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Looked at and decided very quickly it isn’t for me, but good to see LUMIX making stuff they at least think folks want. What they really want however is an S1H mk II in an FX3 style body with the screen mech from the S1II and the screen from the ZR. Then they will truly win the crowd and strut like gods of low-mid film-making.

Panasonic just released a new on-camera mic. Looks like an excellent option for events etc where you want something small or something really flexible. I've watched a few YT showcases and for me, the best features are: It gives you 32-bit without having to have the external mic preamp box (and then adding microphones to that, making it larger again) It's small, much smaller than an on-camera shotgun mic You can quickly swap between modes (I assume?) it's powered by the camera It unlocks the ability to record >2 channels of audio into the files (one person said you can record left/right/mono/mono-20dB as a combo, and left/right/left-20dB/right-20dB as a different combo) It's definitely not magic and the laws of physics still apply. There don't seem to be any really good on-location stress tests posted yet, but there's a few examples. Media Division did an in-kitchen test to compare it to in-camera mics and lav and a DJI clip-on, and also applied a bit of AI voice isolation too to see how far you can push it: Dustin did some good tests including walking a 360 around the camera in each mode, which showed how directional it is, which seems pretty impressive. He also compared it to the Sennheiser MKE440. This shows the different modes out in nature: This is probably a complete revolution for a number of niche uses. Content creators would be one, where they're recording in noisy environments but still staying relatively close to the camera where physics will be helping them. Another is where the flexibility really helps, like shooting events where getting pristine audio isn't an absolute must but working super-quickly is more important and perhaps the 32-bit would really come into its own. This reminds me of how people used to talk about Panasonic when the GH4 and GH5 were around and people were saying that Panasonic just listened to people and then implemented the features that people would use rather than trying to be flashy and grab headlines. This will be an invisible workhorse for lots and lots of people.

Yes, it is. In a single word: context. :- )

There was! Huge headlines back on August 6, 1945!

I thought there was some breaking news for a moment then!

Again, this is an intensely wrong justification. And there's not a single tool that was ever invented that some person didn't immediately start misusing. It only took from July to August for my own country to go from demonstrating nuclear fission to dropping a fission bomb on a city full of civilians. The perceived benefit of "now people don't have to pay artists to do work" is not really a benefit at all and the massive harm caused of "society can't function at all without a shared view of objective reality" is much, much worse. That's before we even mention the other harms being done in the forum of pollution, water use, higher energy bills, and higher costs for many products due to datacenters gobbling up all available storage and RAM. So again, it's not "just another tool" so much as it's an "existential crisis for humanity."

When setting up the ZR with the camera-specific Smallrig cage, there is space at the bottom of the cage to pull the battery and cards out, if needed. I think the ZR's main applications are not in large rigs but where the small form factor is advantageous. Hopefully Prores 422 LT will be suitable as a compromise format to make the camera more useful for those who cannot use the RAW formats. I personally like to shoot Prores 422 HQ 4K on the Z8 and although the files are huge they are not quite as huge as (with that camera) the N-RAW 8.2K, and I like having built-in lens corrections applied to the video file.

Hey all, quick follow-up after having purchased the C50 and using it couple days. The customization is seriously one of the best parts. I have EIS toggle, S&F, teleconverter, display brightness boost, view assist, WFM, false color all on physical buttons so they're instant. Then the touch quick cine menu overlay lets me flip through frame rates, codec, resolution and recording settings super fast without leaving shooting view. It just feels like one of the quickest cameras I've used in real life. Open gate 3:2 is still my absolute favorite thing. The aspect ratio looks fresh and having that extra vertical headroom for reframing or pulling stills is addictive. Being able to shoot 7K open gate in 10-bit h265 at only 486Mbps in the lowest bitrate is a great data rate to resolution ratio. The digital zoom via the rocker switches is the other standout. Light press for slow creep, hard press for fast punch, with separate speed curves for each. It's so tactile and controllable, and it makes punch-ins on primes feel intentional instead of a crop hack. The top handle is really cool too. It gives better balance and a two-handed grip so handheld shake is noticeably reduced, especially low angles or longer takes. But what's even cooler is how modular it is. Snap it off and the camera becomes super compact for travel, storage or quick discreet shots. Having the choice is great. Still working on stabilization. EIS helps when it's on, but you get that slight crop and occasional motion blur artifacts unless I crank shutter angle to 90° or 45° (which I do now). EIS is disabled in open gate 3:2 so those shots are raw shaky until post. Gyroflow should handle it but I'm still having trouble getting it to recognise the camera or lens. Anyone knows how to manually set it up? Any tricks for getting the gyro data to load properly? Still in early testing phase but overall the camera feels fast, intentional and pro in a way that keeps me shooting. Cheers!

That’s a category error: the tool isn’t the harm, misuse is. You can’t break it. Go full Quijote aka Quixote (who is who? LOL Never mind X ) Much of this sounds like corporate self-preservation dressed up as principle. History has a name for that drift: corporatism. Well, something Europe flirted with in the 1930s ; ) It didn’t end well; Portugal even wore the label officially. We’ve seen where it leads. Who we claim to be is irrelevant; what we do is what makes us. We aren’t what we say we are. We’re defined by what our hands actually show. Or reveal. Identity is cheap. Deeds are the proof. Fear’s a bitch. - EAG

The smug "it's just another tool" takes are, without a doubt, the most offensively stupid ones. Yes, ignore the huge amount of societal harm that is inflicted by a tool that lets any jackass instantly create a nearly perfect deepfake of any other person on the planet, right down to their voice and manner of speaking, and it is indeed "just a tool." While we're at it, let's just give the average person access to thermonuclear bombs which are, of course, "basically just another weapon" and "only bad if someone blows them up ."

New technologies rarely arrive without some degree of pushback.

Another gem by @Henryo Really makes me want to pick up my bmpcc again soon. Anyway, such a treat to watch:

A Voigtlaender 40mm F2 pancake is coming, perfectly complimenting the ZR. If the Nikon had a viewfinder and a mechanical shutter I'd be tempted. Lucky me I can save my money.:)

While AI can be employed for positive or negative things, there's a bigger outlook at play for me. Robert Persig's famous musings are where I want to stand philosophically. His theories, and my limited understanding of them, are pretty much the reason why I ultimately view AI unfavorably.

Not that it is perfect by any means but I find myself reacting to it as if I was watching a real movie or a high quality video game - I bet music videos will never be the same or should I say will all be the same after people get their hands on the Ai video model (Seedance 2.0) from the makers of TikTok, ByteDance. If you need to render people dancing - this is the Ai video model for you.

Like a gun, it’s only as “good” or “bad” as the way someone chooses to use it. - EAG :- )

We should hold theft in disdain. Not doing the stealing thing, after all, is one of the commandments in the Bible. I have a friend/colleague that has gone into the AI rabbit hole. He wants to only deliver videos with 100% generative AI. His argument is the hackneyed "It's just a tool". Well, a tool delivering mimicry from unauthorized sources is theft. "But humans copy each other all the time" he's said. Sorry, bud, you're just rationalizing stealing. Putting aside that human plagiarism is also theft, the process of being creatively influenced as a human is not the same thing. Humans filter all creative context through their own impressions, wisdom, experiences, empathy, and feelings. That particular matrix is infinite, random, and organic. The talented know how to tap into this mystic calculus, to develop their expertise, bend their skill set as a means to an end, and to use all of it to create something profound. Hacks (of which I am one, mind. Maybe a self-aware one, but still one nevertheless) can only regurgitate superficially. This lazy superficiality has now been globally scaled and monetized for the 1%. It sucks. Specifically, it sucks for me because those mediocre jobs of regurgitation used to be $$ in my pocket, not theirs. I had a skill of the craft that was worth a certain value. That value is diminished significantly. Yes, I'm bitter about it. Should I be? I may lack art, but at least I had craft. Be that as it may, my colleague's use of AI is especially galling as he's eager to brag at how hard it is to get the various AI systems he uses to comply with his prompts. Here's the thing: he's putting out animation style videos. Do you know how difficult it is to be a crafts-person creating animation? Good god. And he says he's "working hard" doing prompts? The "it's a tool argument," to me, is like going into a museum to admire and marvel at the paintings and sculptures ... but then standing in front of a 10th grader's paint-by-numbers knock-off of "The Harvest" and insisting it also deserves as much admiration as the original Van Gogh -- Or looking at some technical feat, like a 3D print of Michelangelo's David and being, like, "Wow, the person that ran the 3D printer equipment to make a copy of that sculpture is so great!" Bull. Shit. Admiring the craft needs to also be part of admiring the art. If my colleague is so addled that he doesn't even see repercussions of that craft-art-divorce, he's probably hopeless. Worse, he keeps trotting out his latest video examples in a gee-whiz-isn't-this-great-way to everyone around him -- as if we're supposed to be impressed? He's literally said, "I can finally make everything that's been in my head exactly how I see it!" "Make?" No, that ain't what's happening, not really. And the fact that he can't even recognize that he's not a "maker" is the real problem. People that are too shallow to cop to any of that, to appreciate what's being lost ... again, it's the deeper major problem with [waves arms around] all of this. I'm tired hoss. Tired of shaking my fist at the clouds.

Another busy week, but I wanted to share a cool new music track...the latest in my "Light Puzzles" series: "LIGHT PUZZLES 13" (Looping) You can listen to it here: https://soundimage.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Light-Puzzles-13.ogg And download it here: https://soundimage.org/puzzle-music-8/ It's 100% free to use in your projects with attribution. Attribution information is here: https://soundimage.org/attribution-info/ OTHER NEWS I just finished the music score for a cool farming sim game called "Agromatic." Working on music scores for 2 other games, "Futurika" and "The Mandarin Machine." Such cool titles dreamed up by these developers! (I'm always struggling with titles for my music tracks.) Anyhow, you can check out these games and others that I've scored here: https://soundimage.org/custom-work/ Feel free to contact me if you need some help! 🙂

It seems someone had contacted Blackmagic about this issue and they had said Resolve cannot support R3D NE trim at the moment as RED SDK does not support it. So the only options is to save everything shot on R3D NE or transcode trimmed parts to H.265 or to some other format. Well done Nikon and RED. Already transcoded some clips to H.265 with REDWideGamutRGB/Log3G10 and 500Mbps bitrate, and results look pretty good compared to original Raws, but it is not the same than having Raw files stored for later use.

It seems there's a bit of a trend (at least with some YouTubers), to make your own cinema camera. Mathew Trahan is making a CinePi. Alt Frames, is also doing the CinePi project with his own mods. So, interesting. It's now become something that people can make their own if they want. I suspect it'll become a hobbyist thing much like how people are 3D printing their own film still cameras. David Bross was interviewed by CineD, (mostly about his app,) he talks a bit about how he got to try to "resurrect" the Digital Bolex. So, I've decided that in my new film I'm working on, which is set in the present day and involves a group of artists, that one of the characters will be making her own cinema camera. I'll use my Faux Bolex project parts for props. (Still have to get it fully working though.)

Regarding voice AI. Hoo boy. As a documentarian, this one can affect me a lot. A lot of ills can be smoothed over with AI audio. But ... at the end of the day it's an ethical choice how it's employed. I've decided to ONLY use it to salvage VERBATIM lines from interviews and field audio that is distorted beyond comfort. Like, wind noise, clothes rustling. And then it's a last ditch option after audio EQ/Rx tweaking. Best thing to do is just not 'f up the field production to begin with. Beyond that, if AI is used as a production short cut to solve a storytelling/crafting failure as a filmmaker -- I now consider AI use untenable for me. It's simply on the wrong side of things morally when it comes to making honest doc films. Sadly, I fear that's now a contrarian opinion; an "old-fart" opinion. No one probably really gives a shit anymore about these sorts of "cheats" 'cept me.

Kling 3 and Seedance 2 are wild. I guess this means Veo 4 isn't too far behind. What a freaking time to be alive. ~ Mike Vogel (AI Video School), Mid-Feb 2026 source

https://www.indiewire.com/news/obituary/robert-duvall-dead-1235141818/ The world will be much emptier without him. He was one of my favourites—and, for sure, one of many others here too. RIP, you’ll be truly missed, not just on screen.