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Regarding voice AI. Hoo boy. As a documentarian, this one can affect me a lot. A lot of ills can be smoothed over with AI audio. But ... at the end of the day it's an ethical choice how it's employed. I've decided to ONLY use it to salvage VERBATIM lines from interviews and field audio that is distorted beyond comfort. Like, wind noise, clothes rustling. And then it's a last ditch option after audio EQ/Rx tweaking. Best thing to do is just not 'f up the field production to begin with. Beyond that, if AI is used as a production short cut to solve a storytelling/crafting failure as a filmmaker -- I now consider AI use untenable for me. It's simply on the wrong side of things morally when it comes to making honest doc films. Sadly, I fear that's now a contrarian opinion; an "old-fart" opinion. No one probably really gives a shit anymore about these sorts of "cheats" 'cept me.

While AI can be employed for positive or negative things, there's a bigger outlook at play for me. Robert Persig's famous musings are where I want to stand philosophically. His theories, and my limited understanding of them, are pretty much the reason why I ultimately view AI unfavorably.

https://www.indiewire.com/news/obituary/robert-duvall-dead-1235141818/ The world will be much emptier without him. He was one of my favourites—and, for sure, one of many others here too. RIP, you’ll be truly missed, not just on screen.

Hey all, quick follow-up after having purchased the C50 and using it couple days. The customization is seriously one of the best parts. I have EIS toggle, S&F, teleconverter, display brightness boost, view assist, WFM, false color all on physical buttons so they're instant. Then the touch quick cine menu overlay lets me flip through frame rates, codec, resolution and recording settings super fast without leaving shooting view. It just feels like one of the quickest cameras I've used in real life. Open gate 3:2 is still my absolute favorite thing. The aspect ratio looks fresh and having that extra vertical headroom for reframing or pulling stills is addictive. Being able to shoot 7K open gate in 10-bit h265 at only 486Mbps in the lowest bitrate is a great data rate to resolution ratio. The digital zoom via the rocker switches is the other standout. Light press for slow creep, hard press for fast punch, with separate speed curves for each. It's so tactile and controllable, and it makes punch-ins on primes feel intentional instead of a crop hack. The top handle is really cool too. It gives better balance and a two-handed grip so handheld shake is noticeably reduced, especially low angles or longer takes. But what's even cooler is how modular it is. Snap it off and the camera becomes super compact for travel, storage or quick discreet shots. Having the choice is great. Still working on stabilization. EIS helps when it's on, but you get that slight crop and occasional motion blur artifacts unless I crank shutter angle to 90° or 45° (which I do now). EIS is disabled in open gate 3:2 so those shots are raw shaky until post. Gyroflow should handle it but I'm still having trouble getting it to recognise the camera or lens. Anyone knows how to manually set it up? Any tricks for getting the gyro data to load properly? Still in early testing phase but overall the camera feels fast, intentional and pro in a way that keeps me shooting. Cheers!

Another gem by @Henryo Really makes me want to pick up my bmpcc again soon. Anyway, such a treat to watch:

We should hold theft in disdain. Not doing the stealing thing, after all, is one of the commandments in the Bible. I have a friend/colleague that has gone into the AI rabbit hole. He wants to only deliver videos with 100% generative AI. His argument is the hackneyed "It's just a tool". Well, a tool delivering mimicry from unauthorized sources is theft. "But humans copy each other all the time" he's said. Sorry, bud, you're just rationalizing stealing. Putting aside that human plagiarism is also theft, the process of being creatively influenced as a human is not the same thing. Humans filter all creative context through their own impressions, wisdom, experiences, empathy, and feelings. That particular matrix is infinite, random, and organic. The talented know how to tap into this mystic calculus, to develop their expertise, bend their skill set as a means to an end, and to use all of it to create something profound. Hacks (of which I am one, mind. Maybe a self-aware one, but still one nevertheless) can only regurgitate superficially. This lazy superficiality has now been globally scaled and monetized for the 1%. It sucks. Specifically, it sucks for me because those mediocre jobs of regurgitation used to be $$ in my pocket, not theirs. I had a skill of the craft that was worth a certain value. That value is diminished significantly. Yes, I'm bitter about it. Should I be? I may lack art, but at least I had craft. Be that as it may, my colleague's use of AI is especially galling as he's eager to brag at how hard it is to get the various AI systems he uses to comply with his prompts. Here's the thing: he's putting out animation style videos. Do you know how difficult it is to be a crafts-person creating animation? Good god. And he says he's "working hard" doing prompts? The "it's a tool argument," to me, is like going into a museum to admire and marvel at the paintings and sculptures ... but then standing in front of a 10th grader's paint-by-numbers knock-off of "The Harvest" and insisting it also deserves as much admiration as the original Van Gogh -- Or looking at some technical feat, like a 3D print of Michelangelo's David and being, like, "Wow, the person that ran the 3D printer equipment to make a copy of that sculpture is so great!" Bull. Shit. Admiring the craft needs to also be part of admiring the art. If my colleague is so addled that he doesn't even see repercussions of that craft-art-divorce, he's probably hopeless. Worse, he keeps trotting out his latest video examples in a gee-whiz-isn't-this-great-way to everyone around him -- as if we're supposed to be impressed? He's literally said, "I can finally make everything that's been in my head exactly how I see it!" "Make?" No, that ain't what's happening, not really. And the fact that he can't even recognize that he's not a "maker" is the real problem. People that are too shallow to cop to any of that, to appreciate what's being lost ... again, it's the deeper major problem with [waves arms around] all of this. I'm tired hoss. Tired of shaking my fist at the clouds.

Do you agree with my choices... And did I miss anything? https://www.eoshd.com/news/the-2025-hybrid-mirrorless-camera-rankings/ The 2025 camera rankings for video quality and value for money are in!

Agreed. I felt the same about the G9II. Lowlight is good. Full frame cameras seem to just be INSANELY good. And seems like the crop of full frame cameras for the most part has been this way for the last few years. I owned the Nikon Z6 OG from 2020-2025. It has the same IMX410 sensor found in the Sony a7iii, Panasonic S5/S1/S5II/S5IIX. That sensor despite being used in 7 yr old bodies like the z6 or a7iii is great in lowlight, 12,800 ISO and 25,600 ISO never looked bad to me I used to push the z6 so hard with wedding films even dipping into 51,200 ISO and noise was always usable. I dabbled a bit with the G9II in January and lowlight seemed noticeably worse, but at the same time it wasn’t BAD per se and cleaned up well in post. Again I think it’s just that full frame cameras are insanely good. But then again so are crop sensors lol…I was just running some lowlight tests with my friends $649 Canon R50V. With some Denoise in Davinci resolve, 12,800 ISO looked great to my eye. Nuts! 12,800! $649 used to get me a Panasonic G7 and decent lens…how far all these cameras have come. I couldn’t dream of getting that type of result on the G7. But this $649 R50V was extremely impressive lol. We are so dang spoiled. I ended up getting a used canon r6 OG for a very good price ($929), overheating aside its a wonderful cam for $1k average. And looks great at ISO 25,600… I think my biggest isssue with the g9II was PDAF seemed to shut off or be used a lot less when above ISO 2500 or 3200 in a lot of cases. Meaning if you want to rely on autofocus it’s hard to really push things. Because I did find that with some Denoise ISO 6400 and 12,800 were honestly not bad. Maybe I also didn’t have the most optimal lens choices…but when I was recently filming at a summer camp where they had a canon r5 (so I could use the r5 when I wanted and my G9II when I wanted), the r5 seemed to wipe the floor with the g9II at 3200ISO and above especially when pushing things. And unfortunately I just seem to have times where I need to shoot in very very lowlight settings. So full frame is a big help.

My take on the situation is that I'm super-happy with the GH7. It basically does everything I want, and apart from having ultra-sharp ultra-shallow DOF, pretty much does most things that FF does. It does low-light very well, and is only behind the low-light from FF cameras because they have gotten crazy good.

Yep that's the kind of intermediary codec that the ZR needs. But only if Nikon doesn't cook it with that aggressive noise reduction. You know the drill, Fuji had similar issues I seem to remember you pointing out. Thing is, I don't buy cameras based on promised or wishful features anymore. Been burned too many times waiting for "coming soon" updates that arrive late, incomplete, or not at all. So as of right now, the ZR is off the table for me. It's not just the codec situation though tbh, the unreliable view assist/exposure tools and first gen quirks also give me cold feet. Good to know LT is officially on the roadmap, though.. great for early adopters but I think I'm done gambling on "maybe later".

I’m not ‘waiting’ for it as such, but based on my S9 experience, it could be something pretty special. If they get it right. If they even make one… I have gone backwards and forwards over what to do with my S9 that has been at times both A cam and B cam but due to me picking up a pair of S1RII’s mid last year, plus certain limitations of the S9 (mainly build), I was going to let it go… But then too many times I have let stuff go and regretted it so I have repurposed it giving it an XLCS cage, super-lightweight tripod and the dedicated 2 lenses to it, the 18mm or 85mm f1.8. I am hoping they do an S9II with a bigger screen à la ZR but with the S1I/R/E tilt option. And make it a bit more robust but spec wise, it’s already peak camera for my needs. So @gethin maybe look at an S9 because straight out of the box, it’s very high spec and really it’s only the body that is a bit weak, but beef it up with a cage and it’s 💪 And used, pretty cheap!

That's really unfortunate. His Vimeo is still up, and his Instagram too, though they haven't been updated recently. His content output decreased a lot once Gunpowder passed, but he had already been less active as I think he became more and more disillusioned with the entire YouTube/Filmmaking/Photography scene. I hope he is well and creating the art that he loves.

This is something I don't see people mentioning enough. That era, right before the gen2 S series cameras, they were nailing color science in lumix bodies. I'm keeping my eye on used prices, sensor streaking issues n all.

Thanks for chipping in. Yes Pocket og II would do really well. I actually have had so much fun shooting with it since the video and will have more stuff to put out soon. Watch this space. When I say it is so much fun, it is actually very inspiring just taking it with me wherever I go with a few batteries and capturing life happening around me. It is a great storytelling tool. Take care and have a great holiday everyone.

Vimeo is in the process of deleting ALL my videos, due to their new policy of deleting their entire library of content for ALL non-current users without an active Pro paid subscription. Also, about 90% of my Vimeo was nurfed by the copyright music shambles, where Vimeo did the 3-strikes thing and they delete your entire account. So to avoid that, back in the day, I just decided to make these videos private, and unlisted. I have not got round to putting it all on YouTube yet, but perhaps I should?

It once was that the pros had 16mm an 35mm film and the "amateurs" had Super 8 and videotape. Now that's all changed. Yesterday I was capturing some old videotapes from a friend's project that we did in 2011 on a Canon HV20. It looked amazing. I was expecting it to look worse than cameras of today but it doesn't. Just shows that even a camera from then, with a CMOS chip from that era, MPEG 2 encoding, 4:2:0 chroma subsampling, 1440 x 1080 frame size recorded of the wide screen image, and 8 bit colour, it still can look amazing. It just shows that cameras have been very good for a long time now. The differences are mostly ergonomics and physical size. When deciding on a camera, you have to consider what you want to spend months living with.

Here’s a quick review.

I think people are mistaking pretty with good cinematography. There’s good cinematography and there’s bad cinematography, and then there’s cinematography that’s right for the movie. In this case it looks right for the movie.

I'd argue it is the MOST important because without the camera, you don't have a picture. It is the small differences between the latest sensors and codecs that's the unimportant thing. In cinematography, our job isn't to worry about the costumes or set pieces, that's the job of someone else. So lighting and camera are the most important for a DP. What has happened is the gap between the top-end i.e. ARRI and the cheap stuff has closed up. This has been going on ever since the start of the DSLR revolution so it's not a new thing but there's never been a smaller gap that exists now, for example between something like the Alexa 35 and a $1000 used Panasonic S1H. By the way although Magellan has beautiful content and really nice camera-work, the sharpness of it and the deep DOF isn't everybody's cup of tea. It does look a bit too soap opera in parts of that trailer, I think. It looks very different to an IMAX shot film. So there's big differences between formats and lenses still... The same cinema focal length for example on 16mm has always looked vastly different to same on IMAX or large format. Also there are big differences in grading style, camera movement style, and so on. I think most relevant for us is that you don't need to make a massive rig any more to get good results. It's horrible having the weight as a one-man DP. Probably why they used such a small camera on this.

My favourite AI outcome would be for it to fuck right off.