Axel

On (missing) AF, gimbals, speedboosters, hyperfocal distance and lens-choices. With Pocket "I" : the screen wasn't good, but it had the best peaking (Kryptonite-green). With shallow depth of field, no problem. sDoF, of course, was only possible with rather fast lenses, because crop factor was almost three. 
With a slow lens and with he said hyperfocal distance, almost the whole display became green. You wished you could reverse the peaking so that oof-areas were highlighted. Because of the size of the sensor (S16) but nonetheless relatively big pixels, it was sometimes hard to focus. 
Unfortunately, this hasn't changed. Yes, the sensor is bigger, the crop factor is just below two, but the pixels are smaller. And since hyperfocal distance works where the circle of confusion (that's us, the BMPCC fan group!) is smaller than the dimensions of the smallest picture elements, you only get HFD with very wide lenses with very narrow apertures.
HFD means absolute depth of field, fix-focus. I certainly like the idea, but not everybody will. For tripod and handheld shots (we definitely, absolutely need at least a basic rig-stabilization, never believe because it's comfortable to hold it will be okay!) we need to practice manual focussing (P4k display, if sufficient, if not with external monitor).
On a bright sunny day like today I'd strictly use HFD on a gimbal. Otherwise we'd need something like the Crane 2's follow focus and learn to operate that. This was something I dreamed about ever since I learned about steadicams. Have a big box of RC servos and miniature rig parts from my DIY efforts (originals were ridiculously expensive). 
Then again, with the existence of gimbals we stumbled into a trap. Do I really need to constantly move the camera in the Z-axis? No, I even don't consider these shots particularly cinematic any more. Whatever that means. It's time to revisit old threads on filmlook and adjust our understanding of it in 2018.

I don't think so. I am "struggling with grading skills", but therefore I look forward to getting the BMPCC4k with it's new, improved color science. Because I do love beautiful colors. Take this old Ursa 4k wedding (12 stops DR, shot mostly in 1080 ProRes 60p,  basic CC and a popular BM LUT):
 

Footage taken down, sorry guys. Official footage will be available soon, no doubt about that
 

> no prominent fan noise
> apparently useable atmo
> body sounds like yoghurt cup
> comparatively clean shadows (in underexposed parts), noise level acceptable (Dual ISO at work)
> noticed no moire
> slight but acceptable RS
 

Interesting. Didn't know hat.
Yes, tripods. Have a look at the Sirui monopod. It's fantastic:
This is the carbon version. I have the aluminum version, cost 160€ in a regular shop.
I am also planning to use a gimbal, own the Ronin M (too big) and the Zhiyun Crane ("1"). We could use hyperfocal distance instead of AF. Or we use something like this.
Most of all, I have the best idea for a new "rig". Consisting of parts for under 10€. 
@John Brawley
Please tell us: 
Will there be something you can show us in advance?

This thread is called Final Cut ProRes Raw. The actual wb value must be saved in the file. How we know? First, Atomos CEO Jeremy Young says so:
Then there is this clip
You don't have to start playback, just watch that stupid lamp in this posterframe. This is probably with the exposure, ISO and WB the filmmaker intended. It's what you'd also get  with ACR or Resolves CR, a serving suggestion based on the metadata of the file. That it looks like this here is an indication that the metadata are there and that they are read by FCP.
BUT:
FCP doesn't display them, nowhere. This weakness is just the tip of the iceberg. If it comes to serious color work, FCP just isn't the right tool. God is in the detail, they say, and I have found too many flaws compared to Resolve. 
This doesn't necessarily mean that PRR isn't interesting. If Resolve adopts it, I could edit RAW in FCP.
 
 
 
 
 

I was/am lucky to had/have all BM cameras under Ursa line and all GHx.
From my experience I can say just what you and most of other members already know: shooting in raw is, after all, exclusive and most important value of BM vs Panasonic. Actually, in version P2 it may be also and monitor, but if its quality is as P1, than - not. Everything else is unimportant for those who enjoy shooting in raw. Price +/– 500$, viewfinders, battery, rigs, cards, all of that is, I think, secondary... For me, personally, even higher bit rate, even sound.
But - raw, in fact, nowaday doesn't mean any significantly better final image comparing with great codec-science of newer GH5/s - power of raw is in the process of shooting. It still provides more freedom and left much more time for concentration on compositing process and polishing aesthetic before clicking record button. Mistakes of WB, even a worry about light, are completely or much more forgiving with raw. So, for those whose primary goal is concentrated in highly accurate and controlled filming (be it 1 hour on a day or more) - raw means more enjoyable (less painful) action. Shooting in raw is more similar to act of painting once when problems with rigging/stabilization are solved (which is not easy with BM! and that's why I am, as compromise, settled with GH5 ) - someone can more easy "lost" himself in quasipainting shooting because of higher simplicity of mobilized actions. Further more relaxant using of files in postproduction has also, I think, some similarity with bigger painter's palette.
Having said that, Panasonic non-raw codecs are also some sort of technician's art - after using all models in line from GH1, for me it is impressive how much grading potential have 10bit files after continual codec progress/refining.  
That's all from my perspective, experience and equal love for BM and Panny. I must admit that I'm, in fact, using Panasonic as BM with stabilization - don't liking  too much usage of slow motion on narrative, for me might be enough just 24p, and it always turns out that I'm somehow too stupid for proper  usage of AF lenses... so I've tested and sold near all AF m43 lenses, even Oly 75mm... (Turning around mechanical aperture ring also calms me down... of course, with "buttery smooth" mechanic focus ring I'm already in the little private heaven.)
 

I dont think its that easy. Its a matter of taste. If you like BMs color science the camera is a big deal for you. If you dont like it, you dont have to buy it. But my BMPCC has SO MUCH MORE skin texture at proresHQ than i have seen in my a7s II, or a6500, or in any DSLR/M footage that iam pretty sold to BM when it comes to "aliveness" of skin. Maybe i could achieve a similar result with proper post-production but thats time. And time is money. BM does also try do achieve a pleasing grain instead of digital looking noise. I guess thats why they call their cameras "cinema".

For small file sized just shoot prores proxy, or prores lt in full sensor FHD. Just bake in you own lut and you may not even have to "grade" in post.

5 axis is cool, but there are also good IS lenses out there for run&gun work. Wide lenses can be handheld even without IBIS. AF is a thing for some but iam glad that they did not put their ressources into improving that at the first point. Personally i like MF. Just feels more handheld to me and sometimes, selfmade, organic focusshifts can also look more natural or interesting than AF failure. Which will happen.

In the end its all personal taste. For me, i can tell, i was so eagerly waiting to get the look and feel of my BMPCC footage back but since i do a lot of run and gun i am in the need of a more full-framish look, slow motion and low light capabilites. My clients do love the look, its way more obvious to them than colors. Most of my stuff is produced for social media, so it also suffers from bad compression rates in the end. Meanwhile the sony footage always looked dead and flat to me. I learned to deal with it to some amount others would call "no difference" but i see it, so yes, its just about me.

But i also cant listen to mp3s anymore because they do lack so much of dynamic and they sound compressed compared to CD quality recordings. When i show it to others, some notice the difference immediately and others are like "huh, sounds the same". I guess last ones are also happy with DSLR/M footage ;-)

The usability of the Sony mirrorless hybrids borders on bad intent. I hate to take my A6500 out of the bag. Everything about it already feels wrong. For video. It's a little better for stills.
A lot of that is personal preference of course. Ask vlogger Max Yuryev, and he explains why he prefers Sony over Panasonic.
RAW is a little overrated. If a camera has a good color science, a good codec and good profiles, that's enough. It's not the codec. So this to every GH5 owner, who is interested in the Pocket *just* because of RAW: forget it. 
I should have bought the GH5 (after happy years with GH2). I know that the BMPCC4k will bring a lot of problems, challenges. But also a lot of fun. You love it or you hate it.
 

You can read rec_709 above the RGB parade on the upper left.
They surreptitiously fixed all but one third of the two existing bugs concerning Color Wheels and Color Board. To recap: Wheels didn't work properly in 709, Board not in 2020. Now if you open an existing project with 10.4.1, FCP forces you to convert it. Why? 
So that everything looks like before. Nothing of he CC work you performed was destroyed. If you test the tools in the existing timeline, the bugs are STILL there.
It's only when you add a new clip and apply wheels in 709 or board in 2020 that you realize the bug is gone - almost. The shadows in the Exposure tab of the Board still have the bug.
On the one hand, kudos to how Apple handled this without ever admitting there were bugs. Then again, why don't the shadows work? 
Beautiful as always. The subtitles jump. A long line runs from left edge to center, two short lines are centered. Irritating. Don't know how to fix his, never tried Closed Captions myself ...
EDIT: 
Shadows work neither in 709 nor in 2020, neither with the Wheels nor with the Board. Not sure about Midtones. Highlights work everywhere. Tells me once again that Apple is no expert for color.

This thread is called Final Cut ProRes Raw. The actual wb value must be saved in the file. How we know? First, Atomos CEO Jeremy Young says so:
Then there is this clip
You don't have to start playback, just watch that stupid lamp in this posterframe. This is probably with the exposure, ISO and WB the filmmaker intended. It's what you'd also get  with ACR or Resolves CR, a serving suggestion based on the metadata of the file. That it looks like this here is an indication that the metadata are there and that they are read by FCP.
BUT:
FCP doesn't display them, nowhere. This weakness is just the tip of the iceberg. If it comes to serious color work, FCP just isn't the right tool. God is in the detail, they say, and I have found too many flaws compared to Resolve. 
This doesn't necessarily mean that PRR isn't interesting. If Resolve adopts it, I could edit RAW in FCP.
 
 
 
 
 

This thread is called Final Cut ProRes Raw. The actual wb value must be saved in the file. How we know? First, Atomos CEO Jeremy Young says so:
Then there is this clip
You don't have to start playback, just watch that stupid lamp in this posterframe. This is probably with the exposure, ISO and WB the filmmaker intended. It's what you'd also get  with ACR or Resolves CR, a serving suggestion based on the metadata of the file. That it looks like this here is an indication that the metadata are there and that they are read by FCP.
BUT:
FCP doesn't display them, nowhere. This weakness is just the tip of the iceberg. If it comes to serious color work, FCP just isn't the right tool. God is in the detail, they say, and I have found too many flaws compared to Resolve. 
This doesn't necessarily mean that PRR isn't interesting. If Resolve adopts it, I could edit RAW in FCP.
 
 
 
 
 

Not the smartest people at such events. 
I wasn't aware that HLG - us poor men's HDR - was in the menu:
 

I agree with your list, but everyone should do their own tests with LT. The image quality there is pretty dreadful even compared with XDCAM and AVCHD, but for some content that's fine and it's much better than standard definition or something.
While it's true that transcoding can't improve an image, I was comparing AVCHD vs ProRes variants from a clean (uncompressed) HDMI output. 
In my experience, AVCHD was still better overall than any ProRes codec below 422 HQ. Except with foliage. Here's a test that closely mirrors my findings, but theirs is much better!
 

Nothing beats the original, and if the worst acquisition codec - AVCHD - was used, then transcoding that to ProRes, no matter the flavor, it won't get any better.
There's a useful rule of thumb:
ProRes Proxy: for proxy editing, but never for export!
ProRes LT: for editing of everything, for export of material up to 1080. Some report it as good upload codec for Youtube  No recompression!
ProRes422: for editing of everything, for acquisition of HD, for crucial quality check, for export of UHD.
ProRes HQ: for acquisition of UHD, allows recompression.

Take this from a hardcore FCP fanboy: you can blame that on FCP. Or I better put it this way: the fact that you have no WB and no ISO in the CC tools (I couldn't find the metadata for those either, only for codec, manufacturer and camera name) doesn't mean they are generally not stored with the video.

(This is a repost, as the other post was labeled RAW GH5S footage, which the GH5S clearly can't do real RAW )
Here is some rather uninteresting video I shot at night with varying ISO ranges so users can do test grades. It's way too cold right now on Ohio to do anything artistic! Most of the footage is in V-Log, but some is in HLG. Video 6 was shot in ISO-4000 even though I said ISO-400.
Video also contains 150Mbps 10-bit and 400Mbps 10-bit samples.
I've noticed the HLG videos can be pushed past IRE 100 in Premiere Pro CC, so that may be a good format to try and create an HDR H.265 export from premiere.
https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=1BPHKWVRXA8ynNSQCCBaLuB9hZ4fxgpB8
Happy Grading.

Is 8bit HDR or HLG a "joke"? Here is an HDR HLG video shot from the same camera (Sony FS5) using its internal 8bit 420 Slog2 XAVC and Slog2 recorded externally from 14bit RAW to 10bit ProRes HQ (Atomos Shogun). So the 8bit is heavily compressed (100 Mbps), the 10bit is not (950 Mbps!). Totally unfair to the 8bit. But, let's see...
Same scenes - for each the first version is from Slog2 ProRes 10bit, the second from XAVC 8bit SLog2 placed on the same timeline. The video was rendered in HLG 10bit DHxNR HQ in Resolve Studio and sent to YouTube. No color correction other than the Resolve presets converting Slog2 to HLG and level adjustments. It is a real HLG video. You can easily tell which is which, since the 10bit source from RAW is 4K DCI and the 8bit source is 4K UHD.

The video has plenty of blue sky, ripe for banding. And lots of detail, and high contrast with those pesky white clouds ripe for blowouts.

There is a difference. But does it matter? Is it fixable? A laughable joke?
 

If you do not like the test ("the test is a joke," "the test tells me nothing," "YouTube converts to 8bit anyway, so what?"), suggest what you would want to see instead. I can do anything with the original Slog2 clips, including making them available for download. 

Finally, why do we care about this? ALL Sony mirrorless cameras and camcorders less than $8,000 that have log gammas (Slog2/3) and/or HLG only shoot 4K in 8bit 420 - the RXxxx series, the A7xxx and the A6xxx series, and the FS5. If shooting in log or HLG at 8bit to make 4K HDR videos is a joke, that would call into question what Sony is trying to sell, and what anyone should consider buying (note, the GH5 can only do 10bit 422 in 4K30p, not 4K60p). No Canon cameras/camcorders do 4K 10bit below $8,000 either I think. And they have log gammas. Is this a big deal?

Exactly.
Yes. Let me cite myself from the german thread, translation by Google :
An ambitious short film project I've been preparing for almost a year now wouldn't profit much of HDR, thankfully. But I have another one, a comic short on the agony of the dying, and this one would. Will then probably borrow an Ursa Mini to shoot the (few) scenes in raw. And I hope by then HDR monitoring for grading will have become more easy and affordable.
I wonder why Andrew Reid doesn't seem to be very interested in HDR. His videos are so 'impressionistic' and 'poetic' ...

I've seen you make several good points in this community and if others don't, or can't or are unwilling see that it doesn't diminish your wisdom one bit. Some people just haven't worked it out for themselves.
You've challenged one of my misconceptions about how the industry treated the NX1, and I thank you for helping me to become a more rational and less reactive being. 
There are some others here who are good people, but could use a little humility too.

Meanwhile on Germany's huge slashCAM forum. Started a controversial HDR thread there - the first one, apart from one guy who asked how best to achieve a working Youtube upload. Very few fans there as well. The usual suspects, like here. Said HDR would change the way films were lit and framed (finally understanding the vanHurkman thoughts). Was baracked. HDR was for nature docs and candy ads, not suitable for serious storytelling. Wrote, what about *light*? There is no light in SDR, only it's faint reflection. Answer (by a pro DoP): that's enough, brightness is relative. HDR is a gimmick like 3D was, and it will disappear just the same, get over it ...
Another article in the news section: UHD TVs bigger than 50" came to 40% of all houses in Germany in 2017, AUO announces 8k TVs for 2018 and projects 10% market share within two years ...

Meanwhile on Germany's huge slashCAM forum. Started a controversial HDR thread there - the first one, apart from one guy who asked how best to achieve a working Youtube upload. Very few fans there as well. The usual suspects, like here. Said HDR would change the way films were lit and framed (finally understanding the vanHurkman thoughts). Was baracked. HDR was for nature docs and candy ads, not suitable for serious storytelling. Wrote, what about *light*? There is no light in SDR, only it's faint reflection. Answer (by a pro DoP): that's enough, brightness is relative. HDR is a gimmick like 3D was, and it will disappear just the same, get over it ...
Another article in the news section: UHD TVs bigger than 50" came to 40% of all houses in Germany in 2017, AUO announces 8k TVs for 2018 and projects 10% market share within two years ...

HLG allows more room for highlights. Night video has bright lights surrounded by dark. With little DR (like for SDR), either all the lights are blown out (and thus lack color) or if shot to avoid blow outs, there is zero information in the dark part.

So here is an HLG video of a street scene at night:
 
 

Good to know. I'm still getting aquainted with this format. You've elightened the subject a few times, much appreciated. 

I can see why ppl would be attracted to HDR technology. Colors pop like no one's business. It creates a rich viewing experience, as opposed to simply watching something. And I'm all about the tech and propelling the industry forward and questioning those old conventions that were perpetrated on misconceptions. 
That being said, I'm on the fence. Is it possible to create a film that's so vivid and rich in detail and color that it takes your audience right out of the story?
I'm not sold yet that this is a good platform for narrative work. For advertising, it can't come soon enough. This is going to make product shots absolutely pop and scream "buy me immediately".