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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…

Chungking Express by Wong Kar-Wai Absolute masterclass in film making. Think it was shot in S16mm film, but the most impressive thing about the film was that he shot it in 2 weeks whilst waiting to edit Ashes of Time. The script/story changed whilst they were filming and they shot on location in Hong Kong. I think if you're going to write to make a film, keep it simple - if you look at Wong Kar-Wai's early films like Chungking Express, Fallen Angels, In the Mood for Love etc. - the premise is always simple/basic and they shine a focus on very few characters which really draws you in and with quite limited dialogue. He creates a mood and you should use the environment where you are filming to make it another character in the film, which complements the atmosphere you are trying to create in the story you are telling. Having filmed a lot for TV in cities etc. it really makes you focus on what you are trying to do and ultimately achieve - you've got to do things quickly and ignore what is actually going on around you, get the shot and be ready to be adaptable.

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.

I've been thinking about lenses a lot over the last few years, and just to be cheeky I've put some observations into a framework. Level 1 is where we start - with zooms The normal start to using lenses is with zoom lenses, probably the kit lens. We know the thinking at this stage: its convenient, you stand in one place and zoom, hooray! Level 2 is what most YT lens videos are about - primes are better than zooms We all know the arguments. Primes make you "zoom with your feet", they make you learn about perspective, they're sharper, better in low-light, BOKEH!!!!1, you can learn the FOV and develop an instinct for it, vintage ones are cheap, "real photographers / cinematographers use primes!" There are approximately 1000 billion videos and tutorials explaining this, but this seems to be where the thinking stops. I've not seen that much stuff that goes beyond this, but this is really just the start. Level 3 is where understanding begins - zooms and primes have their uses Almost none of the discussion up until this point acknowledges that lenses create images, and images have aesthetics, and aesthetics are what is actually being discussed. Moving to talk about motion pictures now, and cinema especially, there is a bunch of nuance that Level 2 doesn't really discuss. People have decided that FF sensors are the most 'cinematic' and typically are used with FF vintage lenses. This means that the FOVs are 24mm / 28 / 35 / 50 / 85 / 100 etc, with maybe a 40mm in there if you're getting fancy. These weren't the FOVs of cinema though, because cinema was S35. So the FOVs of cinema using the 50/40/35/27/18 were really like 75mm/60mm/52.5mm/40.5mm/27mm. It gets stranger when you add anamorphic into the mix. If I go to B&H anamorphic cinema lens category and sort by best sellers, we get: - DZOFilm Arcana Anamorphic Prime 3-Lens Kit, which are FF and 32/45/75mm and 1.5x, so on FF they are: 21mm 30mm and 50mm - BLAZAR LENS Talon 50mm T2.1 1.5x, which is FF and equivalent to a 33mm - Sirui Saturn 35mm T2.9 1.6x which is FF and equivalent to 22mm If you're using the standard FF lenses on a FF camera, you are using the FOVs that stills photographers used, rather than those that cinematographers used. Shooting on S35 sensor size (or crop mode) with FF lenses can create some of these in-between FOVs too. People at Level 2 thinking probably won't be swayed by the above. I would imagine the thinking is take a step forward or back, what's the difference? Level 4 is where understanding begins to mature - enter the feedback loop The feedback loop is where you realise that the focal length changes how you shoot. A ridiculous example to illustrate it. You decide to shoot on only a 28mm on a FF camera, but when you frame up a close-up shot, the distortion makes the talent look awful, so you take a step back and now the footage feels more distant because we're not seeing the talents face so much because there are no close-ups. We all know about perspective from level 2 thinking, but the level 3 thinking was that taking a step forward or back was no big deal, so which is it? This stuff is subtle, but (like all feedback loops) it pushes us to act differently and this can create a cascade of changes over time. Level 4 thinking realises that this dynamic is powerful and pervasive. I shoot in public, so I don't control the environment. I discovered that if I shoot with a 35mm FOV then I can get environmental portraits of my friends and family from close enough that people won't walk in-between me and them, but moving beyond a 45mm I'd either get shots of them that were tight and didn't really show their environment that well, or I'd step back and be struggling with people walking in-between me and the subject, which is a completely different situation. How would I respond to this? I might shoot from eye-level instead of chest height. Now I've changed the shot angle because of a FOV change. If I shot from eye-level for a while I might notice that I get more attention and now I find that the people interacting with my subject are more aware they're being filmed and keep looking at the camera. Now my subjects are acting differently because of a FOV change. If I asked someone the difference between shooting with a 35mm and 45mm would they think it would change the shot angle and subject behaviour? Not with the Level 2 thinking of "primes are sharper! duh!!", or the Level 3 thinking of "just take a step back! duh!!". What about controlled sets? Sure, on a controlled set there aren't random people walking in-front of the camera, but now we're talking about actors and all the dynamics that goes on there. Can great actors deliver amazing performances while the matte-box is only inches from their face? Sure. Do YOU have actors that are that good? I don't think so. Can great production designers change a set to accommodate a camera being further away, while keeping the frame looking the same? We know that as we move the camera back the subject gets smaller in frame, and that as we do that the background gets smaller but not nearly as fast as the subject does. This is great if you are only filming the subject and don't really pay attention to the composition of the entire frame. But you're a talented cinematographer, so you want to move back a bit and keep the same composition, which means that production design needs to 'cheat the camera' and basically rearrange every item in frame that isn't in the very background. I remember shooting a student film in a cafe and every setup required moving the vase of flowers on the table the subject was sitting at. That vase probably used two-thirds of the area of the table! I watched a video recently where a street photographer tested a 40mm prime for the first time. They didn't know what to make of it, having only a week to shoot with it before they had to release their video review. What struck me wasn't that they didn't know what shooting with a 40mm was like, it was that they didn't seem to understand that there's a period of learning that goes on, they didn't understand that the feedback loop exists. I realised they had 'learned' each focal length by memorising its attributes (which Level 2 photographers will crap on at great length about), rather than having learned them for himself by following a process where you explore the feedback loop and see how it makes you feel and how it makes you act and how the world responds to that, and how you respond in turn, and how the loop feels and matures over time, and how to make the loop go faster etc. I recently spent some time in a small town in rural Japan and shot the same location with FOVs equivalent to 71mm, 82mm, and 100mm. I went out for a walk each night with one of those lenses, going out for perhaps an hour or two. Shots that were possible with one were not with the next, shots that were great with one were lifeless with another. As I walked down the same road from my accommodation seeing the same shots night-after-night and making different framing decisions with each lens (and deciding to take the shot or not to bother as it didn't work) I noticed that I made different decisions to walk one way or another as certain subjects required different FOVs and distances to make them. I've also spend a lot of time, over several trips, shooting night scenes with 68mm and 71mm FOVs. In some locations I can make some shots and not others, while in other locations I can take different shots. If I'm shooting across a road then the width of that road (combined with my FOV) determines the type of shots I can take. After taking a number of those types of shots I start to adapt to how I'm shooting these locations. The more I shoot the more everything feels different. Level 3 thinking says "just take a step back, what's the difference?" and when shooting in those situations the difference between a 35mm and a 50mm feels like it's a span where there are several complete aesthetics in-between the 35mm end and the 50mm end. Thinking about shooting a 50mm FOV vs an 85mm FOV feels like travelling to a different country where things look similar but feel very different in practice. I know I'm barely scratching the surface of Level 4, and perhaps there are levels beyond this that I'm unaware of, but it's just amazing to me that almost no-one seems to talk about anything beyond Level 2. It's probably controversial to say, but I deliberately avoid almost all stills-only people because the thinking seems so rudimentary in comparison to people who shoot moving images. You can feel the limited thinking and the "well, actually!!!!" responses where they miss the entire point entirely because one lens is sharper or something ridiculous. Anyway, hopefully this helps. I've not really heard anyone talk about this stuff, which seems a shame as the rabbit hole is very deep and to only talk about ankle-deep water seems silly.

Well one thing is for sure and that is the S5II absolutely annihilates the S1RII, even with the ‘heat management’ firmware update. Shooting a pair of S1RII’s and a single S5II, same or at least similar lenses, tripods, same settings (4k) at approx 40 degrees Celsius in the shade…and the S1RII’s within 20 minutes shut down each, 3x. Quick battery changes helped string out a couple more minutes before the next inevitable shutdown. Meanwhile, the S5II mumbled something about holding its beer. That’s it, one unit is being traded for an S1II, which was something I was considering anyway. S1RII principle photo and occasional video S1II principle all day video unit S5II workhorse tripod unit S9 backup and roaming ceremony unit L10 candid & details unit But otherwise zero criticisms of how this kit is performing. Ticks basically every box for my needs.

I'm once again reminded of Noam Kroll, who has gone a long way into this rabbit hole. My recollection of his method was a balanced approach, where you make a plan and then improvise and adapt within a limited range. My impression was that he would storyboard things as a way of mentally rehearsing the shoot, and would end up with a clear idea of the logistics of the shoot, the equipment required, etc. Location scouting and anticipating the light etc as you normally would. I believe he also gained a clear idea of which shots were required, and which had some flexibility. Then when he was shooting he could make sure that he got enough for a functional edit, but was also clear enough in his thinking that he could adapt the plan to compensate for any challenges that arose and also to take advantage of any serendipity or inspiration that occurred. I suspect that this is a very deep skill, to plan and then improvise a shoot with an understanding of how the choices being made will go together in the edit. I know enough about editing to know that it's a jigsaw puzzle where you can have two small sequences that work well but don't cut together directly, so unless you can find a way to get from one sequence to the other then you have to change one of them so they're compatible. To do this for a whole scene, or whole film, in your head while you're still shooting it is beyond what I could even imagine, but I'm sure that the talented cinematographers are easily up to the challenge. Noam actually went further, describing a process where he worked with two actors and where he 'designed' what would be shot ahead of time, with the major plot points and story beats, but didn't fully script it. On each day of shooting the three would have breakfast and discuss the motives of the characters and how the scenes should go. Then they'd shoot while improvise the scenes, filming as they went and exploring ideas. It was freedom within a planned structure. I believe he was shooting one or two days a week, and so after shooting he'd review the footage and do rough edits, seeing what worked and what didn't. Then he'd 'design' the next shoot day accordingly, sometimes keeping on with his overall plan for the story but other times seeing something in the footage that made him adapt the narrative. I suspect that the skill is in knowing how much you can stray from the plan and knowing in which ways to adapt to make the end result better than if you just shot it as planned without any adapting to the situation. Certainly if you make a plan and then prioritise which shots are the most to least important then you'll have a good chance of coming back with a functional edit. My impression of great travel content is that most shots are good-but-not-great, and the art is in the edit and how they're combined. EOS-M and primes and a Fujinon-TV 14-70 f/2 will do a lot of the heavy lifting in making it look like cinema instead of video. In my mind you'll need to pay attention to how to keep the camera stable and then look at your references and study their coverage so you can design yours. By shooting on less than pristine equipment, you'll have to get things right in-camera as you won't be able to mess with it in post as much. Specifically, being able to zoom in a little in post can be useful if a random passer-by is staring. If you were shooting this with a modern mirrorless and sharp/neutral lens then I'd suggest using the highest resolution possible just so you have that flexibility. Your concern for getting stared at is legitimate, but the focus is to not get people staring while they're in the frame. As such I'd suggest getting more coverage using tighter framing and shallower DOFs, and for shots that are wider, simply getting more footage so you can edit around people staring. AI can potentially help if there are random people staring in shots you really want to use, but if you can edit around these moments (or prevent them from being in shot in the first place) then all the better. It's also worth considering that there are a number of things you can do that will lessen the changes of people noticing you and the camera, or lessen the people who are currently in frame noticing it. Another strategy is to investigate how much b-roll can be used in the edit without it taking away from the story. You may be able to get away with putting b-roll on top of a good audio edit, essentially having an L-cut followed by a J-cut where the audio goes from one character to the another but the visuals go via a b-roll shot from the location. I'm sure there's a deep art to doing this, but it's worth grabbing as much b-roll as you can while on location (especially if shooting has to wait for any reason but you're able to shoot). You can even return at a later time to get more footage, or better yet, take your kit and go shoot the location ahead of time so you can do a dry-run with the actual rig and also get a sense of what the location is like to shoot by actually shooting in it.

So far, we have: The French Connection The Day Of The Jackal Escape From Tomorrowland Chubby Rain Woody Allen (Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters, Deconstructing Harry) Lost in Translation I think this is a great list! I know that Sean Baker’s Tangerine was shot this way, but I’d rather not sit through another of his films. I've written a drama short. Two characters, 11 pages, lots of walking around town. I live in Portland and I’ve shot all over town before without ever once being hassled (except by some in a crisis of mental health). But I’m really more interested in seeing what kind of aesthetic choices might even be available to me when balancing that with coverage needs, moving quickly, and not attracting too much attention. I'm always so envious of New Yorkers for this very reason. You can fill the frame with sidewalk commuters and often no one will even bother to give you a second glance. I can’t think of any other US cities where this is true. Lovely screen grabs, Kye. If any of these were publicity stills for a film, I’d want to check it out. Especially the 68mm shots. Great mood and sense of place. I think that this quote sums up some of the decision-making that I am facing. I could totally go in there and “wing it”, just figuring out my shot as I went. But I want to rely on natural light, which means timing certain shots for certain times of day, and then that raises the question of how much planning I want to put into each scene, and ultimately how the visuals will compliment the story. I’d rather not lean too far into the documentary aesthetic. After shooting my last five shorts with my C70s, I’m actually thinking about shooting this film on a hacked EOS-M with c-mount lenses. I’ve been collecting them for a while and have three sets of primes, plus some great zooms. I’d personally put the aesthetic available with this (windowed) sensor and these lenses up against anything, I like it that much. I think the reason that no one really wants to do this is because it’s one of the most difficult digital cameras to work with, AND on top of that, the most difficult lenses to work with. But I’ve been tackling the challenges presented by these one by one, and I think I have them pretty well sorted. We shall see! Current plan is to hide a Deity PR-2 recorder with a lav on each actor and attach a timecode box to the audio input of the camera. Stabilize with a steadybag. Transmit the image wirelessly to a producer and make up artist in a car, along with refreshments for the actors. If I end up working with long zooms, I might give direction over a phone and provide a discrete earbud to each actor so that I could also monitor.

Further to the above, and further to what Mercer wrote.. The smaller the camera package the more amateur and less pro you look, which impacts how the authorities treat you Often locations care if you have a tripod or not, especially in crowded situations where a tripod takes up a lot of space and is a tripping hazard. Alternatives to a tripod are obviously hand-held and also shoulder-rig, but the often overlooked options are a monopod, and Mercers trick of having a monopod where the foot is resting in a pocket of a belt, so the camera effectively gains the stability of the operators waist Depending on the focal length and type of shot (medium, close-up, etc) the primary consideration in crowded places is if people will walk in between the camera and subject. My travel shooting with my family was done mostly on a 35mm F1.9 equivalent and this enabled medium-close-ups and closer in very crowded places without anyone getting in-between and wider than that with people or obstacles in-between. If you want to get more distance than that and not get wider then you'd need to go to a 50 or tighter depending on the distances involved. I personally find this hugely situationally dependent as it depends on how crowded things are, how noticeable the operator is, how willing to walk in front of a camera people are (or how much/little they care about you) etc. Combined with the distance / density / shot-size / focal length interactions are the DOF considerations, specifically how much do you want to separate your subject and at what distances. Normally this also blends into low-light requirements but I think these days if you use a dual-ISO camera then that consideration drops away and you can get by with F2.8 or even F4 at night in well-lit areas. The main reason that aperture isn't an obvious choice (just go F1.4!) is that if you can choose a slower lens then you can consider a zoom, which changes the shooting equation drastically. Depending on how you're planning and scheduling the shoot, the ability to move fast without changing lenses might be considerable. The French New Wave approach of getting minimal coverage and preferring longer takes is something to consider. There's a huge difference in logistics between storyboarding the whole thing within an inch of its life (and having many setups and doing hair/makeup/wardrobe touchups between takes etc) and running the whole scene a couple of times with a wider master then going a bit tighter and grabbing the more interesting shots as colour for the edit. Noam Kroll has shot short films on film and only had ratios of 2:1 or similar, and for certain sections only shot one take because he wanted to spend more film on making the important parts more interesting. For aesthetics it's also worth considering what you'll do in prod vs post. The traditional prod approach is to use filtration and select a lens / aperture combination that gives the rendering you want, and then you'd shape the light and control your lighting amount and ratios etc to suit your ISO/aperture/filtration. This makes prod very cumbersome and if you don't control the location perhaps impossible. The alternative approach is that you choose much more neutral equipment and push a bit of a look in post. There are obviously limits to this, but for example by picking a lens that's sharper across its range you can vary the aperture to control DOF and exposure in prod and then degrade it in post (soften it globally and in the corners, add distortion, add diffusion, add vignetting, etc) and you'll have a consistent look despite using the lens at different apertures, etc. Think about DR. The more DR the camera has the less of the scene you will clip and the more flexibility you'll have to adjust exposure and ratios etc in post without making the clipped areas visible. The less DR you have the more carefully you'll have to expose, and the less flexibility you'll have with moving shots that go between dark/light areas. The more DR you have the less you need to vary the aperture on the lens to compensate, or the less you'll need any lighting etc to compensate. Think about the contrast of the final film. The more contrast you apply, the more leeway you will have with the cameras DR, so the previous point gets easier. Film was great in this sense as the negative was so wide and flexible and gave a lot of leeway in post. Monitor as well as you can. Use a large monitor and a viewing LUT. The more you can visualise the end result while shooting the better. I find that shooting in uncontrolled situations means there are always things in the frame that I'm reacting to. This is in alignment with the situation and performance too - shooting in crowded public places will have the cast reacting to their surroundings, so you should be reacting to their performance and to your surroundings too, so the more clearly you can see the shot the more coherently you can react to it. Embrace the chaos. Separate the ideas of controlled coverage and creative experimentation as much as you can. The idea of getting a master in the can and then experimenting is great because you can ensure you've got an edit that can work and then you can grab risky but potentially great shots after that. Much better to have the final edit cut between neutral shots and really great shots that embrace spontaneity and add to the film than struggling in the edit by having to cut between shots that are neither safe nor creative nor sensitive to the surroundings. Some example 35mm F1.9 shots I've taken (please ignore the grading - these were from a long time ago!!!): More recent shots with 68mm F1.5 equivalent: and more recent with 70mm F2.0 equivalent: If you really wanted a minimal set of focal lengths, I'd suggest a 28mm for wides and ultra-packed situations, a 'normal' lens in the 35-50mm range, and a longer one in the 70-100mm range for shots where you are at some distance and don't want a wide. Your aesthetic should really begin with the emotional arc of the characters in the film, filtered into scenes, then the equipment chosen to express the intended aesthetic while shooting in the specific circumstances of the location and logistical assets and challenges.

I'm thinking of selling mine. I have had mine for a couple years and understand the camera's ins and outs if you need any information. As far as your question, I'd be most worried about the usb-c port. Most of the available cages do not have cable clamps, so I'd imagine most FP users haven't used them with the camera. So I'd verify with the seller that the port functions and the connection is tight.

Well stated @eatstoomuchjam @kye :- )

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 😬

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.

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?

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.

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.

ARRI have been able to focus on colour science for cinema whereas Canon and Nikon moving from film to digital was primarily colour science for stills "the capture of a single frame".It is not the same .Nikon must have had many died in the wool stills photographer old farts on their board that only began to change about six years ago towards "cameras are multimedia capture devices." Fujifilm is different -making motion picture film was an important part of their business from 1934 to 2013. Red have been in the game since 2005 but without the history and back ground that ARRI had with cinema meant their colour science developed in a different way(with American influences !) . There is also feature films like Dune-2021 and The Batman -2022 that used digital to film to digital (DFD) to give the final result a more film like appearance.

Apparently they can't even educate their own sales reps about their own products, so their ability to sell a camera that doesn't have the latest specs may be less than required. Emily said one thing in the video that was amusing, she said she had to hand it to Sony, as they have managed to brainwash their customers into thinking that larger sensors are better and that smaller formats aren't useful for anything. This is true, there is all kinds of misinformation out there that people are just constantly repeating to each other. The total amount of money spent on marketing must be absolutely unfathomable, but the thing is that companies will gladly pay for it because sadly, it works.

I have a GM5 and I'd love Panasonic to update it but the market usually always chooses "more features" over "tiny size" when given the choice. The Sigma Fp got slammed for no EVF, no IBIS. The Panasonic S9 gets passed over for being too limited, even though it's a similar spec to the S1H, with better AF! And with their 1 inch stuff like the LX15, nobody really bought it... all preferring RX100 VI etc, despite the fact the LX15 is one of the best compacts ever made with an F1.4 lens. If Panasonic made a mistake with the L10 it's the lack of a prime lens version to go after the X100 crowd. I also sense the age old marketing problems again with Panasonic. In Berlin, my local camera store (a very significant and long running one) has a Panasonic rep who is there very frequently, almost on a weekly basis. Panasonic have not even briefed him on the L10, let alone got a demo unit out for him to show to customers. Camera companies need to learn the marketing basics. If your strategy is to build hype around a big orchestrated online launch, have the camera in shops the next day, strike while the iron is hot. Why do the launch and actual release months apart and have nothing to sell?

Yeah, there are differences for sure. Some situations show larger differences than others. One theme is that the Panny versions are much more saturated in skin tones than the Alexa. Coming from the kings of colour science, this has got to be deliberate, so even ARRI aren't trying to match the Alexa. I think that instead of asking "are they identical", the better question would be "does this impart some magic". I mean, everyone agrees that ARRI has the magic but their cameras don't even match each other between sensors, so it makes no sense to have a higher bar for the Panny version than we'd apply for ARRI themselves. My impression was that the ARRILogC profile and the ARRI709 LUT is the most like the Alexa, with the V-Log -> CST -> ARRI709 LUT not being as good. This makes sense as whatever colour / gamma secrets ARRI applies in-camera can be put into that profile as it's customised to the Panny sensors and also safely locked inside the camera away from prying eyes (unlike anything they put in their LUT). However, the Alexa also responds differently in the spatial dimension, with the far-red response including a more spatially distributed response from skin tones. We also know that Alexas process the image spatially in-camera due to their texture options and processing. Who knows what is going on with texture in there. IMHO the texture of Alexa images is right up there in importance as their colour response. None of this includes temporal aspects either. While I struggle to think of what processing might be occurring in-camera between frames, there might be some (we can't tell), and that's beyond the possibility that the hardware itself has some sort of secret properties that contribute to the image. FDTimes did an entire episode on the Alexa 35, with interviews of over a dozen people and 100+ pages: https://www.fdtimes.com/pdfs/free/115FDTimes-June2022-2.04-150.pdf Here is the image pipeline in the Alexa 35 (page 59): To give some idea about how stunningly out of our depth basically everyone on the internet is who talks about this stuff, starting on page 116, Dr. Tamara Seybold talks about Textures.. "For example, the debayering already needed to obtain the full color image doesn’t only generate RGB values but also influences the perceived sharpness and grain rendering. And many more steps influence the clarity and grain that are important aspects of the texture of an image. So we, in the image science team, pushed hard to obtain the best results by really optimizing each and every step in the image processing pipeline, not only for the best color rendition but also for the best texture, as we call it. We did that in a holistic way, optimizing steps in the beginning of the pipeline together with later steps so that the overall result would be best. At some point, this came down to having more than 30 parameters that we had to optimize together—a huge amount. We specifically had to build a small “texture grading machine” to be able to optimize all these parameters together." (emphasis added) I don't know about anyone else here, but I would struggle to even list 30 parameters, let alone identify all the parameters, isolate the 30 that matter, then find the sweet-spot (or sweet spots) in a 30-dimensional space. This is regarding the Alexa 35, but I remember reading in there somewhere that the innovation of the Textures feature is that you can choose different profiles on the new camera, whereas on the old ones you only had the one, and that on the previous models they had chosen a texture configuration that was their best attempt at a one-size-fits-all. So the inference was that the previous cameras were also doing this kind of processing. By implementing their colour science inside the camera, they could be doing all sorts of stuff. They could have things that analyse the image and then apply different treatments depending on the scene the camera was capturing. They certainly have a team capable enough and a camera with enough processing power to have a dozen, or a hundred, or a thousand, LUTs or algorithms inside it and be changing these things based on context or WB setting or sensor temperature or whatever the hell else they found was useful. The sheer depth of knowledge that has gone into their image science is incredible. In 2009, Glenn Kennel joined ARRI as their CTO, which was a new position at that time, and in 2010 he was promoted to President and CEO. Glenn had previously worked for Kodak from 1980, and worked on various things that involved the gradual digitisation of the pipeline, including things like telecines and film scanners etc. My understanding is that his contributions at ARRI were pivotal for the development of the Alexa, which was the first digital camera to gain wide acceptance within the industry and did so due its film-like response. A bit of searching revealed some interesting discussions we already had during lockdowns..

4K is nice, but I still insist that most of us aren't watching on screens big enough to really get the full benefit of it. I can see very little difference on my 55-inch 4K TV between 1080p and 4K, except on YouTube, but that's because of the significant bitrate bump YouTube's 4K has over its 1080p. That's another reason to upload in 4K instead of 1080p even if you film in 1080p. When watching Blu-rays, though, the difference is almost non-existent unless you literally walk right up to the TV and are a few inches away from it. Now imagine how little difference there is when watching on your phone or a tablet!

To add to the above, Matti Haapoja (perhaps the king of pixel peeping "cinematic" YT) uploaded a bunch of videos that were edited in 1080p (and upscaled to 4K for export) and he tracked all the comments and not a single person commented that the videos looked different or whatever. In a blind real-world test literally not one of the pixel-peeping techno-fetishist pedants could tell. Of course you'd still want a good 1080p image, some 1080p cameras were better than others. The added bonus of this approach is you only need 25% of the computing power to edit it. Or if you go with h264 instead of h265 then it's even less!

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.

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.

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...

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