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I thought/assumed that the choice of cameras for f1 were similar to the reason that studios have been using Ronin 4D for a bunch of stuff - and why the last couple of Mission Impossible films used Z Cams for the stunts - because there's no Arri that could possibly fit in the places where they put the custom Sony cameras (just as there's no Arri that can be usable on a gimbal as quickly as the R4D can be ready and because there's no Arri that can fit in a lot of the places that the Z Cam does). It's not to say that the Venice line isn't really good, it certainly seems to be, but on a movie with a budget of $100,000,000, the difference in price between shooting on Alexa and shooting on Venice is basically a rounding error.

Its been a standard practice in telecom industry for decades. You want to provide service to 2x wireless users? You need to upgrade your license: X dollars. But that works pretty well for them because its an enterprise world and the hardware they're selling is not something you could buy an alternative from Amazon. Arri is selling a device that is surrounded by rapidly approaching sharks that already ate its lunch in commercials, music videos, and documentary segments of the market. And I don't buy this cliche of "but studios afford that". Did you see what they used for f1 movie? Studios have a lot of money to spend, but they're not stupid.

Curren Sheldon (documentary filmmaker/DoP) did some testing with the S1 II and the S1R II for overheating. For those of you who are in countries that don't use freedom units for temperature, 80F is about 27C and 92F is about 33C. tl;dw - On a hot day sitting in the shade, neither the S1 II nor S1R II overheated after recording for hours. With the camera sitting in the sun on a hot day, both could overheat after a while with the times being really similar when configured the same. Using a dummy battery and external SSD makes a big difference. If you need to roll long takes (10+ minutes) with the camera sitting in direct sunlight on a hot day, neither is the right camera for you (really, very few cameras are going to work for you here). If you're shooting indoors or are able to put the camera in the shade, both are fully capable of very long recording times without overheating.

I'd like to know too, especially about the S1II and using the Rec709 profiles (Natural specifically). Everyone who's reviewed the S1II has done so using V-Log or Raw. I've read that it's not quite as aggressively digitally sharp as the S5ii/S5iiX but still showing some heavy NR and smoothing of fine details. I might have to get a loan of one for myself to see whats what.

I was with you on "it's OK to have a license as long as there's an option for perpetual," but this is the part where you're losing me. Subscriptions, as currently implemented by companies like Adobe, are actually extremely consumer-hostile. You're right that it's good to have an ongoing source of revenue, but you're completely ignoring that they now have no impetus whatsoever to build features that people actually want. If I have Lightroom 5 and Adobe release Lightroom 6, I can look at the features that were added. If none of them are something I want, I keep using Lightroom 5. If Adobe completely misses the mark with customers, few or no people buy version 6 and they are forced to course correct or go out of business. If they go out of business, the copy of Lightroom 5 that I have keeps working forever. Maybe eventually it won't run on a new computer, but I have virtual machines or my old computer as options still. In a subscription world, I pay Adobe every month to keep using the software that I already have. They can waste as much time and money as they want on shitty new features that I don't want or care about. I still have to pay for them. They want to spend 1000 hours developing an integration between Lightroom and a stock photo site so they can pull extra revenue through a deal with the stock photo company? I don't care and I'll never use it. But I'm still paying for it. The company spends a bunch of time integrating their own cloud service which would charge me even more money to store my files? Don't want it, probably will never use it, still funding the development. If a competitor has different features that I want, I can certainly move to their software, but unless the interface is identical to what I'm used to, now I lose time and effort re-training on how to use the other software. They know that a lot of people aren't going to take that time and effort so the money keeps flowing in. Plus maybe I've spent hundreds of hours in something like the Lightroom catalog rating and tagging things or doing some other activity that isn't necessarily stored in the XMP sidecar (not sure if ratings and tags are) and moving that to another software package would eat a ton of my life. Stop using the software for a while? Sometimes subscriptions are easy to pause or stop, but a lot of times, they are a pain in the ass to stop. Once again, extra money keeps flowing in because people forget the subscription or give up on cancellation because they'll probably need it again sometime in the future. You are arguing against yourself here. If I own the software and it doesn't have to check a central license server every time it starts up, I can open my files in perpetuity. Virtual machines are a thing and allow running older software basically forever. On the other hand, if I had a file created in some version of Adobe's software in a format that isn't supported elsewhere (not sure if this exists) and I don't pay a ransom to Adobe, those files are now dead to me. Also, if Adobe decides to stop supporting that software because not enough people are paying the subscription, those files can never be opened again. Go offline for a month because you're traveling in the middle of nowhere and/or don't want to pay for a local sim? Sucks to be you, you won't be editing anything after a few days because the software can't phone home. This is increasingly a concern in the gaming industry as well - there's even a petition and a movement within Europe about it at https://www.stopkillinggames.com/ Companies intentionally build their games to require an online connection and if it's gone, the game stops working. Meanwhile, eventually most people stop playing and it costs money to run/patch/maintain the servers so the company turns them off. Wanna play that game that you loved a few years ago? Too bad. Even if you have it still installed on your computer, it now serves no purpose other than to waste disk space. Anyway, Adobe announce record profits all the time. I'm still using Lightroom about like I was 10 years ago. I should probably try Capture One again. I have kind of hated it every time I installed it, but at least their model is less offensive - option for a perpetual license or subscription, and if converting from subscription to perpetual, some of the subscription costs are prorated toward the purchase.

In Arri's case they offer (1) Alexa 35 with all features included in the purchase price, (2) Alexa 35 base model with the most commonly used features enabled, and (2a) subscription to optional features that you may need for a specific project, (2b) permanent licensing of those features that you want to keep, so the subscription is just one option and permanent licenses to those features are available if you want them. I don't understand what the issue is. Having more options in how the payment is made is good and means more people/companies will be able to afford the stuff. No one is complaining that leasing or renting cars (or getting a taxi ride) are available in addition to the option of purchasing and owning a car. Public transport tickets are available on a single trip, load value, or pay for use for a period of time basis. Again no one is complaining about the existence of these options. Why then is subscription software or firmware as an option a problem? I think people are complaing about these things because they don't understand that software development costs money and if you want to continue developing a particular piece software in the future you probably need to keep those same people who developed it continuously employed so that you can do it efficiently in the future. If you have to let the people who developed something go, to add features, the cost is multiplied because no one new initially understands the existing code. The subscription model works best for software because it enables continued employment so the knowledge of how the software works internally is not lost. Today since operating systems are continuously changed, the applications software also needs frequent maintenance. So for Adobe the subscription model works best. They are able to maintain broad hardware support and have a huge library of cameras and lenses that are supported in terms of raw processing and lens corrections. The subscription cost is really low for the (still) photography software kit (LR + PS) and while the other stuff is kind of expensive, it was always expensive even in the then-thought-permanent license era. And as there are free or inexpensive options available for the tasks which Adobe prices expensively (Davinci Resolve instead of Premiere Pro), there is something for everyone available in the market. What would be much worse is that people rely on a particular product and have a lot of material made with it and suddenly those files could not be opened or edited as a result of the company making the software ending their operations or support of the product.

er, sorry to take you away from your 35-350 big boy toys 😉 however I'm looking for a smaller lens, preferably with a distinct yellowing. which means thorium glass i think. Got my eye on either the takumar 35mm f2 or the 58mm f1.2. However if you know of others let me know. From my research they seem to be guaranteed thorium glass. Of course they are not the only thorium lenses out there. Just easy to get i guess. Although easy to get is relative where ebay is concerned. I kinda like the taks in m42 mount as its easy to adapt to m43 and i already have a few of them. Main reason to get one is i'm thinking of using it for sunsets. I'm hoping the yellowing adds a bit of a kick to a sunset. I could buy a cheap yellow filter, and i probably will for comparisons however that seems like cheating to me and not terribly authentic in the scheme of things. I was liking the 58mm f1.2 for awhile except by the time i mount it to mft it becomes more like a 120mm with the crop and i'm not that interested in a telephoto at the moment. I'd also have to buy a metabones speedbooster 0.64 to bring it back to a more reasonable view and i'd like to wait a little bit longer before i pull the pin on that particular purchase.

Has anyone been able to assess how the fine details are processed here? I'm wondering how the footage looks compared to the original S1 or S5?

Looking after my brothers place for a week, while he goes on holidays with his wife. I decided I'd do some unscientific observations with my assortment of cameras. I did take the e-m1 yesterday however it didn't quite go to plan. So i'll redo that before the end of the week. There's quite a few different animals to "shoot" hopefully you all get a bit of a different perspective for a bit. A frame grab from the iphone 13 pro max. i shot 4k then resized it to hd for convenience. I thought it turned out ok. Frosts tend to kill off the grasses, there's a bit of green around but not much.

I only made it about 5 minutes through the video before I got bored with it so maybe he addresses some of this after that. But I'm not sure why it's news that Arri give people an option to buy the full camera or a base model that disables some features until they're enabled. That's been a thing for a long time. When one buys the base model, there are options to pay to enable those features on a temporary or permanent basis. It's one of the reasons that when you see used Arris for sale, they'll frequently say things like "includes high-speed license" or "includes raw license." Speaking for myself, I kind of hate subscriptions in general for this kind of thing, but that is very much mitigated by having the option for a permanent license. I still don't like it a lot since (in most cases), it's not really reducing the camera price. In the case of things like the GH4/5, it's not like Panasonic would have needed to charge more for the camera if they just threw in vlog-l. In Arri's case, I suspect that the decision was pushed by big rental houses - if I'm a rental house, a reduced cost base model lets me buy more cameras. Add a license to enable certain features and I can just tack that onto the price of the rental. Renting for a week? X dollars. You want raw on that rental? Add Y dollars. Camera reaches end of service life, the buyer can turn on any feature they want on a permanent basis. I don't love it, but it's not terrible.

I have one on the watch list for amazon prime day. Hopefully they come on sale. Even if they don't I'll grab one as they are cheaper new on prime, than buying second hand off ebay.

If I understand correctly what you mean, I think so... I have used stills previously, but not 'matching' stills. What I am proposing going forward is ensuring my video and stills match perfectly in the grade and if frame grabs intended to be used as stills, identical to that exact frame in the video. The primary intention and purpose is to cut back drastically on stills photo capture in the first place and therefore also editing time and move towards a more cohesive and less time intensive approach. So currently I'll do a full capture, cull and edit etc on both photo and video. Going forward, I'd like to capture even more video and reduce the stills capture back to just certain elements, mainly details and family groups. Pics will be captured in raw + Jpeg 3:2 ratio with my LUT baked into the Jpegs (which is the same LUT I bake into my video footage in camera). I normally bin the Jpegs and use the raws, but I am proposing using the Jpegs and simply keeping the raws as backup just in case. Edit the video timeline to the point where it's still in 3:2 open gate format and then pull the frame grabs for use specifically as stills, rather than to insert back into the video. I can then go back into the timeline and put my more 'cinematic' 17:9, or 2:1 or whatever crop on it, and add all the twiddly bits that are video specific such as any text, transitions etc. Et voila, a finished wedding film plus a set of stills that look like frames from a movie. As intended, ie, when someone says, "your photos look like frames from a movie", it will be because most of them are. Anyway, I am going to give it a go as all last year, this year so far and the next 2 jobs, I've been shooting stills on the A7RV and Nikon Zf with 90% of the footage for my wedding films coming from the S9. After these next 2 jobs are in the bag, the A7RV and Zf get replaced with a single S1Rii shooting 7.2k 30p clips and the S9 which was shooting video exclusively at 6k 30p, will be shooting a mix of some stills and some secondary video. Pretty sure it will be a good set up based on the kit I have and some of the trials I have attempted, but as with all these things, it's only when you climb out of the trench and charge the enemy, with bullets flying, you truly know. Or you step on a landmine and it all goes tits up.

Not AI but this will significantly speed up the manual process and is a good all round productivity booster in general. For this task (and you can have multiple presets for other tasks) I’d have the left and right inner buttons assigned to the Première Pro keyboard shortcuts for previous and next clip respectively, the centre button to play/pause, one of the outer ones for the export shortcut and the jog shuttle for the jog shuttle. Workflow would be hit the button to move to next clip, play/pause button and jog/shuttle to locate and then export key to capture. Rinse and repeat moving to the head of the next clip each time. Nothing you couldn’t do with mangling your fingers to do the shortcuts but far, far more ergonomic for such a repetitive task. As I say, they are just generally useful devices for everything editing related. And not a bank balance drainer at £65 either. Also, as it’s based on driving keyboard shortcuts it can move with you to different applications. https://contour-design.co.uk/products/multimedia-controller-xpress

Makes sense. One other thing I just thought of is wondering if Lightroom can import stills directly from video files? I have no idea, but I remember that Photoshop had integrated some rudimentary video functionality some time ago so maybe Lightroom has some? It's not completely beyond comprehension that they might anticipate solo wedding shooters wanting to pull stills from video files. One thing to keep in mind is the creative impacts of inserting a stills step into your video workflow. On my last couple of trips I worked out a dailies workflow where I backed up the footage, pulled it into a timeline, applied some basic colour grading, and then reviewed it (it's a dailies workflow after all!) but also pulled stills as I went. The creative impact is that while looking for good stills I was focusing on clips that had a single good frame, which is often not creatively relevant for doing a video edit, and could definitely impact your mental inventory of your footage. If you're doing this before you've done the edit, or if the edit is predictable or formulaic enough, then it might not matter, but otherwise it might negatively impact the editing process. Resolve has an ever-increasing catalogue of AI features, but I doubt they'll be sophisticated enough to choose the nicest compositions and facial expressions etc, as making the happiest movie possible isn't really the focus of many film-makers.

I just start a new timeline with the finished production as a single entity. Or rather that is what I have been doing to date with the few attempts I have made. I think what I will do now, for the rest of this year at least, is introduce a new chapter as it were in my process which is after culling, importing, colour grading, while the clips are all still 6k 30p on a 6k 30p timeline, but prior to any speed changes, transitions, graphics, text etc, is export a 3:2 6k copy and then pull the stills from that. These will then match my same baked in LUT stills also in 3:2. I can then import the results from both into Lightroom as a single set for any final grading and reexport as JPEGs. The only thing I hoped to do other than this was have AI find, select and export 350-500 frames from clips for me…amd maybe that software exists and if it doesn’t it should as that will be one of those things worthy of the title ‘game changer’. Kills or at least severely limits the photographer in me, but hey, choices…

I last did some screen grabs in resolve 18, when i bothered to dl 20, i think they changed how you grab frames as nothing i did seemed to grab a frame. 20 was new at the time and there were no tutorials that i could find More by good luck than good management i figured it out. I do think its easier / faster in to do in 20. Just letting you know so you avoid some hiccups.

The C100 would suffer from the same problem that all workhorse cameras suffer from - the best images from them are made by people who are so good at making images they don't post to social media and/or don't list their equipment if they do post. I wonder how many big budget productions have C100 shots mixed in with the C200/C300 main stuff but used the C100 as a higher-risk or mounted cam due to its size and relatively low cost if something happened to it. I've got the occasional beautiful image from my XC10 when the stars aligned and the location and lighting and composition were all working together, and that had a tiny sensor and 10x variable aperture zoom lens. The C100 almost matched it in pixel-peeing terms despite being 1080p and In similar situations the much larger sensor and ability to have nice lenses would be game over.

VLC has a feature (available via a hotkey) that saves a screen grab as a PNG. It's not a very good player though unfortunately, on Mac anyway. It can't play backwards, and the feature to advance a single frame works at first but seems to get bogged down, and after you've advanced even a few frames it seems incapable of going back to playing again. I know you said you were editing in Premier, but (IIRC) the free version of Resolve does timelines up to UHD and can grab screen grabs relatively easily. It would require a bit of setup where you pull the clips into a timeline, then the grabbing would be like butter, then the export of all the grabs takes a few steps, but the ease of finding the right frames might be worth the 30s to setup and export at the end? Both are options though.

I’m not sure how much of this ARRI log C3 is over-hyped… Having looked at some of the footage shot side by side with standard log, very little difference and with some samples, I prefer the standard log. And anyway, the Phantom LUTS by Joel F are designed to ‘mimic’ various versions of ARRI. I’m more than happy with those and think they look better than the standard log…which itself to me looks better in most cases than this new cost option download. None of these things will turn your $3000 mirrorless into an actual ARRI camera, but then how many can afford, never mind need an ARRI 35? Not a fan of subs either. Pretty sure it’s not for me.

Very logical, for my specific needs anyway. I had even considered going back to the S1R and never wanted to part with my S1H, but both would have been a compromise in my current and future workflow. And yes, for the kind of work we do in the conditions we do, the S5ii (or X) is a better option. Well straight out of the box anyway as there are some workarounds such as dummy batteries, recording to SSD and in some folks cases, simply having the right fan settings on in the camera in the first place! Or even do what I do and that is if I am going to have my static’s outdoors in direct sunlight for any length of time, prior to switching them on, I chuck a white handkerchief over each with an elastic band. Makes a HUGE difference. Costs literally nothing except the thought process in the first place. It does seem though very much a case of the user error stuff aside, having these mega sensors, writing to CF Express (which tend to get hotter than SD) in a body that has not increased in size, has resulted in a big chunk of post-release negativity which has the diehard Sony Boys laughing and pointing. 99.9% sure that it won’t affect me due to my intended use, but I guess I’ll find out over the rest of this Summer eh? Also, the launch price put me off. That coupled with the fact they did not take the body as far as I hoped they would, but I picked up an open box unit for £2700 which is not far off what I have been offered for the A7RV, so even with my next 2 lens purchases, with my 2 body plus 4 lens sales, depreciation aside (I’ve had my fair working use out of my kit), this whole deal is not really costing me anything. And the icing on the cake for me is that I get to keep and use the S9 alongside it as a sidekick. I shall call them Batman & Robin.

Obviously paid firmware upgrades have been a thing since the Gh4 days...but a subscription model is so annoying.

RIP us actually getting to use what we own lol. Yes Arri is amazing, yes the Alexa 35 is wonderful, yes these prices are totally fine for large film groups or people renting. But now Arri is putting some features as "upgrades" such as Anamorphic desqueezing and ArriRAW support...and yes, they offer these in weekly/monthly subscription models...hoping this does not trickle down into future cameras that are much more affordable. Sick of subscriptions.

Over the past decade I've been a part of thirteen independent micro or no-budget budget films. Five of which I'd actually feel comfortable enough to show to strangers and say, "I've done this." It's weird because I've never been too precious about IQ. My personal-tech-craft-sloppiness-indifference does show in the final product, but only if you're looking real hard (at least I think so). I kind of want to be better, but I also don't really feel a strong pull to eek out that extra little juice, you know? I'm more interested in trying to shape a story by putting a bunch of note cards on the wall in the writer's room. Anyway, I've held tight to my LUMIX cams since the 20-teens. Also have an Oly cam. Haven't bothered to upgrade much. I know I'm missing out on the latest and greatest, but when I look at stuff a decade old vs. the film I just finished, and I think they both look a-okay, I guess I'm just not the type of filmmaker that's eager to change gear. Anyway, if anyone wants to see those five films I mentioned, let me know. I've posted them here before, but can share anew.

A logical move I ‘d say. Better to have just one brand. I’d love the S1ii but I don’t see it being up to the task of events snd weddings during the Spanish summer. A shame but it makes me realise what a bargain I have with my S5iis.

EH FILMS gave an interesting take on the GH7: