Axel

On 5.9.2017 at 11:15 AM, Axel said:

Meanwhile, I leave my lightweight ACE at home, frame my shot with gimbal or monopod and additionally apply >stabilization >tripod mode in post. This revolution comes too late for me. 

On 5.9.2017 at 1:48 PM, Jonatan said:

And you do diz how? Possible in Resolve?

I use FCP X, where tripod mode is available as an option in Inertiacam, but only after the analysis has found little camera movement like pans and tilts. In Resolve 14 it's in >Color >Tracker >Stabilizer >Camera Lock. Does not decide four you if there is too much camera movement, so very shaky shots will turn to RS-like jelly. Other than that (monopod or gimbal used) it will be indistinguishable from a tripod shot.

On 5.9.2017 at 1:48 PM, Jonatan said:

 

1 hour ago, jonpais said:

Stunning scenery! Funny how almost every single shot was made using either a gimbal, drone, slider or shoulder mounted camera though. Impressive nonetheless. 

I fully understand that some shots need the aesthetics of a tripod, where the camera doesn't move at all. But I always hated to carry around and set up the thing. Meanwhile, I leave my lightweight ACE at home, frame my shot with gimbal or monopod and additionally apply >stabilization >tripod mode in post. This revolution comes too late for me. 

30 minutes ago, Andrew Reid said:

The individual is always susceptible to crowd forces, cultures, peer pressure, society norms, and so on.

These forces work slowly, in a nightmarish slomo. We move with the current, the mainstream carries us to the end. 

38 minutes ago, Andrew Reid said:

It's completely unrealistic, sadly, for individuals to act as individuals, self determining the destiny of the planet from individualistic change.

It is, indeed. 

40 minutes ago, Andrew Reid said:

The change should happen with the forces that shape the crowd.

Imagine, I mean just imagine that movies and docs promote the change, that new parties with benign principles are founded and get elected and that capitalists suddenly act responsibly and sacrifice quick profits for sustainable growth and stop buying politicians. That individual residents abruptly change their whole lifestyle out of insight - in masses. That could almost prove divine influence. The age of Aquarius. It would also mean that human minds had changed in such an uncharacteristic way that they probably would not call themselves humans anymore. The necessary changes have no chance without majorities actively supporting them. And every single one of them must have undergone that change of mind, following the example of others, until the movement has reached a critical mass. Without the individuals who start it all, who leave the path on their own, nothing of this will happen.

Didn't read every posting in this thread, so maybe this was already covered. I mean the part about EditReady. There is a much more powerful tool that does a lot more. It's called Kyno. A beta version for Windows (free) is announced. Didn't look too spectacular to me initially, but now I've bought it, and I think it's fantastic. Plays all* media (you can filter by video, audio and stills), dives trough folder structures (called drilldown-mode), allows to import, trim (> subclip), batch-rename, tag (Premiere: mark), transcode, wrap and copy directly from card. Allows to send data bases to FCP (shift cmd f) and Premiere (shift cmd p). 

*well, no raw video for now, they're working on it.

7 hours ago, jcs said:

* Alan Watts on automation and money (watch it!):

"A person who is confused, like a pavlov dogs who salivates on the wrong bell."

The consumerism part of capitalism made us accustomed to substitutes for our real needs. To a point where we are addicted to those substitutes (camera gear?). 

"If you don't work, you have no right to eat."

God said so: "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread." He patented work, if you will. The context is the expulsion from the paradise. It's not a moral command, it's a curse! Slave owners and paid-slaves owners (like our employers, but in a broader sense also our whole rat-race culture) have exploited that spell over centuries. The less substitutes you need, the more you are free. More of unconciously consumed frustration reliefs only stop growing more when we either die or wise up.

How best do we become aware of our real needs? There is a psychotherapeutic advice, a technique, that I find very useful. We are all adults, and we think we can tell exactly what people expect us to be, how we should be, behave. That marks an adult - seemingly. We also can imagine that we are still children. We have many wishes and impulses that are childish. But we are practically orphans then. We should become our own parents, become our own loving father and mother, adopt us. Fight for us, care for us, educate us, even pray for us. If we did wrong, we will always and completely forgive us. No place for guilt in our mind. There is no conflict in what we want and what we are. We better ourselves in any way. We see through all tricks and use no tricks to manipulate others.

17 hours ago, tomekk said:

What you're saying would be ideal but historically oppressive regimes very rarely give up, if ever?

Stephen Hawking ("that dummy in the wheelchair. All talk, no action!") recently said the whole show could be over within 100 years from now. Our asses are history! It's highly unlikely that mankind (and the "White Man" in particular) will miraculously stop to consume and waste the planet. Like, just in time. Great prospects, one could say, so why don't we just enjoy our last dance on the volcano and consume a little more?

Because the neurosis of our time is to sit and wait until the future finishes us off. This is not going to be solved by any mass movement. The individual has to change. In the present. Buying paper bags? Selling the diesel? Change to LED lights? Drops in the ocean, and way too late. 

18 hours ago, jcs said:

However, strings are pulled from unseen forces; how do we know what's real in Washington, and who is really in control? Follow the money.

Easy enough. Who can still remember the particular news / fake news / scandals / tweets of DJT in June 2017? That was (June 8th) when this happened. The official WH announcements were TLDR, mas aburrido no se puede. The law about to be revisited, re-evaluated here was a direct reaction to the financial crisis of 2007, Obama signed it in 2010. This crisis caused hunger for approximately 100.000 more people worldwide. It is responsible for estimated 40.000 deaths. 

For those with real power, who really control Washington, Trump is a welcome distraction. Movie quiz: what is a "Kansas City shuffle"?

4 hours ago, Shirozina said:

Micro HDMI is fine as long as you use a cable lock as even full size hdmi cables can be dislodged.

The smallHD Focus' Micro HDMI port is secure. It fits tight, and you theoretically could let the the monitor hang on the cable. In the camera sets, they provide two 40 cm cables, one Micro>Micro, one Micro>HDMI, and a double female adapter to prolong the latter. Nothing to complain here.

4 hours ago, Shirozina said:

It doesn't need 10 bit or RAW to see the advantage over internal codecs when grading log. It's the massive compression that's the problem not the bit depth

That's right. However, with Slog3 in 8-bit, you still may have banding in the sky even if you recorded externally, only slightly less than with native XAVC. With Slog2, you have to avoid noise in the shadows (> ETTR), because compressed noise is the worst. Other than that, there is no difference worth the hassle of a ProRes recorder. 

4 hours ago, Shirozina said:

Ext recorders / monitors also give you better monitoring tools to enable you to focus, expose and WB more accuratley  - the later being more crucial if you are shooting log ( severely compromised anyway on an internal codec).

I find the Focus to be very good for that. You have histogram, waveform, vectorscope, false colors, zebra, peaking, all completely customizable. And if you wish on separate screens that you can change  with a wipe on the touchscreen. Well thought out. The Inferno, as good as it may be, weighs 709g without battery, the Focus 106g ...

22 hours ago, Ed_David said:

I can say someone is "queer" and that means different things to people.

Being racist to me means a person who believes one race is superior to others.  A white nationalist to me is a racist who also is a nationalist, not a globalist, as Bannon proclaims.

As I see it, a racist is someone who believes in "race" in the first place. If you believe that differences in appearance are in any way significant for whatever quality someone might have, you logically end up with eugenics, Apartheid, concentration camps. Because from a genetic position, all humans share 100% identical genes. Everyone could - and should - reproduce with anyone of the same species. Cats and dogs should also not be arbitrarily kept from fucking with wildly different looking cats or dogs, their breeders are "racists" and more often than not make their victims suffer.

22 hours ago, Ed_David said:

 One, who, Andrew has said, allows interesting discussions to happen and doesn't like posts that contain swear words directedly personally towards a user such as another victim @Axel, who also, probably doesn't appreciate this.

???

I wasn't aware of having been insulted. Must be because English isn't my native language. Many of the niceties are lost.

Found it on FAQ - FIRMWARE UPDATE INSTRUCTIONS:

Quote

(Must be 16gb or smaller – FAT or FAT32 for Windows, MS-DOS (FAT) for Mac)

Works.

There is rudimentary documentation about this monitor and no actual manual. I tried to load a custom LUT from SD card (formatted EX-FAT), following this advice (no special video tut for the Focus, but apparently it works the same as indicated here - from 3'03" on), but the Internal folder can't be opened (looks as if it can't be found). Only Camera Calibration LUTs appear (factory provided). No hits on Google. Has anybody been able to do his? 

54 minutes ago, Arikhan said:

@Neumann Films And still...if we can not express our opinions and thoughts, what is then the sense of our democracies?

In my work (home for the elderlies) 90 % of the clients have dementia. They have forgotten the meaning of, well, basically anything abstract. Their imagined social status, their illusion of autonomy, their professional ambitions, their whole anxiously upheld public persona: gone for good. Emotions remain intact to their last breath. At some stage they have forgotten the words to express them. Have they lost their humanity? 

The ability to think, to mentally function, to use reason, is an extension of the brain. A relatively new tool in evolution. As powerful as it potentially is, it turns dangerous, destructive, genocidal, if it loses contact with the emotional core, the real needs of the individual. Everyone would agree.

How does this relate to filmmaking? Do we question this whole field of activity because being shown a video doesn't feed anybody? Why not? On the other hand, it's a means of communication with many connections to the subconscious. Less abstract in many ways than language. Do we question language? Sometimes we should. The sense for our own and our neighbor's needs is numbed. We should listen to the heart (as cheesy as this sounds) more often, and it communicates non-verbally.

7 minutes ago, Neumann Films said:

Evolve faster.

We can be superheroes. Our power would be real empathy. This is the only way. 

15 minutes ago, Neumann Films said:

Gear privileged...dude, you're on a fucking forum for cameras.  You don't know what anyone does outside of this forum.  No more than they know you.  Stop being an entitled little prick.

That was what I was trying to say. I didn't mean to single me out.

2 minutes ago, Neumann Films said:

Sorry for being harsh.

No offence taken. We say sorry too often.

Just now, Emanuel said:

This white versus black whatever color talk is completely nonsense and primitive.

Did you read this between my lines? Then you have misinterpreted them.

The white privileged gear collectors miss the signs of the time, which, thanks to Trump and the like, have made people more aware of politics. Some (black) comedian said, we have a very good party now - with a lousy DJ. I have a book on documentary video, written by (black) Anthony Artis titled SHUT UP AND SHOOT - ANY CAMERA - ANY BUDGET - ANY TIME. The time is now. Or never. Aesthetic niceties have their reasons, but we tend to be on fixated on, er, visual correctness.

That's a workflow decision. Not sure why you would store in folders outside of the library, probably some shared storage environment. I usually store inside the library, but don't have the libraries on my system drive. There are countless ways to do this. You could also wrap or transcode to ProRes with another app (EditReady, Kyno) and then leave files in place. 

Dick Sweeneys two films have a different effect (in whole) as cantsins and Kevin Mullins'. They look like very short, fast cuts. The other clips more have a flip-book/ULFR (ultra low frame rate) approach. There is a magic in seeing time chopped to it's key phases. As a 6-year-old, I received a Christmas present from my parents, which, unbeknownst to them, became my Rosebud:

I was obsessed with cranking the speed. Later my father bought me a used Super 8 camera with single frame mode, and I made stop motion films with plasticine dinosaurs in my big brother's model train towns.

In connection with the Hobbit-HFR-discussion, I exported the LOTR prologue in 12 fps, here, to demonstrate the opposite effect. I wouldn't like to watch a three hour movie that way myself, but I think this belongs into a filmmakers toolbox and should be used if appropriate. Surely it can be achieved with different methods (with slightly different effect then), and one should experiment with different shutter speeds also.

The opposite would be a clip at at least 30fps (clarity), very high resolution and extreme slow motion. Time almost frozen, a living painting. That's what comes to my mind when I read "cinemagraph" (TwoScoops). Now if you imagine a short film as a slide show of those cinemagraphs, the effect could be mesmerizing (given, of course, it's not about flowers and cats).

35 minutes ago, jcs said:

I haven't use the A6500 ...

* this 4K video looks much better- very detailed! He's using a tripod so that helps with compression artifacts. That's one way to work around low bitrates- keep motion to a minimum. Another way is to record externally at a higher bit rate.

I agree. For certain cameras, 4k is just the better HD. It should be labelled so. UHD. And I am about to borrow a Shogun in order to pixelpeep the differences. Limiting myself to static tripod shots is not the answer.

5 minutes ago, jcs said:

I find 4K useful for post zoom/crop even for 1080p target content. A7S II 4K looks really nice scaled to 1080p (GH5 has more real detail in 4K). Are you saying the A6500 hasn't freed you from 'worrying about the whole resolution issue"? I'm not sure I understand your point?

Pocket HD is noticeably better than A6500 HD, and I'd like to know why. Sure, low data rates, the way it is downsampled in-camera. Indeed the A6500 UHD 100mbps provides better HD, but on closer look there are still artifacts. I have footage from a borrowed C300 to compare, and the 1080p is pristine in comparison. I also have 4k from a borrowed BMPC and UHD from my buddy's FS7, and that's a whole different league. No wonder, you say? Yeah, but doesn't this confirm the statement that "Ks" don't tell you anything?

7 minutes ago, jcs said:

So what's Yedlin's point?

That the absolute number of pixels stored in the video file doesn't tell anything about the actual spatial resolution. Nothing at all, in fact. And for perceived resolution, that other factors contribute more than spatial resolution, because in the real world the latter never is true, but always scaled up or down.

3 minutes ago, jcs said:

Who is "grossly overestimating this factor" in 2017?

Whereas I wrote for years now that resolution has nothing to do with quality, I frequently fall for his too. I sold my Pocket mainly for the reason that I saw the resolution limits even on my then 1080p monitors. I tested raw, but there were too many artifacts (moire, color fringing). I absolutely loved the ProRes footage, but it obviously wasn't true HD. Being a wedding videographer, I liked the early shots of the Ursa Mini. This was shot in 1080p ProRes, and I had little to complain quality-wise:

Eventually I bought the A6500 (price & size). Thought that it's 4k would free me from worrying about the whole resolution issue. Does it? Of course not. Naive fallacy. 

1 hour ago, jcs said:

On my 4K desktop displays, even on the YouTube, there's a huge difference in quality watching in 4K vs. 1080p: 

Don't you agree?

You take the compression factor out of the equation (very poor on Youtube, so that up-rez'd HD looks noticeably worse). If YT used better or less compression and if the overall quality was better, but if they had to stop supporting 4k due to limited bandwith, I would prefer this. My monitor upscales pixels that are compression artifacts to a very high degree.

And you ignore what Yedlin proved about perceived sharpness. I watched Yedlins part two on a 5k display in full screen, viewing angle/FoV of around 60°, not measured exactly, the width of my display and my distance to it tend to be roughly a equilateral triangle. And since the clip was 1080p only, compressed in a quality-preserving way, and since I couldn't see individual pixels, neither in the 4k part one nor in part two ... (Edit: like part 2 shows, you never actually see the pixels if your viewing device's resolution is dense enough).

What Yedlin says is not, we should all shoot in 1080. He says we are all barking up the wrong tree. Would I prefer to watch Dunkirk in a 2k cinema? No. I was one of few who could compare Inception (4k mastered and 4k delivered) on a 2k and a 4k screen back then. I could sit even closer to the screen than usually. But there is a limit, because if you sit before, say, row 6, the image is perspectively distorted too much.

I only later learned that The Revenant  (4k mastered and 4k delivered, watched by me sitting in row 6) was 87% shot in 2,5k. A 4k projection that upscales a 2k image or shows a native 4k image will look somewhat more brilliant than anything projected in 2k. So 4k TVs and monitors do have their benefits. It's just that we all grotesquely overestimate this factor. 

The most gruesome image degradation takes place in the second part, starting at 38'17". What's the remedy, if you record 4k in a highly compressed codec? Atomos? Avoiding brutal compression?

This sounds rather unlikely. You already said that the copy to library option was checked, but just to rule out one thing, choose the library and just import another clip. Does it say copy to library or copy to (i.e.) manueldomes media drive ??? You could have had the copy to library option checked in preferences, but this can be overridden in the library's inspector settings (>modify >storage locations >media).

If you read copy to library and if the library settings say in library, then this is a mystery and a mess, and you have every reason to be concerned. Then this probably is a very rare accident, I've never heard of this before. You should better post your request on 

http://www.fcp.co/forum/4-final-cut-pro-x-fcpx

... where you will get help. 

EDIT: hold down alt + cmd when you launch FCP X (trash preferences). This sometimes helps.

Brand new from Brandon:

18 hours ago, La Muerta said:

Got Zhiyun Crane V1 for almost two years already with only a battery issue. Gimbal maximum time of use is 20 mins. then batteries are out. Using Canon 6d + Samyang 14mm 2.8

 

wonder whats the problem with my batteries

Might be exhausted. Buy new batteries.

For the Pocket, buy the Zacuto Pocket viewfinder. You can press the very big and comfortable rubber eyepiece to your eye and thereby have an additional stabilisation point. Use a pistol grip or screw together a grip to the side (like here, unfortunately the free Dropbox doesn't render image links any longer), which is better for heavy lenses (I recommend the Sigma 18-35 with Nikon Pocket speedbooster). Mounted on a QRP, steel parts and screws cost below 10 bucks.