense, ie, pointless.

Greetings Everyone, More new free tracks are ready for you on my Fantasy 12 page: "DREAMY HOLLOW " (LoFi) "FOREST WEDDING " (LoFi) "KINGDOM IN DESPAIR" (LoFi) https://soundimage.org/fantasy-12/ As always, they're 100% free to download and use in Mp3 format with attribution. I hope some of my tracks are helpful! 🙂 OGG GAME MUSIC MEGA PACK - OVER 1400 TRACKS (AND GROWING) https://soundimage.gumroad.com/l/ylyre My Mega Pack contains over 1400 music tracks (and growing!) in higher-quality Ogg format. Great for video games, films, podcasts and more. This is a bundle of my genre music packs: Fantasy | Sci-Fi | Funny/Quirky/Weird | Puzzle | Chiptunes | Action | Dark / Ominous | Horror / Surreal | Misc These tracks sound almost as good as my original WAV recordings, but are much smaller in file size. Perfect for video games. Ogg tracks also loop better in game engines than Mp3 format. THE PACK THAT GROWS WITH YOU I add new music all the time and send users updates so you can download my newest tracks as I release them. As always, enjoy, stay safe and keep being creative!

Oh yeah, most definitely true! When I used Parsec in the past, it was when I was playing around with game streaming and that's often more latency-sensitive than something like using my video editor, though I'll also need to see how it is for frame-perfect transitions/effects that I want to align to audio. But for me, the use case isn't to reuse underpowered machines to backhaul to another machine - my M2 Max is powerful enough for anything I want to do (though I'm likely to buy an M5 something after they're released since my warranty on the M2 will probably be up around then) and I can just pick it up and carry it with me. For me, it's more about putting the editor on something with fast access to the underlying storage. Even though wifi has come a long way, it still sucks, in my experience, for editing high-bitrate footage from a nas (proxies would help, I'm sure). I'd be likely to still do color (and maybe fine tune audio/video sync edits) with the laptop on a wired connection through the dock, but as a silly example, I did a 48 hour film project a few weeks ago and at some point, one of the people is hallucinating some burnt toast talking to him. We ripped a little mouth in the bread. For the 48, I just warped the image for the hallucination, but now that I'm working on the extended cut, I'm animating the little mouth to move with the words. I suck at vfx since I barely ever do them and don't like them much so it took me a bit over an hour to get the first 3-4 words done. The next clip has about 10-12 words. They should go a bit faster now that I figured out what I'm doing, but... still probably a couple more hours. I'd rather do that lounging on the couch while watching a movie at night vs hunched over my desk. Maybe Parsec is my shortcut for that. That and there's another part with a transition that I can't nail down to where I like it, would rather play with that while comfy on the couch too.

Looks like someone decided not to wait for the embargo to lift before posting his review:

With Parsec, the key is efficient H.265 (HEVC) encoding and decoding. On my 2020 Intel MacBook Air, I’m seeing decode times around 9ms at its native resolution. On the other end, the M2 Mac Mini encodes the HEVC stream in about 8.5ms. Over Wi-Fi (on the Air), network latency hovers around 4ms. Altogether, that gives me a total latency just under 25ms—well below the 42ms frame time of 24fps video. In practice, it’s totally usable and, to my eyes, indistinguishable from working directly on an M2 MacBook Air. Most Intel Macs from 2017 onward support QuickSync, which provides solid hardware-accelerated decoding. The real game-changer, though, is the vastly improved encoding performance on Apple Silicon, which makes setups like this feel snappy and responsive. When using Ethernet—even at modest speeds—latency drops further (often below 1ms). Parsec can stream H.265 video with variable bitrates up to 50 Mbps, which is trivial for gigabit Ethernet. It also supports 10-bit 4:2:2 streams, though honestly, I can’t see a difference on my aging eyes—especially when using high-DPI iMac displays. For me, Parsec solves three major problems: Reviving modest hardware — especially for tasks like video editing. Enabling near-instant resource sharing — with Thunderbolt providing a pseudo-network connection up to 40Gbps between Mac Minis. Letting me work remotely — from the kitchen table, for instance, while the main setup runs in the basement. When you pair Parsec with BetterDisplay, the experience is nearly identical to working on the host machine—if not better. In my case, the iMac’s high-DPI Retina display actually gives me a superior viewing experience compared to using the M2 Mac Mini with a standard external monitor. Unless you're using an Apple Studio or Cinema Display, it’s hard to beat the visual quality of 4K, 4.5K, or 5K iMacs. Interestingly, the 2017 iMac Pro isn’t the best choice as a Parsec thin client. It lacks both QuickSync and the T2 chip, which hurts performance. If you're going this route, a standard 5K iMac (2017 or later) is a much better option.

You might be talking me into reinstalling Parsec and trying this out, but for different reasons. Usually I edit on my Macbook (The lower-end M2 Max) and it's totally fine, but when I'm at home, I prefer to edit off my basement NAS instead of from external drives and I use a postgres database on a server next to it. But if I don't plug into the network (which means sitting at my desk where the dock with 10ge is), editing video is not great (and editing photos in Lightroom ain't great either). But I have a windows gaming PC also set up near the desk which has a pretty decent setup with a nice GPU. I suppose I could just parsec to that while on the couch or in bed and do my editing, with the main catch being that I need to use Windows shortcut keys. That or I wait until there's a decent deal on an M4 Mini with 10ge (there have been some solid deals, but they're always for the base model with only 1ge)

I've been using the free version only. However, I did pay for BetterDisplay ($20)- for me, it's worth it and they did a hell of job that needs to be rewarded. I'll definitely have a look at this too. Thanks for that.

I often use Splashtop Remote Desktop when editing remote and its always been very reliable. My main use-case is making an edit on a windows machine hooked up to a bunch of media servers in one city and I'm in another city on a MacBook. It handles the keyboard mapping and display scaling extremely well. It also has support for multiple monitors, so I can plug the MacBook into 2 external displays and have all 3 screens mirror the 3 Windows screens. Or assign them to spaces if I'm using the MacBook without the externals. Another advantage, in my case, is it has the option to blank the screens on the remote computer, and runs through a secure network, so feels very safe if you need that. I'm curious about Parsec, but it seems to be a similar price for similar feature set. Since Splashtop is doing the job just fine, I'm debating if its worth the time to research and switch over. For colour depth, both say they're 4:4:4 so I don't think that's much of an issue.

If macOS ever supported multiple simultaneous users, I’d happily run just one Mac Mini and use 3–4 iMacs around the house as thin clients for the whole family. I’m confident the performance would be more than sufficient—as long as no one is editing video at the same time! Unfortunately, that’s not the case. But there’s nothing stopping me from setting up several iMacs as thin clients, each connected to its own Mac Mini. By placing the Mac Minis next to each other and linking them via Thunderbolt, I could enable ultra-fast access to shared resources—effectively building a small, high-speed local computing cluster with shared storage and plenty of power.

I’m not 100% focused on color accuracy here—I rely on scopes for that—since calibrating two machines in different environments is never going to yield perfect results. My main reason for using BetterDisplay is to match the exact 4096x2304 resolution of my 2019 4K iMac. Retina displays don’t play nicely with standard external monitors, like the one I currently have connected to the M2 Mac Mini. I’ve heard some users connect “dummy” displays to the encoding machine to force the proper resolution, but this setup with Parsec achieves the same effect. If I send a standard 4K signal to the iMac, it doesn’t look as clean—the image is upscaled and noticeably less sharp. With this setup, I just launch Parsec and connect to the M2 Mac Mini. What I see on the iMac looks almost indistinguishable from running natively on the 2019 i3 iMac with 8GB of RAM—except, of course, I get the performance of the M2 Mac Mini. In fact, I often forget I’m even using Parsec. I’ve accidentally shut down the Mac Mini thinking I was turning off the iMac! And the biggest surprise? I’m getting Thunderbolt 4-level performance on my media drives—despite using only a 1Gbps Ethernet connection. As long as latency stays below a certain threshold, the experience is virtually seamless. The iMac just becomes a glorified thin client- exactly what I want.

I never tried editing with Parsec, but it's a good idea! How does it handle color management? Or is that done by Better Display?

I'm putting this question out there to see if anyone else is doing something similar. I've been running Parsec over a modest 1Gbps home network, paired with BetterDisplay to ensure proper 4K+ 60fps signals are sent to my iMacs—while editing 6K video on very modest hardware. For those unfamiliar, Parsec is low-latency remote desktop software. With BetterDisplay, I can match the resolution to the native Retina display of my iMac, allowing me to work from two different locations in my home without needing multiple high-end machines—or a 10Gbps network. The end result? It feels like I'm using an Apple M2 Mac Mini directly on a 2019 4K iMac. Honestly, I can barely tell the difference. I’d estimate the latency is under 25ms with this setup. Now I’m curious—has anyone tried this off-site? I imagine cross-continent setups would suffer from latency, but within the same continent, it seems like remote editing could be entirely feasible. It sure beats lugging around terabytes of footage. For me, this setup has breathed new life into an older machine. I’m even considering picking up another iMac—maybe a 5K model from 2017 or later. With H.265 decoding not being too demanding and the M2 or M4 Mac Mini handling encoding with ease, it seems like a highly effective and budget-friendly workflow.