Andrew Reid

All of politics, completely out of control everywhere, and nobody seems to be able to get a grip. What's the common theme in all of our countries? Well, it has turned into a TV show, an attention economy, and that the people who enter politics for the right reasons have to play the game too, with a hostile media, be it old style TV debates, tabloid journalism or the new hellscape that is social media. Nobody has felt it necessary to protect the culture of politics or nurture a better calibre of politician, through better education and training... So you just get a load of narcissists or lackies going into it instead. It has become The Apprentice, it even has the same host. Everyone took the old style of politics for granted - we have never much liked the culture of it in the first place anyway, but as a result - it's even worse now.

The Chinese are great but they need to watch this And this...

The Alexa has a really fast sensor readout, 2ms... motion cadence on that is of course fine as it is on all of ARRI's cameras, so that probably excludes fast readout as being the issue. Maybe some cameras implement the shutter timings differently to others? Say if you are in 1/50 or 1/40 or 180deg shutter the sensor might still remain in 60fps and it will just expose for longer and then the image processor converts it from 60p to 24p and then the codec maybe fudges things further with trickery like inter-frame compression and inter-frame noise reduction, whereas on a simpler camera like the Digital Bolex there is none of that shit and basically a global shutter sensor and entire image pipeline optimised for 24fps at 180 degree shutter. Maybe some of our modern mirrorless camera sensors have a true 24fps mode and others only have 60fps mode, process the 24p from that. Maybe some codecs are truly awful at motion... On the 50D it didn't have a video mode at release if I remember correctly? Magic Lantern enabled it via the raw video hack, but there's no H.264 mode is there? I could understand why some of the older H.264 low bitrate codecs hurt motion a lot, Cinema DNG and Magic Lantern were like going from digital video to film. The leap was that big. I should do some tests in Cinema DNG on my Sigma Fp-L as it is a direct sensor feed, uncompressed RAW and no pixel binning in the 1.3x crop mode. I bet that looks pretty good at 180 degree shutter in 24p.

So the news is in... https://www.eoshd.com/news/openai-decides-content-is-worth-paying-for-but-only-if-its-disneys/ OpenAI is being paid $1bn. Disney is paying them to license their entire range of intellectual property. You read that right... Disney is paying OpenAI! In return OpenAI will get to use Sora and other OpenAI tools - presumably they would have had to pay for these at some point so factored it into the $1bn. These tools will be used by Disney staff at HQ and in the creative process. In return Disney will also get an equity stake in OpenAI. This strikes me as a very good precedent for OpenAI. They are getting IP holders to pay them, rather than the other way round where OpenAI pays for content rights. There must have been absolutely no chance Disney could have won their lawsuit on copyright grounds for this deal to have any chance whatsoever. They must also have been persuaded that Sora AI fan videos of Star Wars would have an incredible social media reach for years to come, it's like free marketing isn't it? The guardrails must be really tight. No way are you making that Jabba the Hutt sex tape.

Are you talking about the US or Venezuela? 🙂

By the way the collapse in price of the vintage stuff is extraordinary, you can get an Iscorama close to 500 euros now, almost back to 2010 pre-DSLR video prices

Yeah, thanks this shot is exactly what I'm talking about - the muted way it handles the sun is not what a good cinema anamorphic should look like. They don't have the big stretched ovals in the horizontal flare, the fatter flare lines and blooming. All these kids putting down pretty significant $$$$ for all this sterile stuff from China No question is it more practical though.... But better image it ain't 🙂

In terms of colour in LOG and rec.2020 the only difference between cameras these days is how easy (or otherwise) they are to grade, for example C-LOG on the old Canon 1D C was so easy, it only needed the addition of contrast and barely any colour grading at all to look cinematic. Now there are massive differences between LUTs compared to between LOG curves and colour. So when you see all these reviews, tests and comparisons you are just seeing a LUT! It's almost comical really, nobody gets under the skin of what the camera is doing - they're just putting their grading skills and LUTs on show. And the codecs are all so good... no more 8bit banding. I compared the Sony a1 SLOG3 H265 8K to Nikon Z9 NRAW 8K and there was nothing in it really, not even in terms of noise and shadow detail. You could do just as big a grade or white balance shift on the H265 footage as you could with NRAW. Now the way I like to think of RAW as useful is as follows: - As a way to bypass poor camera image processing... Hardly needed now... In the old days, light and day difference between something like 5D Mark II compressed H.264 and uncompressed Magic Lantern Raw (in Cinema DNG), even at 1080p it was a different league of image quality. - As a way to increase image quality with drawback of huge file sizes. Now we get if we're lucky a 1-2% increase in image quality for a 1000% increase in file size (over H.265 10bit) - As a way to turn off in-camera sharpening and white balance (do it in post). However image processing has got so flexible you can turn sharpening off in LOG... look how smooth and natural Canon LOG looks on the old 1D C or EOS R6 III 10bit H.265 for example - A file format to show to clients that says you're serious 🙂 And we all know why the majority of videographers are fawning over raw delivery whereas ARRI ALEXA DPs casually go round doing it all in ProRes That is another comparison the YouTube bros refuse to do well... the ALEXA ProRes vs ARRI RAW and Canon LOG vs RAW I haven't seen a single good comparison!

The modern lenses are closer to the Panasonic LA7200 in terms of look, just a lot sharper edge to edge. Whereas the Iscorama even when there's no flare still looks more cinematic and it borrows from the look of the taking lens you pair it with as well so you can play with that. There are no decent adapters as good as the Iscorama 2x. Still for £150 I am not complaining 🙂

I've yet to see any that have the rendering of an Iscorama or Soviet era LOMO, or the TOTL Hollywood lenses. They need to dial the coating down a lot and get rid of the very thin chickenwire flare. Anamorphic flare is much more than that as an aesthetic.

Well Venezuela is a dictatorship, so in a sense they're right to go after them for national security and drug cartel reasons. On the other hand, we'd be naive to think this is just about that coveted peace prize... And I'm not talking FIFA Peace Price The thing with Trump is it's weird how well he gets on with all the other dictatorships, isn't it? Perhaps it's because Venezuela's government claims to be socialist ("Chavismo") He only gets on with the right-wing dictatorships not the socialist dictatorships

The later Sony CineAlta F55 (CMOS) also had a global shutter and can be had for dirt cheap these days, as low as $1k Perhaps that's the key. To expose the entire sensor at once.

I think anyone can submit? Nikon probably curates the top ones based on social media reach. Honestly though it's not great. It isn't in the same league as a Panasonic Real Time LUT. All the processing seems to be in 8bit. I'll release what I've been working on soon but only when it can be made to look absolutely 100% right unlike the shitty shot above with its two green tones.

Motion cadence for me, is matching the target frame rate with the sensor and shutter speed-sensor interplay. It is also about rolling shutter vs global shutter as that plays into the look of motion. The less distortion or jello the better. I wish people would SHOW things again. Where are all the tests on the a9 III with global shutter showing what it's like in video mode at 24p vs the a1 II? I miss the Vimeo days of being able to compare with meaningful shots rather than the standard YouTube guff of a candle for low light, ridiculous whip pans for rolling shutter that nobody ever does in proper cinema, a model staring blankly at the camera for skin tones and a crazy underexposed shot with the shadows lifted until everything looks flat and dirty with no tonality - yeah that's a dynamic range test, sure. The best motion cadence I've ever shot was on the Digital Bolex with the CCD sensor. I think some of the faster sensor readouts are losing something important. They all look like 60p in their 24p modes. For 60p and 120p motion cadence has less meaning. Since there's no motion blur subtleties that need taking care of.