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Post. I trust my calibrated monitor in a controlled room better than the one on set. So what I do with any new camera is I do a bunch of tests to find a setting that I like, then I shoot everything in that setting and adjust in post as needed. That way I am very familiar with what I can or can't do with that setting. I will often do tests to create specific color node graphs ahead of time, designed to be applied in post. But on the shoot I want everything to be familiar, even when I know based on my tests what it will transform into. That's not to say I'm good at cinematography. But I do think I'm good at not wasting people's time. I test everything ahead of time by myself or with the people leading the project, then we maximize set time for the actors and crew. No fiddling with settings while people are waiting around.

I wonder who these mics are actually for? I mean, influencers have gone away from hidden microphones in order to look authentic: and even people taking the piss out of them... The pros are going to actually mic people up properly. So, who is left? Is there some hidden niche of people who care about speed and also hiding the mic? My experience of the people that are just using the little matchbox sized mics is that they aren't trying to hide them either: Even the street-interview people aren't hiding them:

What I like about recent Canon C line is that the skin often has a bit more separation from other colors. I don't know that I prefer red/magenta, but it's not nice if skin gets muddled with everything else. I wouldn't say all Canon, because I was honestly never a fan of the C100's image for the few shoots I used it on. I don't know that I especially like color on the Panasonic S-series as SOOC it tends to exaggerate yellows. It's a great camera and does what I need at an unbeatable price though.

Great camera. It's cinema in a box the size of a pack of cigarettes. There's nothing wrong with video - technically it's what I do. One thing that is starting to be understood is the look of the footage, which with video often looks quite artificial, which is in contrast to film which looks quite organic. Artificial isn't a bad thing either - all styles are valid. My own preferences are for something that is aesthetically pleasing, mildly flattering, and doesn't call attention to itself. This has pushed me into investigating the whole subject and what "cinematic" actually means, which leads into the territory of YouTubers making cinematic videos that despite having huge amounts of effort and thousands of dollars of equipment are some of the least cinematic videos ever made, even when compared to something like a T2i. ...and you can install your own. Bingo! Instantly, you can have whatever look you want, SOOC. This is what I do. My current best answer is GX85, 14-140mm zoom, 12-35mm zoom, and 12-32mm zoom. If I'm not allowed to colour grade it, I'll edit it on a 720p timeline and export upscaling that timeline to 4K. That will knock the digital edge off it. Why? Because if your camera is large then you'll get beautiful images with lovely colour science and everyone in the background of those images will be staring at the camera. Oh darn it! There I go again, talking about something other than colour. It's like I'll never learn that there's no more to film-making than camera tests. C300mk2. Why? Go watch any video on why this is the most popular documentary camera. Rent an Alexa. If you want to understand why, go watch any video from a professional cinematographer or colourist talking about why Alexa is the best choice. Neither do I. Which is sort of the point I've been making all along. Alexas are known to be green, sometimes even problematically so. Canons are magenta. etc etc. If we're talking about choosing cameras for the best SOOC colour, and yet bizarrely there isn't any limitation on the fact that some cameras require 3 people to operate them, then I'm thinking that if you can put a LUT in the camera then it counts as being SOOC colour. Ironically, because it comes SOOC lol. In which case, you can choose Alexa 65 and just put a modified 250D / 2383 LUT in there and you're done! Alexas also tend to go green. There's a knob in any NLE that corrects this, but don't let 3s of work in post stop you from changing your entire set design around that one tiny little thing!

In general, the stills stuff is a really close match for the film stocks (differences in the production are tiny)... and we weren't talking about a small difference, especially in the greens. Meanwhile, FilmConvert and Fuji's own Velvia profile both look quite a bit like my slides. 😄 As you said, though, a lot of the people using it have never actually used the film stocks that it claims to emulate - and some of their emulations look nice. If you won't suffer cognitive dissonance from many of them not looking a lot like what they claim to be and/or want to use ACES as a starting point, it's a decent product. Unless something changed recently, FilmConvert really doesn't have a good story for ACES (I think that last time I checked, it was "transform out of ACES into something else, apply FilmConvert, and then transform back").

More examples of bad lighting. This was a 709 shot from my GF3, which obviously couldn't auto-WB far enough to compensate (yes, this looked white in person): My best attempt at grading in post also couldn't compensate well enough: But the real demonstration is on a project. Here's a camera test I shot. These are the images after grading: They all look pretty straight-forward, but it took a lot of work to get to that. Here are the shots SOOC: Note that adjacent shots have considerably different looks - SOOC: After: Obviously I've let the flaring lower the contrast on the middle images to a certain extent because otherwise it would look too forced, but the tint of the first image and second ones needed to be evened out as one had the sun in it and the other didn't. I've shot these tests by the beach many times, using many different cameras (OG BMPCC, BMMCC, GH5, GX85, XC10, GF3, iPhone, GoPro, etc), shooting manually and in auto, in RAW / LOG / 709, etc etc. All required decent amounts of work in post to even them out and look normal. It's like anything - the natural look takes the most amount of work and is, in reality, the least natural. You keep saying you want nice looking images without doing any/much work, but I've been working super hard at this for quite some years now and it's just not possible. You either get nice looking images with work, or you wave the camera around and you get out what you put in - a film that looks like a dad with a handycam. The myth that you can buy it was created by equipment manufacturers trying to sell you cameras and LUT bros on YT trying to sell their LUT packs.