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This is quite misleading as mirrorless cameras can be set up to do a similar thing where the image is tone-mapped and written to a rec 709 video, usable immediately. The use of a log format and pretending that it is meant for direct viewing and comparing that to a highly processed video from a different camera is a bit disingenuous when cameras have menus with processing settings that allow the user to get a video without editing, with less AI for sure, but with good algorithms that do a roughlysimilar thing more predictably and with higher quality. I am not familiar with how Canon or Sony cameras do things but on Nikon I often use ADL which is their tone-mapping algorithm and it allows me to shoot high contrast, suboptimally lit scenes and get good results without editing. Log video is specifically a storage format and not meant for immediate viewing, which you of course know. Extremely edited night time footage where subjects have been dug out from the shadows will never look very good, and using appropriate lighting and/or making the video in conditions where the existing lighting is half decent is better than relying on extreme AI processing. This is probably one of the reasons why compact cameras are enjoying a resurgence: people are sick and tired of the sickly-looking overprocessed results from smartphones, and even a compact camera that has a small sensor but does not overprocess the image is preferred.

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.

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

Wonderful! Great eye and great images. Definitely in the direction of Koyaanisqatsi etc, not only with the images themselves but the shifts in theme too. Everyone should do themselves a favour and watch it!

The trailer is gorgeous. Great job!

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.

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.

In a sense it's much better than people give it credit for. In terms of bit depth, what matters is how close (or not) the bits are to each other in terms of what hues / luma they describe. We all know that 8-bit LOG is worse than 10-bit LOG. In general, the below are roughly equivalent: - 8-bit 709 == 10-bit LOG == 12-bit Linear - 10-bit 709 == 12-bit LOG == 14-bit Linear and the killer... - 6-bit 709 == 8-bit LOG == 10-bit Linear The challenge with 8-bit 709 is that the 709 from consumer cameras is essentially a creative picture profile, and so when you try to grade it there will be all sorts of tints or knees and elbows in the gamma etc. If you try and convert from 709 back to some sort of LOG space for grading it makes the image much more flexible, as I outlined in my 8-bit REC709 is more flexible in post than you think thread, which showed that with some care you can turn this: into this: However, this is a "naked" transform without any look applied, so once you add in a transform with some flavour (like the 2383 LUT) then you can get an even more consistent output, turning this: into this: @Framed_By_Dan the above thread is worth checking out as it has a lot more detail, but the crux of it is to make sure you're using the right colour spaces etc, which FilmConvert should be capable of doing I would imagine.. Adding a film look will help obscure any shot-to-shot differences, and would probably give a decent set of tools for making small changes that are normally needed between shots when working with footage not shot on a closed soundstage. I think the reason people are so dismissive on 8-bit 709 is because when it was out, the colour grading tools people had access to were primitive and the colour grading knowledge was minimal, however when 10-bit LOG came in everyone needed to convert and people with specialist knowledge built LUTs that looked really good, and then after that the tools got a lot better and people started learning how to grade. I think had those tools and knowledge been around when 8-bit was the norm then people would have gotten a lot more out of it. The examples above show absolutely unforgivable exposure and WB errors and the results are good enough to be amateur-level. Had these been the variations that someone even semi-competent would have in their footage, the results are likely to be basically flawless. Indeed you should!!! 😆😆😆 Seriously, everyone has their own standards and looks for different things, so me saying it's good enough won't carry any weight for you using it on your projects (and it shouldn't) because we shoot differently. The sensor is 4592px wide, which with its 10% crop in UHD, means the normal mode is reading 4174px across (which seems an odd number actually). If we assume the 2x is half that width (and not half the full sensor) then that gives us 2087px wide for the 2x crop. I always shoot 4K so I get the 100Mbps bitrate, but edit on a 1080p timeline, so any artefacts will probably be obscured in post for me. Depending on what you're shooting, how sharp your lenses are, and your timeline resolution you may get quite different results I'd imagine. I've got a few S16 c-mount lenses and some have wider image circles than others, with my Risespray 35mm F1.6 c-mount even covering the full MFT sensor on my GH7! Definitely worth testing and they can add some great character to the image without taking up a lot of space and making the rig really big (unlike using adapters and vintage S35 or FF glass). Also, definitely recommend using FilmConvert for this, as not only is it likely to be a more accurate film emulation (it's film emulation, whereas the Film Look Creator is just that, a Look Creator that creates Film LOOKS), but also it should have settings for input and output colour spaces, so if you set these correctly then you should be able to adjust exposure and WB in a pretty neutral way. I've been using the Standard colour profile, with Contrast / Sharpness / NR all turned down to -5, and Saturation left at zero. If you're using different profiles then I suggest shooting some test shots in both Standard and your normal profile, then pulling them into FilmConvert and playing around and seeing which you prefer. All the profiles on the GX85 do quite significant things to the colour, rotating hues, lightening and darkening different hues, changing the saturation of different hues, etc, so there is no neutral profile and it's just a matter of taste. If you get some good results I'd be keen to see them so please feel free to share them!