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OK, I have a black one inbound and should be landing tomorrow or Thursday… I tried to get the LTD version but has to come from PannyBoy direct and they have zero stock, so black it is. My S9 is still not fixed and I have missed it on the first 3 jobs of the year and with 5 more imminent, can’t wait any longer. On the off chance my fixed S9 does turn up prior to these next 5 jobs I am away for, I’ll use both as a bit of a test but regardless, probably have a place more now for the L10 until an S9II comes along. My experience of not having a mech shutter has not been the greatest and the role either of these units is destined for is more photo, so…

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?

I use it both for my own films as well as I get hired to do music videos and events. I just finished a feature length experimental film shot entirely with it called Shapes, Colours, Patterns. (There's a trailer for it on my Tumblr. https://clarknikolai.tumblr.com ) I'm very happy with it, and of course the image from that camera is gorgeous. Something I've discovered with the Digital Bolex's footage, is that it looks the best projected rather than shown on an LCD screen. I'm now working on a new project. It's a narrative, collectively written, performed and crewed by myself and three other artists. It's set in the present day in east Vancouver where three artists are working on their art projects. The characters are based on the people involved and their real lives (but fictionalized so we have more freedom.) We're using French New Wave and Availablism methods. Quick half-day shoots. It's self funded, using what we have around us, the equipment we already own, locations we already have, etc. (I think so far all we've spent on it was some coffees.) I plan to enter it in to film festivals when it's done. Here's a picture with the camera mounted backwards on the shoulder rig. This is so the camera operator can walk forward while the talent is behind them and they don't need a spotter. It's tricky to learn how to move but it's going okay. It works fine with a wide lens but not easy when zoomed in (as you'd expect.) We have to flip the image in the monitor or it's disorienting.

I should have some soon @kye @PannySVHS I say ‘soon’ as in shooting, but as to getting around to being able to even look at it… Currently already in a 6 week log jam (see what I did there?) which gets longer week by week 🤪

There are so many variables when it comes to how you're viewing the film images. Negative film has wide dynamic range and soft highlight rolloff. Positive film has much more limited dynamic range and pretty hard highlight rolloff. Faster film tends to be grainier. Filmmakers with a big budget would be choosing their film stock for aesthetic/style reasons. Imagine shooting Taxi Driver on the same technicolor low-grain film stocks that were used for The Sound of Music. Bright saturated colors would have been terrible for Taxi Driver. Scorcese chose less gritty films than some others might, but Travis Bickle lives in a relatively desaturated/dark world and that's for the best. Filmmakers with low budgets were likely to choose the cheapest film stock they could and some even used the leftovers that weren't exposed from the productions of others. Or in the case of John Waters, whatever film he could steal. Next, as you said, for these classic films, you aren't necessarily looking at scans from the master negatives. You might be looking at scans of the release prints. They didn't always save the masters. It could even be a second or third-generation print. Then to add to that, the way the film gets transferred matters. Did they scan the original negatives or a print? How was it scanned? Was the film being scanned perfectly flat? What compression was used on the scanned image? Was it scanned or telecine? If telecine, which projector lens was used during the telecine process? As far as the lenses, razor sharp lenses have been available for a long time, including in the 50's, and including wide angles. Lots of vintage wide angles are a little softer in the corners, but they can be very crisp in the center... but fashion applied in many eras of film, just as it applies now. For some of the softer images, especially close-ups, they might have been using a net filter, made more complicated by the net filter potentially being mounted behind the lens instead of in front. https://www.provideocoalition.com/the-secret-life-of-behind-the-lens-nets/ I'm sure I'm forgetting more things too. Like almost anything going through an analog to digital process, there are about a bazillion variables to consider along the way.

A quick headsup with the Viltrox adapter. Years ago, I hacked a Canon 10-18mm to make it fit, which it did. However, one day, I took it out my bag and was getting some really crazy lens flares. Turned out, the back lens element was touching the glass in the adapter when at around 12mm. In my bag, it cracked the glass in the Viltrox, and I learned there's a pretty good reason the combo didn't work without being hacked. So if you get any EFs lenses, be careful - or you'll end up with a one of a kind, megaflare adapter (I've used it a few times since because of the 'creative flaring', so it's not all bad) This photo is from the moment I noticed something was wrong. Luckily, it was on my GX85 at the time, which I was using for behind the scenes stills. So nothing was lost or ruined in a 'professional' sense.

no 12 bit codec (whether it's PR444 or raw) makes it kind of DOA for me. that tended to be kinefinity's main selling point imo. conceptually its cool, but I just got a BMCC6K FF for 1500 euros second hand as a B-CAM. same sensor, same open gate capability, gives me an option to use an EVF as well, and it lets me do more in the grade.

Dammit, v7 had a mistake in it, so re-exported and uploaded it.

You may or may not have see this, Adapter with Native AF Speed!? Only works with a g7 or gh9 ii no others it seems. Available for about 100 lenses but works with some others just as not quick it seems. on futher reading Olympus E-M1 series and OM System OM-1 series] Metabones transmits the same PDAF/IBIS data to the camera in the same way as the latest Panasonics, and gets a significant boost in AF speed

There are actually good answers to the 10x question for each FF mount. Sigma 20-200mm is an answer for E mount and L mount. Sony has their own 24-240mm too. Nikon have a 10x near miss with their 24-200mm and an over the top 14.2x 28-400mm. Canon has their 24-240mm too and if you don’t mind mimicking trombone playing while zooming then their old 35-350mm EF is a great bargain. I actually have one of the latter and the range is great.

Yes, you're exactly right. Musing about this is interesting to us, obviously! Here's my rambling take. The Japanese engineers have long been pursuing a different path of imaging evolution, as they've been in "electronics" mode for generations. Their culture kept them away from deep considerations of what film does vs. what digital does. The Japanese simply have a different sensibility about image IQ. This reality in of itself is a fascinating dive, going all the way back to traditional feudalism culture, WWII, national pride, and their "High Increasing Stage" era of the mid 20th century. Their imaging tendencies emerged out of their unique cultural context. In other words, once their engineering IQ evolution preferences were set, there was not much room for it go off on tangents. ARRI took a different road and put people on the development team that understood the physics and chemistry of film and wanted that look. ARRI engineering cuts and adds different spectrums for very good reasons. Thus, as you say when you mention plugins, emulation of film behavior is the thing, the whole additive vs. subtractive thing, for instance. ARRI does their adjustments in camera. So cinema follows ARRI to chase the IQ they know best, and ARRI becomes the cinema standard. The phrase "color science" is amusing to me. Because, yes, the engineering is science, but ARRI is in fact making their cameras behave with purposeful (and insightful) aberrations. They aren't going for accuracy, they're striving for colors that evoke a certain perception of emotion by being "pretty" which could be considered an artistic pursuit in their engineering craft. "ColorArt" doesn't have the same ring to it though. It's all pretty wild. I mean, I'm on forums where there are darkroom alchemists chasing esoteric processes to heighten certain color dyes in film, and minimize others by changing their development chemistry -- which is weird as heck and an extremely hard way to affect an image (save that when choosing the stock or when doing the enlargement print imo) but hobbyists aren't rational, they're just playing. There's a whole sub culture of analog photographers that deliberately buy decades old expired film just to see what happens with the dye degradation. All in all, there are an infinite number of ways to achieve color rendition. But, yeah, I'm with you. Give me a decent camera and I'll affect the image with a plugin and get it in the ball park. I'm not positioned financially or emotionally to be chasing the refined fringes of things. I enjoy mulling it over in places like this, but none of this sophisticated color science could be a part of my career. I'm not nearly talented enough to indulge it, nor smart enough for that.

Thank you. I'm glad people are liking it. It was a lot of work and took two years to make. Most of the time by myself, out in the city with a tripod and camera. I met a lot of people doing it since the camera looks unusual. (It's common in Vancouver to see someone filming as it's a big film production town and has six film schools but people out shooting usually have more modern squarish looking cameras.) The themes and aesthetic came out of the photography I had been doing for several years already. I had been framing buildings to make geometric shapes. This was basically adding motion to that series. The music was from a friend who had I got to know when he acted in a short I did a few years earlier. https://testcardmusic.bandcamp.com It hasn't had a festival screen it yet but it did get an award in Sevilla, Spain. https://www.instagram.com/seviff.spain/p/DUTcVcGDLq7/?img_index=16

Here's a pic from a shoot I did last December. I don't know the brand of the shoulder rig (as I got it used on Craigslist), the EVF is the (sadly discontinued) Kinotehnik LCDVFE. The camera attaches to the rig with a Niceyrig quick-release plate (that has feet). The lens is a vintage Angenieux 17-68mm zoom with a screw on wide angle adapter, on top is a Niceyrig top handle holding an Audio-Technica stereo mic and a monitor mount. A bit hard to see is an attachment that goes below the rails between the shoulder pad and the grips for two wireless mic receivers.

It allows you to operate the camera fully remotely so it is fundamentally the same thing. To be honest, if I was going to use such a thing then having a compact palmable remote is more appealing than walking around looking like I’m holding a crucifix like the Luna option. But it’s one more thing to carry so there is that. The head tracker is very smart and for people doing instructional videos it is excellent - even if it does look like you are carrying ET in a papoose when you are out and about. I guess the drawback is that it is excellent for seeing what you are seeing but falls down as a concept when doing the other 50-75% of what vloggers do which is getting their own face in reacting to what they are seeing. One issue might be trying to be discreet as you have to look at someone and ET sat there swivelling to do the same does draw more attention and gives off a mobile surveillance unit vibe. It such an eye catching feature though that I would expect DJI to be emulating it soon.

It’s arrived. Immediate observations… Each to their own and all that, but the size is perfect. Over the past near 20 years, I have only had a couple of ‘personal’ cameras starting with the GF1. I still have that one (somewhere) and last time I tried it, it felt somewhat clunky and slow. No big surprise, it is getting on a bit! X100 which is a strong contender for fave camera of all time for its time. Again, it would be terribly slow today, but SOOC, produced the best ever JPEGs of any camera I have ever owned. Not necessarily (and not actually) the sharpest or most detailed, but specially compared with high MP full-frame cameras, but just a certain ‘filmic’ magic about those 12 MP files from that sensor. Sony RX100v. A fiddly little bastard. Great video, very average at best stills. Too small. Sony ZV1. Again, a better video unit IMO, hated the stills experience. So here we are with the L10… I’ve set it up to mimic the set up of my S1Rii’s that sit above my S5ii…which sits above my S9 (that I am unlikely to see again before mid July as I head off on a near 4 week road trip in a couple of days). I still need to import any LUTS and I’ll start with my Phantom one’s for the S5ii which I currently use for the S1Rii’s also. If anyone fancies making a LUT to bake in based off the new L Classic Gold, I’d be interested 😬

I like film and retro filmic looks, but shooting Super-16 (or even Super-8) is still an expensive PITA. After some testing of my equipment, I've realised that my GX85 has image quality equalling or surpassing a Super-16 film camera (with some categories surpassing a Super-35 film camera) so in my pursuit of a pocketable, portable, fun, simple, and fast setup that looks like film, this project is born. The criteria is to work out how to get great images from the tiny setup that are enough like film that most people would believe it if you said it was shot on film. My approach is simply to compare the two and find the biggest differences and then work on bringing them closer together, 80-20 rule and all that. The first point of comparison is already known, the crop factor is similar (2.2x vs 2.88x) so making sure I don't go too hard into shallow DOF then this should be comparable. Second consideration is camera movement, shake, and how they'll be used. S16 film cameras can be hand-held, but they've got some weight so are relatively steady in use. 8mm cameras were designed to be hand-held and are much lighter, so will move more. The GX85 is far smaller than either, but has IBIS (and OIS with some lenses) so that should make it feel larger, but I'll have to watch out for parallax, which will give away the cameras lack of heft. Third is the DR. Film has a huge DR and I wasn't sure how this would go - harsh clipping of highlights and blacks will be a dead giveaway. Without knowing anything about its rec709 profiles, I shot an exposure test where I took shots one stop apart. Film negatives have a lot of DR, but print film has far less, with stocks like Kodak 2383 only having about 5-6 stops in the linear range of their exposure (between about 10% luma and 90% luma, before the rolloffs kick in). Bringing in my test shots and matching the contrast within my standard colour pipeline (based around the Film Look Creator tool in Resolve) I realised the GX85 has enough DR to push its highlights well up into the highlight rolloff curve of the FLC, and same with the shadows, so this is fine too. DR, check! Fourth is resolution and texture. The images should be soft and noisy, but how much? After reviewing a number of sources, I realise that there are all kinds of factors, such as the speed of the negative, how it was exposed (0... or -1 and pushed in post, etc), but often the biggest factor in softness was the lenses used, and the biggest factor on the grain is the processing that the streaming service does when you upload it! In this sense, I have a lot of freedom in these aspects, but I'll have to do further tests on uploading to YT. I have seen videos that have really nice grain in 4K, so I know it can be done, but my previous tests showed the YT compression really changes things, so I'll have to do more tests. Then we're into testing with real images and just seeing what we see. My first test was some random shots in the garden, just to have a starting position. The feedback I got (including one friend who practically lives to talk about film!) was that it looked good but needed more saturation. My thoughts were that I exposed too high (I'd forgotten that the LCD is deceiving and the GX85 has a lot of shadow info) and as such the highlights in the first image were clipped in the file and still show in the graded image. After this test I happened to watch a YouTuber go through their grading process and they said they exposed by putting the image in the middle of the histogram, which made sense to me and I realised this is what I should do with the GX85. Second test was just a few images while out and about. It's the GX85 and 14mm F2.5 pancake lens. I'd previously forgotten this lens is both a 31mm and also a 62mm (with the 2x zoom) and so is much more flexible than I was remembering, so I made sure to include some 2x shots to see how useful that was with this level of image degradation. I also decided to push the images to get more of the kind of look I'm chasing. The 2x seems completely fine too, having quality far more than this level of softening will show. I also re-graded them in B&W, pushing the contrast much further. I may even want to go harder on these. Much more work to do, but I'm really liking the process so far. In these days of digital perfection, the attraction of film is in the colours and the texture. If you want the colours and not the texture, wanting to keep a much more modern level of sharpness and noise, emulating some of the properties of film is so ubiquitous that I think it's just called "colour grading". The phrase "film emulation" then is for the texture of film and deliberately wanting the imperfections and aesthetics of it. You don't have to go hard like I have with Super-16 film + Super-16 lenses levels of softening, but if you did this is easily possible too and FLC has 35mm presets which soften, but do so far more subtly than this. I'll continue to iterate on the colours and textures, but moving into moving images is probably next, with all the testing of the YT processing and compression that comes with that. But seriously, imagine telling someone in the 80s that you could fit an interchangeable lens camera capable of shooting feature-film level images in your pocket... Feedback welcome.

These are really nice. The best is the footprint. I played around with SpektraFilm but didn't do much with it. I should try it again.

Not only the Leica :- )

I'd use a little known plugin called Tilt Shift Blur (TSB), which comes with Resolve but is very special in a critical aspect. Normally if you have a node and give it a key then the node calculates things as normal and then uses the key as a transparency effect, so if you used a large Gaussian Blur and gave it a key then you'd get a huge blur mixed with the sharp image at the level of transparency the key dictated. However, with the TSB, the key defines the size of the blur, so you can vary the size of the blur that way. For this purpose I'd give it a luma key of the image and adjust the contrast and amount to control the relative amount of blur between the lighter and darker parts of the image. The TSB is what I use to soften the edges of the frame in my lens emulation nodes, which allows there to be no blur in the centre and it gradually transition to having a larger and larger blurring towards the edges. The fact that the key input acts as a transparency control really doesn't make much sense when applying most OFX plugins and I'm surprised they haven't made more of them smart like the TSB one where it uses the key as an input to control one or more of the OFX parameters.

Hey all, I'm pretty close to squeezing the trigger on a Sigma FP - what are some things I should be looking for when inspecting a used Sigma FP for potential purchase? Like obvious things for me would be signs of irreparable damage to the ports, dead pixels, ensuring the SD slot is in working order, any scratches on the sensor. Anything else though? Particularly things that might be unique to the FP. Thanks in advance!

Version 8. Changes are: Added CA Added film dirt and damage Added diffusion Less blur I've also added a bunch of fresh images into the reel, so there's a wider range of situations, including more real-world examples. The ones I grabbed from previous trips are exposed with SS so the motion might be off on some of them, so excuse that aspect of it (although having a slightly blurrier image does make this less visible). I also backed off the stabilisation on the shots from the previous reel as I think it hides the gate weave a little and is more how the rig actually shoots. Here are a few before/after images, to get a sense of what it's working with as input and how far it's taking the image. This is the setup used for (most) of the images in the reel.. It's tiny, actually pocketable, fits in the palm of the hand, and the ergonomics are just right.

Ok, here is the kitten footage about the only thing i did was zoom in a little as i wanted it to be more obvious what what happening in the first clip, i also stabilized the footage. Iphone 13 pro max was used. Not sure about the third clip, one day last week the iphone camera gave me grief all day. It jumped about, had focus issues. Quite bizarre, i have also noticed it flares abit oddly, i presume its time to put new lenses covering over it as when i examine the lens covering their starting to get scratched. I have since installed the raw cam app thats been mentioned in a forum thread and i'll give that ago shortly. The mission 1 has been in and out of its box, i charged the battery and updated the software and its back in its box as i want to do some kind of unboxing ceremony, kinda like a welcome to country thing 😀. You probably need to be abit aussie to grasp where my thought processes are going. The other issue is i seem to have misplaced a ball head adapter. I kinda had some ideas for its use, not a huge issue as i can work around it i think.

Ok its official, i have no willpower at all... as you can see not $700 but that was expected. I like the little embargo sticker, talking to a saleman they were only allowed to start selling these from yesterday. Hn gave me a gift card of $100 so the grip comes down to $54 easy decision. I did take it out of the box to charge it up on the way home as i had a usb to c cable in the car. I do wonder if i'm going to need a better memory card, what i have now is probably a bit ordinary. Big day tomorrow it would seem. we'll find out tomorrow, i'll let the suspense build :)

Stepping away from film emulation for a moment, the thought occurred to me to that we have softened the image enough for the 2x and 4x in-camera digital zooms to be tested. The GX85 sensor is 4592px wide, which with its 1.1x 4K crop factor, means that the horizontal resolution for its 1x is about 4174px, with the 2x crop it's about 2087px, and the 4x is about 1043px. Normally the 2x is usable on a 1080p timeline and the 4x is not, but with the film emulation on it, the only way to find out is to test it in the real world. Here is the GX85 with 14-140mm lens on it at F5.6. Optically zoomed to about 25mm: At 14mm and zoomed 2x in-camera: To me this looks completely fine. So far so good.. Optically zoomed to about 50mm: At 14mm and zoomed 4x in-camera: This is the big one. I see some differences here, but not enough that if I saw this in an edit it would pull me out of it, which is really what I'd want - to know if it's usable. For some context, I shot this test with three lenses, the 14mm F2.5 pancake lens (which is the lens I'll be using), the 12-35mm F2.8 and the 14-140mm shown above. While the light was changing during the test, what is interesting is that the 14mm F2.5 has much less contrast. The reason I point this out is that when comparing the 14mm F2.5 with in-camera zoom to the other lenses I think the lens rendering itself is the most significant difference. 2x comparison: and now for the main prize, 4x: This is an excellent result as far as I am concerned! Caveats: This is with the v5 film emulation grade, which as @eatstoomuchjam pointed out might be on the softer side of the range for what 16mm film rendered However, this grade DID NOT include the lens emulation stack, so the lens barrel distortion, vignetting, and corner softening hasn't been applied, so that could go some way to evening out the look I haven't done any sharpening to compensate for any softness. In the past I've discovered that a digital zoom of about 1.6x can be equalised by some careful sharpening in post, so sharpening isn't to be underestimated, especially in the context of an edit where (hopefully) the viewer is looking at the content and not the image Super-16mm film was often shot on several primes, where some would have been sharper than others, or on zooms, where the zoom would have been sharper in certain parts of its range than others, so natural variation in this stuff is potentially making it a more accurate emulation rather than detracting from it I suspect that the 4x is on the edge of being too soft, which makes sense as it's a 1K sensor readout going through a lot of processing and rescaling, but this is a great result. So.... the GX85 and 14mm F2.5 lens is a Super-16mm setup with a "turret" of T2.5 lenses that are equivalent to 31mm, 62mm and 124mm, and it's (just) pocketable and fits in the palm of your hand! Happy to share the power grade if anyone wants to play with it.

It was better when you could buy stuff under $1000 and pay not additional taxes. Gerry Harvey complained to the government he was losing too many sales. Thats when the ten % gst got applied to everything and the government had a win and Gerry Harvey could suddenly afford a few more race horses as well. For awhile those overseas ebay buys were a bargain as the middleman got cut out out the deal. However i suspect the manufacturers or sellers have upped the base price regardless of middlemen or not and the savings aren't as spectacular as they once were. Ah ok, i read that as a reasonable (price) opposite of what you meant lol, although not sure what gopros have normally sold for over there. I think i paid $500-600 for the 9 when it came out. Confident i looked around for the best "local" deal. Playing devils advocate momentarily and to be honest i have no interest in the other models, a new chip, decent capacity battery it seems, and ability to mount mft lenses and that 1080 at 960fps even at 10 seconds is impressive, i think i would be happy to pay $700 even through its a jump over earlier gopros but it wont be $700 here, I'm expecting $1000-$1300 er i just googled mission 1 in aus. Seems like there here, except the ils gopro and its $1100 which might come as a bit of a shock to some of you 🙂

Just FYI, if anyone on here is looking for one. This one is 5000 Euro. https://cinematography.com/index.php?/forums/topic/104495-for-sale-digital-bolex-d16/

Samyangs at f1.4 are not cheap plus they are big and heavy. As far as I remember you don't like big and heavy. Maybe older sigma lenses from HSM generation as Anaconda_ suggested. Sigma 24mm f1.8, 30mm f1.4, 50mm f1.4 HSM. They are all under 200 E/$. Not small though. If you want smaller and cheaper lenses then you have to accept they start at f1.8, f2 and f2.8. Then you have lots of option and not only with Canon. You can also adapt vintage lenses to EF adding second adapter. With speed booster they become f1.4 to f2 both quite usable in low light on m43 in my personal experience. I was in this place more than 5 years ago with BMPCC 4K. Went trough speed boosters, calculating focal lengths, spending lots of time researching and trying to build decent lens sets both vintage and modern. My frustration grew with time as I realized this won't be cheap nor ideal to my goals. Went FF and never looked back. My decision was driven specifically by lenses. I realized the hard way a well-known truth: We buy systems not cameras and lenses are more important than cameras. If I want to use vintage lenses, cheap lenses, have access to the largest pool of lenses - FF is the right choice. I may change one FF camera system with another, my vintage lens sets stay, lenses have the same focal length and character. Same is true for Canon EF lenses. A FF system is no longer more expensive than m43, especially when we include the lenses. Example Panasonic S5 vs Panasonic GX85 + speed booster. Paradoxically a FF system (body + lenses) may even come cheaper due to large pool of lenses than m43 + speed booster.

I worded my response badly! I meant that the $700 US price tag was "already there" in terms of 'exorbitant, ridiculous, and "this is just an action camera - WTF"' which Kye had just said in anticipation of the AU pricing. I should have chosen phrasing that made it more clear that I wasn't simply repeating US pricing that is already known. 😅

I love the sigma 30mm f1.4. When I was using the GX80, it was pretty much the only lens I used.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ayD92_55eZom1FTxYGxE6KA_fnjkNwHn

Interesting that WB is placed before De-bayer. Photographers call it "white balance scaling" and prefer it not to be done by manufacturer, since its digitally boosting channels, which is irreversible process. After all its not like all things they're doing is science. Some decisions are just an engineer thinking its the best compromise.

I’d also make sure not to skimp on storage speed - having a fast NVMe drive for your active projects and cache files can make a surprisingly big difference to overall responsiveness, especially when working with larger footage formats.

It’s not even close.

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.

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.

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

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.

Old cameras have a number of challenges, including: - weak codecs, often 8-bit low bitrate files - terrible low-light - dated colour science and no log profile (rec709 profiles only) - poor DR - lack of IBIS or EIS - etc At the time these were pretty significant challenges. Now they aren't the challenges they used to be, because fast lenses and film emulation assist with all these limitations. Let's take these one at a time. Weak codecs Weak codecs, including 8-bit low-bitrate files can be soft, and can be overwhelmed by motion. By shooting with faster lenses you render more of the frame out-of-focus and therefore the limited bit-rate only has to focus on a smaller percentage of the frame. Thanks to cheap Chinese optics companies, we are now awash in F1.4, F1.2, and even F0.95 primes. The soft image is now no longer a liability, because compared to our modern 4K sensibilities, even 35mm film is noticeably soft by comparison. This means that by adding film emulation you'll be softening those edges and smoothing over any subtle compression artefacts. Film often has a more compressed colour palette, pushing hues closer together in many instances, lessening the visibility of artefacts. It doesn't work magic, but every bit helps. Terrible low light Cheap F1.4, F1.2 or even F0.95 primes sure make a big difference after the sun goes down. That "fast" F2.8 vintage lens you were shooting on back then is 3 stops slower than these things now. That can really bring a lot of situations back from being unusable to being at, or close to, native ISO. Dated colour science and no log profile Rec709 colour profiles are basically a creative filter the camera has applied, and they often weren't that good. Film emulation takes that image and applies an incredibly large transformation over it, which goes a long way to hiding any imperfections the colour profile might have had. It's like if you put on a pair of rose-tinted-glasses, you can still see that things have different colours, but any subtle differences aren't visible because the image has had a strong look put over the top. Also, film emulation plugins often come with controls for exposure and WB etc, which can help to grade the 709 footage, which was a major pain back before we had colour management pipelines. Poor Dynamic Range You know what else has pretty poor DR? Print film! Kodak 2383 has about 5-6 stops in the linear region, and then everything else in the image is squished into the highlight or shadow rolloffs. Yes, you can see into those rolloffs a bit, but if your camera has 8 stops then you've got at least a stop to put into each rolloff. People think film has huge DR, and it did at the time compared to consumer digital cameras, but it was the negative film that had the huge DR, not the print film. It's very common now for people to shoot on film, scan it, and then do everything else digitally, so they keep the full DR of the negative, rather than taking half of it and pushing it into the rolloffs. This is a still from Minority Report from 2002: It's not exactly a dynamic range demo - the streams of light INSIDE THE ROOM are blown out and every item of clothing the main character is wearing is crushed blacks. Lack of IBIS or EIS So there's a little shake in the files... well, film had this thing called Gate Weave, which was where each frame didn't perfectly align in the camera and so when played back there was movement of the whole image. Once we started doing digital intermediates people started stabilising the images digitally and that went away. When I went to the cinema and saw Goodfellas projected on celluloid they played a bunch of old ads and movie previews also on celluloid, and some were jumping around all over the place and some were rock solid (which means the projector the theatre was using wasn't the source of it) and much to my surprise, Goodfellas itself had quite a bit of it. By just using modern tools you can now stabilise things pretty easily, but this will create artefacts if you do it too strongly (especially if the camera had bad RS), but applying film emulation gives you much more leeway. This is because you can stabilise the image, then apply some Gate Weave, and once the viewer notices your images look like film they'll potentially just accept the shake in the image as being part of the film look. By adding Gate Weave and getting some grace from the viewer you can potentially increase the strength of the stabilisation you're applying too, with there being more wiggle room, and also because the softening of the image will mean that any distortions in the image will be slightly less visible. I was inspired to write this partly from my GX85 Super-16 camera project, but also partly by this video of the GH2 shooting at night. You can still see the ISO noise and macro-blocking creep in as blue hour ends, but he was also using the 9mm F1.7 and 35-100mm F2.8, the F1.7 is reasonably bright, but the F2.8 is pretty slow compared to things like the TTartisan 50mm F1.2 or the 7Artisans 35mm F1.2 primes that are $109 and $97 on B&H. These won't offer OIS, so your options for these on non-IBIS cameras are to spend more (Canon and Sony both offer 35mm and 50mm F1.8 primes with OIS) or to use a tripod or larger rig of some kind. Far from perfect, but much more useable than you'd think. These cameras have actually gotten better over time as the rest of the ecosystem is better able to support them. The only reason we don't think so is that our expectations have inflated faster than their potential.

So true. Our training and experience give us an eye for composition and framing. Last winter when I was in Mexico, as a tourist, I started shooting with my iPhone. I thought it was boring so I used an app that replicates grainy, dirty Super8 and shot with that. I realized that I also needed shoot like another person. I needed naïveté in my shooting, so I chose "1960s dad with his Super8 camera". So, I did things like shoot the waves in the ocean with a slow pan to the shore, signs, cars going by, etc. It was refreshing not to have to be so perfect all the time. (Now unfortunately I have to edit it and the footage is not exciting me, but that's a different story.)

I count myself very lucky in that regard in that I don't work to client briefs or input. At least, not beyond the most basic of levels. Ditto end result where there is zero input. It means I am only ever looking at how I am doing something or how I would do something. But a lot do not have that luxury I know!

Anecdotally, yes, from reddit threads and even Photography Life who have separate pages for the two models and both contain MTF charts that seem to be different (it's not the same image) but the curves appear identical. https://photographylife.com/lenses/panasonic-lumix-g-14mm-f2-5-asph https://photographylife.com/lenses/panasonic-lumix-g-14mm-f2-5-ii-asph The announcements from Panasonic also use the same description - V1 - from Panasonic announcement: V2 from DPReview (I couldn't find the announcement of V2 on Panasonics website? Why do you ask? Your review at the time was quite favourable.

Ha, me, everywhere all the time. I cannot step out of my house without continually working out how to shoot in any given environment whether it’s public transport, a restaurant, a bus, an elevator… It’s something that is just hardwired into you! 😂

Yeah, this was my job for a while in the middle of my career. It's a hell of a thing to learn. People, or tourist (especially tourists) going about their lives tend to look unattractive while also being ostentatious. A shooter, depending on what one needs to do, has to mitigate that or leverage that in various ways. Anyway I can't be a tourist anymore. When I visit places I'm always looking at situations with my videographer's bias and can't seem to be in the moment.

My film friend said that the edges were too sharp for S16, and gave me some examples of things printed on 2383 that look SUPER soft to me. It makes me think that the look of film is really two looks: 1) the look of a neg scan (which is digital from then on) 2) the look of a negative printed to a print stock I wonder how much "film emulation" is actually emulating the first one. I also wonder what look I'm going for. It occurs to me that back in the day what we'd see on analog TV would be low-resolution film scans (having maybe 480 lines) but would have had semi-infinite horizontal resolution (bandwidth limited and all that I know) and would have had zero digital compression, so the grain would have been fully in-tact (and therefore loud and proud). I suspect the aesthetics I absorbed (and are unconsciously referencing) would have been from music videos, sports videos, etc in the era of MTV (80s and 90s). In this early time anyone with a low budget would be shooting on 16mm (or 8mm!) and often not the highest quality lenses or cleanest stocks etc. I'm guessing I probably watched thousands of hours of pure-analog uncompressed 16mm or 8mm footage scanned and broadcast in SD, and those would have been quite DIY / experimental / creative etc, rather than the much more produced and formulaic outputs that came later on. Thanks! Like I said above, not targeting and specific pipeline, but I did calibrate the contrast on the first set of images from the GX85 to the DR of 2383, which was 5-6 stops in the linear range. The goal is to get something that looks like it could have been shot on some unknown stock. Realistically, this is a proxy for the images just not looking digital, and apart from trying to emulate VHS or Betamax, there aren't any other analog looks to draw from. Plus, film did a ton of things that research says that are aesthetically pleasing, and I'm sure I also have some baked-in nostalgia or just acclimation to this look. Interesting you think of T-max, and think this is fine grain. The grain on this is based on the 16mm preset in FLC, but modified to be softer. More on this later. I looked around and found a few 8mm examples with high contrast, but most were much more faded-looking, even stuff that seems like it was shot recently. There's this video which has shots like this: or this one with shots like this: Thanks! It's definitely more about training my eye to learn what I like rather than any sense of accuracy, however film has so many things that are desirable that there's so much overlap I couldn't do either one to any degree without also making huge progress in the other! The technique I'm using is to add the grain first, then soften the image. This ensures that they have the same amount of softness and we're not dealing with these horrific combinations of sharp footage + soft grain, or the other way around. The people I spoke with suggested that this tends to look a bit soft and so they either sharpen afterwards, or add a touch more grain on top. These shots had a touch more grain on top. What I didn't do is match the grain to the image. I added 16mm-sized grain to a sharp image, then softened that. Maybe I should just add 65mm-sized grain so it matches the resolution of the image, and then adjust the amount and softening to match the stock. I definitely have more to test. You're also right about moving grain vs frame grabs. I'm reluctant to post video samples until I've worked out how much grain to force-feed into YT to get the right amount of it out again. Definitely all considerations for a full-historic-emulation. I'm not really chasing historical accuracy in the sense that you're talking about, although I might be chasing some specific something I saw once and loved, which is possible (or quite likely) considering I watched a ton of very creative and edgy films growing up, including a lot of early music videos and skateboarding videos, which are much more likely to have been hand-held and with the camera being used to express attitude rather than the restrained professionalism of documentary or narrative cinematographers. I'm still figuring this out, but I suspect that what I have in mind is a feeling that I'm chasing, or perhaps an attitude, and I'm trying to get closer to that on every level at once. The colour and tone, the texture, the movement (motion cadence?), the compositions and camera movement, the choice of subjects, then in the edit the pacing and rhythm, the structure of shot combinations and overall arc, as well as the music which I plan to write as well. It's the whole vertical stack from tech specs to final feeling and emotional aftertaste of the edit. I have always liked street photography, and for this project (which is sort of a subset of my Night Cinema project) it's really shooting high-attitude moving street images. The gold standard for this is Illkoncept, who shoots travel videos on digital but has also shot some videos on his 16mm Bolex: From what I understand the Bolex doesn't have that many lenses and the ones available are often very soft, so this 16mm footage is a lot softer than other examples. This is in contrast to a setup like this, where they have used Vision3 50D and shot on the Laowa Nanomorphs and scanned at 6.5K, so this is sort-of an example of an image pipeline where the negative itself is the limiting factor: The other thing I've heard is that over the decades they improved the film itself, and what I was lead to believe was that it doubled (or more) in sharpness, so late 8mm film matched early 16mm, late 16mm matched early 35mm, and late 35mm matched 65/70mm. Great discussion.. it's forcing me to think about all kinds of things I hadn't really considered, which is the whole point, plus the result I'm getting are improving with each iteration.

Typing that reply certainly did make me warm even more to the LX100 and L10, but considering I have the GX85 and 14mm F2.5 already (and are therefore a FREE option!) it's pretty hard to beat for a number of reasons.. The size with the 14/2.5 is similar, and it doesn't get larger when you turn it on: As I edit in 1080p and am softening the image in-post rather than sharpening it, the 14/2.5 on the GX85 can be a 31mm and a 62mm (with the 2x zoom function) which are both absolutely awesome focal lengths for shooting how I like to shoot. I can easily bring other lenses if I am shooting something worth putting some effort into shooting (ie, it's not just an EDC opportunity). I've shot an absolute ton of tests on the GX85 so I know it inside and out. Like most of us here, I both crave the simplicity of having a fixed-lens setup that would do most of what I want, but I crave the choice and freedom of the options that an interchangeable lens mount provides!

Already looked a ton of reviews for this one, since is (almost) the camera I was waiting since 2014, when I got my OG LX100 - it was my first 4k camera. Still have it here, internal batery dead, but still functioning well. For years tried to get an MK II, but the used prices are insane (should drop now). This one solves a lot of problems of the LX100 I and II: - Finally it have a PDAF sensor on it, and with more resolution to boot (12mp on the OG, 17 mp in MK II, 20 mp in this one). - The sequential field EVF is gone, is a proper OLED now, the same 2,36mp panel that everyones uses. Never had the tearing issue with my LX100, past in the day it was on par of the others, but now you see the resolution difference. - Movable LCD. I would prefer a tilt screen instead of a flip, but in todays market, I undersatnd the decision. - More controls, more customization, LUT support (this is a MUST), switch for stills / video / S&Q, and now is a PASM model (In the LX100 you had to remember to set the shutter speed manually every time you wants to record a video). I was 100% sure to get one, and I saw the price. Ouch. But newer cameras are pricier each day. And after I saw some things: - The camera is much larger than the LX100 models - in fact, have almost the same size than a S9. Ok, they fitted a much larger battery, but...for m43, it could be much smaller. Battery aside, it could have the old size (even with some video lenght cap, like 30 mins - not the 15 min of the LX100)...and than I realized. - Panasonic now have the tendency to share body design between cameras (S5II and G9 II, for example). Then my prediction - this body will be shared with the S9 II, EVF and all. - About the lens - is exactly the same, but the PetaPIxel guys said that Panasonic told them that the dust problem was addressed. And the stills appear much sharper than the MK II, looks like there were som optimization. - No IBIS - Probably it would cause trouble the the "multi-aspect" of the sensor. The lens does not cover the whole sensor, and vignette would appear if the sensor moves (which does not occur with the lens OIS). Internal space for an IBIS they have for spare - the GX9 is much smaller and have a very good IBIS. They should keep the lens formula the same, just make it larger (to cover the whole sensor) but...profits. It is a very good camera, and I still want it badly. But is expensive, and for an EDC camera, for my use cases, an RX100 VII is a more versatile and smaller proposition (and costs the same new, much kess used). The X-E5 is almost a dream camera to me too, and I did not bought one, again for the price. And I shoot less and less, hard to justify it.

The secret sauce is skill. As someone that used to make my living doing travel videography decades ago, this Brandon guy has really honed the judgement it takes to get the shots. There's so much going on out there in the environment and he's able to omit it, control it, and/or shape it into something impressive. It's really quite a thing to do. He could make any camera in manufactured in the last 15 years look similar to this. In fact, he has. This guy is a cinematographer that really knows how to chase the light, compose a shot, and also create advantageous serendipity. Which might sound like a paradox, but it really isn't. But, yes, images like this sell cameras. Okay, buy the camera if you'd like and start the path to making an edit like this. You can't buy his boots-on-the-ground experience though. He's casual about it all during his "how-to" segment, but it really is the biggest factor here.

Sounds like you should be on the lookout for a used LX100?

@mercer Canon just released the R6V, which is somewhere between the R6III and C50. Another option to consider...

For sub-$2,500, a used EOS R5 ticks a lot of your boxes, I think. Afraid of overheating and want longer takes? R5C is right at the top of your price range, but would be doable. If you're willing to compromise on IBIS for the Nikon ZR and if you're willing to bypass stills, a used OG Komodo is just in the $2,500 price range. If you already have some stuff around for rigging up a cinema camera, you'd be able to use it pretty cheaply after that. If not, you'd probably be in a few hundred bucks more and out f your price range. The Komodo does have a built-in gyro, though, so it can be stabilized. Otherwise, the ZR seems to be a fantastic choice. A used Nikon Z8 would be just out of your price range, but would also be a really solid choice. A used Z6 III would do you really well too. Price is about the same as a brand new ZR. lensrentals.com has a used BMCC 6K for under $2,500 as well. It's a sensor from 2018, but you can get good results and nowadays, it has surprisingly good autofocus. No IBIS, though.