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I contend that the old GX7 looks better than a GH5.

It's really good. I'll have to watch a few times again to analyze more but my first impression is that this type amount of grain I associate with the 1970s and the cameras used back then for 16mm had some gate weave. Maybe try a touch of that and see.

Yeah, honestly anything that has come out in the last 10 or so years is more than good enough for YouTube. Even if it shoots 1080p, if you edit and export in 4K it will look great. My nephew has started a small little vlog with my old GH3. That's a 14 year old camera with really good 1080p and it looks great still. He likes using a "real" camera, so that's why he uses it over his iPhone, but he could definitely get away with using just his phone.

Some of Nikon's portrait F mount lenses do the same. They deliberately let the red light doesn't hit the same plane as blue/green. As like not-much-corrected glasses of the old days. So red is a bit out of focus. Very very tiny amount. Tho that amount changes with focus distance. They usually optimize for portrait distances. They abandoned that approach with Z mount lenses.

A compact SSD and a good USB-C hub have probably been the most useful smartphone accessories for me lately, especially for video work. Small things, but they make the whole setup feel way more practical.

OK, now I get it. There's this one, the PRO, and then the ILS which has interchangeable lenses. I'm waiting to see what that one is like. I love me some lenses!

Round 4. Changes: Included lens emulation Stabilised shots Lowered grain I completely rebuilt the grain nodes in a different OFX trying to refine it, then realised it didn't animate. FML. The lens emulation includes adding a vignette, softening the edges, and adding a slight barrel distortion. The grain seems a lot on certain things (like the sky) but doesn't appear at all on other things. I see no pattern for it, but this is how real S16 films also appear on YT so I'll leave it to the judgement of those with a better eye than me. These are my settings for Film Grain OFX - it appears there's quite some adjustments, so let me know if I should play with anything...

I bought a used Em10iii over 5 years ago for $300 and haven't stopped using it since. Nice 4K video and you can put good vintage lenses on it for next to nuthin'. Yes, concentrate on lighting and getting a good mic (I use a Tascam DR10L) but do know there are a lot of good affordable cameras out there too. I also have 2 old GH4's in the cabinet. They're cheap as well.

One of our favourites ones among us over here... LOL oh boy : D ...has just spoken:

These days the camera is the least imporant thing, since we all own phones that shoot very good video with the right lighting. Something like this might be useful, to help you frame yourself so you can use your main cameras instead of the selfie camera on your phone. https://www.smallrig.com/Wireless-Video-Monitor-for-Phone-Vlog-Kit-4851.html?skuId=1902205216988602369&utm_source=google&utm_medium=shopping&utm_campaign={us_roasl}&utm_content&utm_term=1902205216988602369&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=22986129310&gbraid=0AAAAA9ksdxlR0rKJm8KPUZEfnds4FA25H&gclid=CjwKCAjwidXQBhAZEiwA4egw6IMJP7OXRfSob5wBL8w-tVSe1oUTWPIYilNm1fLnTWsIBMzdbzi5RRoCELoQAvD_BwE

Very interesting. I've been looking into this for a long time and hadn't heard some of these insights. Very useful. One thing he got wrong, at least for v3 of their colour science is that there isn't anything luma-specific done to the image inside the camera, it's all done in the LUT. The evidence for this is when people do under/over tests, where the camera is deliberately under and over exposed, when you correct the image in post to the correct exposure the colours are all the same. If they were warming the highlights or cooling the shadows in-camera then when you overexposed and brought the exposure down in post then that warmth would be baked-in and your mid-tones would be warm (or they'd be cooler if you underexposed) but that's not what we see. It's also no secret that they compress the skin-tone hue range and also tend to skew yellow, especially compared to Canon which skews magenta/red. The IR-cut filter letting in a bit of far-red so the skin-tones get that scattering is interesting. To a certain extent it might be 'recoverable' in post (ie, perhaps we can guess what might have been there based on what info we do have). Perhaps the key aspect of any such attempts would be to blur this new channel once it's been simulated, as this is the information coming from deeper in the skin and is scattered a bit. It's been hinted at that part of the 'Cooke Look' was that they used materials that slightly blurred light at a range of frequencies within skin tones, so the lenses sort-of worked like a skin-hue-only diffusion filter. Potentially anyone with a full-spectrum camera (OG BMPCC BMMC anyone?) could seek out IR-cut filters that are designed to let in more far-red. Potentially even people with IR-cut filters on their sensors could get strong ND filters to boost the relative proportion of IR coming into the camera. I'm guessing that the right amount of the right ND might do it - have enough ND that the IR is boosted but not so much that the blacks become polluted. It's funny he mentioned that the iPhone has a strong IR-cut filter - I was testing my iPhone 17 Pro the other day with lots of ND (because it doesn't have an iris!) and I got a ton of IR pollution, including getting a non-trivial amount of it when using the same vND I use on my GH7 which I've never seen any IR pollution on. So the iPhone must have less IR filtration than the GH7. It's worth adding that a lot of these things are also accomplished by film emulation.

The previous comparing with this one is pure crap. :- )

thanks guys! Really appreciate the answers! Yeah, I'll probably will focus on getting mic and lighting setups firsts

I thought the title was slightly clickbaity but I’m glad I clicked on this one. There are a lot of “Arri look on your xyz camera” videos but I think this is a far more interesting take on it. The question is are you doomed to never match it because it is baked in (not least the IR cut filter) and it can’t be reverse engineered in post? Can anyone who has bought the Arri license for their supported Panasonic camera chime in with their thoughts?

For the talking-head stuff, almost any camera will be good enough if given enough light, so I'd suggest you concentrate on getting 1) enough light so your camera is at its native ISO, and 2) lighting that is flattering and creates depth and contrast in the image. There are lots of videos on YT that show this, and the before/afters show what is possible. You don't need expensive lights either, there is tonnes of info on home DIY hacks using lamps and cheap shower screens as diffusers, etc. The standard approach is 3 Point Lighting, like this: This video is a good primer and talks about how to use (or avoid) existing light sources like natural light and ceiling lights etc. Other videos that might be useful: This video is longer but starts with a complete setup, so acoustics etc too. Cameras get all the attention, but in the real world are some of the least important parts of the whole setup. You're lucky in that you're building something indoors for one specific use in an environment you control and (hopefully) doesn't have to be portable and easy/quick to setup and pack away. With a bit of effort you should be able to get a great setup that works really well and doesn't cost much at all.

Thanks for the feedback! I'm also happier with the images, but I think there is still more juice we can squeeze. My attitude is to assume the aesthetic impressions people have are correct and to try and reconcile those with the technical process, especially when the two are at odds with each other. The new texture approach to emulate a neg stock and then a print stock: Grain added at timeline resolution (full sharpness) with Resolve Film Grain OFX Gaussian Blur added to image+grain so that the sharpness of the image and grain match Grain (same as above) Blur (same as above) I think this more accurately mimics the architecture as with film the grain IS the image, so applying a softening to the grain or incoming image before they are combined would risk creating a mismatch. Then it's done a second time, which makes sense as if you print an image from a film stock onto another one, the image coming out of the print stock will be the print stocks representation of the neg stocks representation of the scene. The Resolve Film Grain plugin is a bit odd, with expanded/different controls than the ones in the FLC, but it lacks the presets I wanted so I had to roll my own. I think the grain was pixel-sharp, but there's a chance some softness is coming from there. Also not sure if Gaussian is the right flavour of blur. Let me know if there are better options.. Thinking about your impression that the image was sharper than the grain brings me to think about what might be making the image too sharp. The first potential culprit might be internal sharpening in the GX85, but I don't think this is the case. I expected that it would have sharpening, and some time ago I sat down to test how much it had and then design a blur that would counter it, but when I compared RAW and JPG stills (4592px wide) vs the 4K h264 on a 1080p timeline, I found no discernible difference, so concluded that the downscale from 4K to 1080p was enough to eliminate the (inevitable) sharpening that will be in the h264 stream if viewed at full resolution. The second potential culprit is that this image pipeline still lacks all the softness of anything in-front of the film-stock, specifically lenses and filtration. The 14mm F2.5 on the GX85 is pretty sharp, even when shot wide open, so might not be typical to the look of S16 from back in the day where the images might not have been so sharp, or they might have been sharp in the middle but not so much towards the corners? I have done a bunch of lens emulation stuff before so could easily reach for some of that, and I should add it anyway, just because it's more in-line with the overall goal of the project which is to evoke a more gritty retro mood, rather than to realistically emulate S16 film as if it was shot on modern lenses. Their vintage ND filters probably weren't quite optically perfect either. I should also do some tests to work out YT compression so I can start sharing moving images, as grain etc is completely different when moving to when not. Is there anything else I should be looking at for Round 4?

The GoPro one in Seoul is very impressive.... I'm guessing they must be doing super-duper processing of the image. Still, for the form factor it looks like a great result. I'd be curious to see how the low-light is compared with previous normal GoPros. Some time ago I made the case that an action camera is the perfect vlogging camera, as it's the size of a pair of wireless earbuds but is mostly without the issues that continue to plague the "vlogging" cameras that aren't wide enough / crop for stabilisation / etc. If I was a vlogger I'd be using one of these 8K action cameras for sure, using the wide for talking head stuff and cropping in for more normal FOVs. No-one on YT can tell if you edit a 1080p and upscale to 4K on export, so a 2K crop from an 8K sensor gives a pretty useful FOV, assuming the readout isn't terrible.

Much better than the previous batch. I like where you're going with this. I think the grain is a bit too extreme now but it's not unrealistic. It would depend on the film stock as some film pictures are this grainy. The ones where I think don't work for me are the 5th ( the trees) and the 8th (city shot). Both of these I think the grain is too much. The one of the trees as well looks like there's more detail in the leaves than that amount of grain would show.

Not only small, two additional no-brainers to my book anyway -- people say this time GoPro has something or two really new:

Honestly your phone is more than good enough for this. Get one of the budget wireless mics that connects to your phone and you're good to go. Invest in a camera once you know whether you enjoy and are committed to it.

Hi guys, can you drop some used camera suggestions to shoot YouTube talking head videos at home, ideally for under $400? And also maybe some cheap lens (used are ok as well) that would work. would really appreciate! Just wanna start my blog without any big investments cheers

Presumably Freefly would chirp in with the Movi Pro…

I'm a little cynical about the whole (ai thing and what they call ai ) certainly there are coding improvements and other improvements that perhaps can maybe put down to Ai i'm not so sure. I think its a great selling point to call any product Ai enhanced whether Ai is superficially involved or not. Besides that i am confident if you buy any of the current models you would notice improvements, maybe not earth shattering improvements, but improvements none the less. Most likely small things like balance, handling, how easy it is to use that sort of thing. Most of the manufacturers are on their, second, third even fourth generation models. Safe to say they have all improved, however i doubt any of them are perfect despite what the youtube influencers would have you believe. I have no exp about the ai tracking that wasn't a requirement when i was looking. I know some cameras have predictive tracking, how that would integrate with a gimbal is above my pay grade. As far as i'm aware its still up to the human to pan, tilt and rotate. 🤔 I have a little gimbal suitable for iphones and gopros and not much else. When i use it, it works great, maybe my style or my needs are modest, certainly my skills are 🙂 Once i got a bigger camera, i watched a lot of youtubes on various gimbals. I made a list of things i thought desirable in a gimbal. Now as i write this i cant think of any of them... For whatever reason a crane m3s was decided on as desirable. There was also a crane m4 available at the time, some thing in the m4 specs was different enough from the m3s that it was ruled out despite being the latest incarnation of said gimbal. There was a potential bug reported with the m3, it seemed to affect some people and not others. When mine arrived it worked ok, i did the update thing anyway... i'll be honest i did stress about whether i would get one that had an "issue" and needed the update, in the end it was a non issue. I can't really say anything bad about it. It works without issues, so far. What i can say, is its big, probably stands half meter tall. its kinda heavy even before you put a camera on it and it likes heavy cameras. Put a light camera on it and it will have apoplexy for ten seconds straight. I tried that 🙃 the little om-1 mark two is way to light for this gimbal. Later i did add a focus motor and cables and whatever else came with the kit, surprisingly it was pain free getting it all rebalanced and working, not what i was expecting at all. I did have a usb cable in the wrong port, there's 3 or 4 ports for different things and two ports side by side, once i figured that out it worked fine. For me the only down side is the weight of everything, maybe i should join a gym. Filming anything much longer than 30 seconds or minute starts becoming a struggle real quick or it seems like that... If you have a dji ronin, there is some wisdom in staying within that brand as you know it already and have the muscle memory as well. A different brand is buttons in new places, the functions probably 180 degrees to what your used too. The kind of stuff that makes you inclined to pull your hair out... not impossible to do, just longer before your up to speed. I did ask a question similar to yours when i was first interested in a bigger gimbal within the forum, not sure i got a definitive answer and thats ok and i hope no one takes offence at my comment. What it did do, was make me ask some questions to myself and then it was a journey of finding answers that matched my expectations and sometimes redefining criteria when criteria clashed or probably closer to the truth my understanding was flawed technically and needed readdressing anyway. In the end i think i made a good choice for me, whether the crane m3 is a good choice for you is something you would have to do your own homework on 🙂

i'm looking at the tiffen magsafe for my iphone 13 as well i have been pretty happy with the phone 13 for photos and vids. 9 times out of ten its the only thing i have with me capable of video, Its also hard for me to justify the price of a new iphone or even android. I purchased the camera raw app for the iphone that i read about in another thread and i'm going to give that a go. I also plan on replacing the screen due to a large crack which doesn't stop me using it, but it does annoy me none the less. Also i have noticed the flaring in photos is growing so i'm thinking its time to replace that clear front lens housing as well. I feel those measures aught to provide a useful increase in "useability" and stave off a new phone purchase for 12 months / two years hopefully.

too late now probably, but could you not get the k&f iphone 17 filter ? although it doesn't look threaded which is an issue at the front