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thats great!

My rule of thumb is that if I use an item on 5 or more shoots, buying (and reselling at the end) is cheaper than renting. That's probably fairly conservative too: I usually buy used, so when I sell I get 60-80% of the cost back. I've even sold cameras at a profit after 1-2 years.

Absolutely. Another consideration for some is availability. When I was hanging around reduser.com it became pretty apparent that a common thing was to own a RED (obviously!) and also a set of vintage primes, but to rent modern lenses. The rationale was that often these cinematographers were doing personal projects and having the vintage primes made it so that they had a set on hand for whenever the personal project was able to be scheduled. Quite a few were filming one (or more!) documentaries too, and are essentially on-call so that if something suddenly happens they can grab the camera and go. It was common for these guys to store the camera in a go-bag, often rigged up and sitting next to the front door. Good luck shooting that if you got the call and then had to rent equipment in the middle of the night!! Film-making varies much more person-to-person than most people expect, and logistical factors or aesthetic preferences can easily flip a decision between two different people and their circumstances.

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@John Matthews While I'm sure you could just put a bit of gaff tape over the contacts and manually program in the focal length you want for IBIS have the camera treat it like a manual lens and get the high stabilization mode, it probably wouldn't be ideal because then you'd also lose aperture control, AF, and most likely the ability to even focus, as I'm assuming it's an electronic/focus-by-wire lens and would need the contacts active to be able to function.

Congratulations on completely missing the point. That was really impressive and you should be proud. The pricing I listed for the 300D was representative of all of the lights that I have. For example, I also got a 600X during their BF sale last year. It was $1,691 and included barndoors + fresnel (and a free MT Pro). Looking at lensrentals.com, it would be $193 for a 7-day rental (light only) and an addition $28 for the fresnel/$24 for the barn doors. I've also used it on 2 shoots since I received it in December. If I use the light on 8-9 shoots over the course of owning it, I will have paid less than renting it, even if I never had a need for barndoors or fresnel. And again, in a few years, I'll also be able to sell it and recoup some of the investment. If I didn't wait for a sale to buy the light, it doesn't really change much - just the number of shoots that are needed before "own" beats "rent." Beyond that, in your example, for the two shoots I've done with the 300D, I'd have spent twice as much as I did and had more light than the shoots needed (if a 300C was enough, I didn't need a 1200D) (also, at least one of the shoots used RGB mode on the 300C which would have made the 1200D a stupid choice for that shoot). So the point, once again, is that if you actually use the gear on any sort of regular basis, it costs less to own it than to rent it - even before you factor in the cost of your time to keep driving to and from the post office or rental house.

fantastic. the problem is that its just 1 light, and that its not particularly strong enough to be a keylight unless you’re in a studio environment or you can block out as much ambient light as possible. For 455 euros you can also rent an aputure 1200d, some 6x6 butterflies, bounces, negs, stands and even more for 1 day. the other issue is that those amarans are built kind of shittily. Every time ive used one of those i was afraid i was going to break it.

The news on the street is that you cannot use the Sigma 10-18 APS-C lens in EOIS in High, which sucks. However, I'd like to know if you slightly remove it from the electrical contacts and put it back, what will it do? There's got to be a way to do it. I know that if you use a contact-less, full manual lens, it works just fine- it's the lens information that screws things up.

I used the new high e-stab on my s5iix on a shoot last week to test it out, pretty dang smooth! Although the crop is quite significant, I was running around getting very gimbal-like footage on the venerable sigma 18-35, but at 18mm, plus the crop in 60p, still quite tight, so I may use this more with the Sigma 14-24. Great new tool in the toolbox of this already amazing camera though.

That depends. If you use your lights daily, renting is far less affordable. If you'll use them only once every 5 years, renting is far more affordable. Somewhere in-between those two things is an inflection point (which shifts around depending on sales). My Amaran 300C was $455 for Black Friday last year and it came with a free medium-quality light stand. At lensrentals.com, the Amaran 300C goes for $87 for 7 days. So after I've used the light on 6 shoots, I will have saved money vs renting. Since it arrived in December, I've used it for 2. After the shoots ended, I didn't have to put it back in a box and drive it to the post office so it's also saving me some time. If I don't want it in a few years, I'll probably be able to sell it for $100-150. Plus I have that extra light stand going for me. That's pretty nice. 😄

renting tends to be the most affordable option

Maybe the forum has been taken over by AI and it's become sentient and agreed with your comments so much it wanted everyone to read them several times!!

I watched this video recently about synthesisers and recording equipment magazines (which operate incredibly similarly to cameras) and yeah, print magazines almost make YouTube reviewers look honest by comparison. TLDR: he analysed a magazine from 2002 and out of 188 pages, 79 were full page ads (he didn't even bother to count half-page ads either, so the ad coverage was way higher) all reviews were positive except for the odd little minor comment, and none of the sub-category scores in any review were even below 2.5/5 (except one product which got 1.5/5 for a subcategory, but that was because it had too many ads!!)

The situation with review content being affected by commercial interests is nothing new in the slightest... Many years ago I was asked if I was interested in doing a product review for a now long-gone print magazine. I tried to be as fair as possible when I wrote it, but thought the product had some usability/compatibility issues that needing fixing. The version of the review printed in the magazine had some of my criticism watered-down, I assume partly because advertising revenue related to the product was important to the finances of the magazine. I only did a couple of reviews for the magazine in the end, mostly because the amount they paid for them wasn't much in relation the work involved in testing a product properly (and I wasn't interested in doing quicker, more superficial reviews).

A 'walking about in a forest' comparison from Robert May of the S5iix stabilisation modes at 14mm (very wide angle) using the 14-28mm f4-5.6 lens(which doesn't have OIS): Pretty impressive stabilisation performance with minimal warping artefacts.

Sorry. UK idiom. 'Old' in that context doesn't mean old. My bad.

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LOL, yeah, or self-importance or narcissistic or megalomanianism etc 😂😂😂 I guess in that case they don't have a clear idea of the industry they're in, likely because they're thinking about themselves rather than their audience. Entertainment is very broad and is sort-of a catch-all for the other categories, but I think it's still useful as it firmly defines that the purpose is to engage and entertain. I think that because YT was new and people didn't really understand what it was or how it fit into the world people weren't clear that it still fit the definitions that had been previously established, but (as usual) the pros had figured it out already and there (almost never) isn't anything new under the sun.

Self-indulgence? 😉 Entertainment is probably an overly-broad category, but that's splitting hairs.

Why did it triple post?

Oh sweet, a double post

Oh, maybe I misunderstood "big old lights" to mean "big, old lights." High wattage LEDs from those companies are all fairly recent--even within the realm of LED lights themselves being fairly recent. Seems to me that quality LEDs have only become available at reasonable prices within the last 5 years or so.

Lok just posted a video talking about the S5ii and talks about the new e-stabilisation feature, and it looks like it has completely eliminated the IBIS wobble on wide lenses? He includes examples with him walking with a wide lens, so it looks like a legit test:

With all the discussions recently about YouTubers I've been thinking about this as I watch YT videos and I remembered this comment and wanted to come back to it. I think that perhaps one of the things that would help a YouTuber achieve success on the platform is having a clear idea of what business they are really in. For example, and off the top of my head, YouTubers likely fall into one of the following: Advertising (as has been discussed) Entertainment Education Journalism These are pretty broad, but I would suggest that each has a clear definition and purpose, with clear principles on how it is done, how to make money, and what is to be expected from a good (and dodgy) channel. I'm guessing that if you don't really know which category a YouTuber is in, then perhaps they're drifting into dodgy territory. Did I miss any?

@Parker is right that having too much isn't a problem because you can just turn the lights down or put on more ND etc, but in order to not end up buying $20,000 worth of lights unnecessarily, maybe just do some tests with your own light? Work out what the largest amount of light would be that you would need on a regular basis (you can always rent for the 5% of times that are an exception) and then test your own 150W one and just crank up the ISO to see how many stops brighter a light you would need for that situation. It's work, but in film-making you pay for everything one way or the other.. with money or with time or with experience etc.