Eric Calabros

1- the rate of decline in engagement in all of the photo/video forums and websites is depressing. Even comment sections are mini ghost towns compared to same place ten years ago. Maybe social media is stealing a lot of that free time usually spent on traditional web in the past. 
2- many of those people who could write informative blog posts are now like "why bother writting any more when no one reads any more?". Today they're making videos, and try hard to make it 10 min long, which means they have to add a lot of water to the milk. 
3- I don't see any other industry with so much negativity about the major brands of that industry. Telling people they don't need and shouldn't buy new released products is a norm in our corner of internet fora! There is hype moments before and after press release days, but overall discouragement is way bigger. But look at car enthusiasts or audiophiles online communities...They're constantly encourage each other to buy more!
4- lack of communication between experienced users and newcomers is hurting everyone, and sometimes it's sad. Many people who are upgrading from smartphone, are making mistakes related to misunderstandings that discussed and explained and solved seven years ago. They just don't know where to find the knowledge.
5-  a tendency to reduce everything to "matter of taste" has emerged to the point that the whole concept of critique apears as moot point, like there is no wrong way and right way of doing things!
 
Maybe its overthinking. I don't know.. just wanted to share my thoughts. 

This phone has active cooling fan.

Thickness and bulk is no longer an issue.
Yea, not using this tech looks intentional.

1 - Yep, they are. As I said sometimes here, I'm in a Telegram group that have a lot of younger "content creators", mostly talking about gear shopping, but sometimes giving filmmaking hints to each other. NEVER in this almost 8 months there I saw a link to some forum or webpage. Ever. All links are to Youtube or Instagram.

2 - Which leads from the previous point. People want videos, nobody reads anymore. Even some blog guys like Gordon Laing or Robin Wong are putting more efforts on Youtube.
I like Youtube to see some tests like AF, recording the camera screen to show how the detection is ocurring, but few people do that. Or to show some ergonomics. The rest, I prefer text, but is a dying preference.

3 - Fanboyism is a long staple in camera community. For me is a human necessity to prove themselves right - I bought this camera / lens, and I will defend that I made THE BEST decision. And as @MrSMWsaid, there is a ‘you don’t need anything new’ mantra - which, specially for stills, is very true. Video is still being improved, but for stills the only tangible upgrade was in the AF section. 

4 - For experienced people to comunicate with newer genrations is hard - because these people tend to lend long explanations telling just not HOW to solve a problem, but also WHY that was the solution. Which is a good thing - it increases the knowledge of the reader.
But nowadays people wants FAST solutions, don't want to even search for themselves. Last week in the already mentioned Telegram group, one guy made a very basic question, and I gave him the solution.
THE NEXT message in the channel was another guy...making THE SAME question. Yeah, he not only did not made a previous search, but did not even to bother read THE PREVIOUS MESSAGE. And this is the norm.

Even clouds are not in the same place. 

It's being hoovered up by Meta and X.
Facebook Groups especially. Most of the content on the internet is now on just a few major social media networks. Smartphones are partly responsible as a desktop website doesn't work as well as an app on a small screen without a keyboard.
Yes definitely a shift to video informercials.
The enjoyment they get out of cars and hifi is huge.
But a car without a road and hifi without music isn't very much fun.
With cameras it's the same, they are only fulfilling when you have something worthwhile to shoot, or at least the expectation of something in the future, other than just testing, but unfortunately there is less stuff worthwhile to shoot around at the moment. Fewer actors, writers, communities of artists, and less beauty in the world full stop.
Yeah a lot of the leading pros have withdrawn back into their careers and don't give as much input into the community. When it was an emerging area they were all over it, but I guess the use (and knowledge) they can get out of us peaked a long time ago.
Yeah this is a good point, have noticed that. This comes with the hyper-subjective and ultra-personal perspective of most people today rather than being part of a collective and objective whole. Each person has their atomised 'version' of the truth.
Very relevant thoughts.
I feel the same way.
Hopefully things take a turn for the better soon and people go back to being more productive and spend less time on their phones.

Even clouds are not in the same place. 

Even clouds are not in the same place. 

Its not simple as that. There are a lot of object color-background light combinations that affects depth perception. If someone really want to spend time on that, he or she better do it at the scene with LEDs and carefully selected objects in the background, instead of specific color grading in post. 

Unpopular opinion: extreme hue shift is not art. Its a fad. 

Sound check. Internal mics protected by attached wind muffs recording jazz:
with activities: feeding, chess, boxing, typing, posing.
And an 8K frame grab:
And the rig:
 
 

I'm not a lawyer but I guess that if a court decides the patent is invalid, RED would lose all income related to license agreements based on that patent. Since they pulled the lawsuit, the other companies cannot automatically stop paying license fees if they have agreed to do so as the patent hasn't been invalidated officially.

The RAW case was dismissed, and Nikon is free to keep it.

The problem with Japanese camera makers is that they don't know how to make money anymore. You want to attract younger customers, you have to support the platforms that encourage them to use dedicated cameras. That's about a combination of knowledge and culture. Its a shame that these days its Apple, the king of parental "auto everything", that advocates manual control for its iphone cinematic mode. The Apple way of "manual" of course. Soon they change the taste of an entire generation to believe 60fps is artistic! Dedicated camera needs its own narrative to survive, and we're losing the narrative. 

I managed to download a few brief 8K 50fps NRAW NEV samples from another forum and view them in the latest version of Resolve (18.1.4):
https://forum.grassvalley.com/forum/editors/editing-with-edius/572094-n-raw-from-z9-sample-download
They are now listed as 12 bit according to Nikon specs. There must have been a decoding problem that has been solved since Resolve 18.0. Perhaps NEV files are captured in 12 bit log and Resolve previously converted them to 14 bit linear. It is hard to know what the issue was as TicoRAW compression is new to the camera world (hence the RED lawsuit).
The same TicoRAW conversion that the Z9 utilizes when compressing for photos in the "High Efficiency" RAW mode at 14 bit readout is also utilized to create the NRAW files. In photo mode, this is limited to 20fps at full sensor readout (8256 x 5504). Although the video mode uses a crop (8256 x 4644), which produces a 38mp image, it doesn't seem possible that you could get 14 bit RAW video at frame rates higher than 24/25. The Canon R3 could do 14 bit RAW at 30fps with its 6K video, but Canon would never do such a thing! That would obliterate its current cinema line.
In any case, the rich color tonality we were seeing in the Z9 footage is still there and the files edit nicely on a 4K timeline. They are perhaps not as optimized as R3D files, but they should be easier for editing than Canon 8K RAW Light.

The problem with Japanese camera makers is that they don't know how to make money anymore. You want to attract younger customers, you have to support the platforms that encourage them to use dedicated cameras. That's about a combination of knowledge and culture. Its a shame that these days its Apple, the king of parental "auto everything", that advocates manual control for its iphone cinematic mode. The Apple way of "manual" of course. Soon they change the taste of an entire generation to believe 60fps is artistic! Dedicated camera needs its own narrative to survive, and we're losing the narrative. 

I liked the DR in this shot

I liked the DR in this shot

The problem with Japanese camera makers is that they don't know how to make money anymore. You want to attract younger customers, you have to support the platforms that encourage them to use dedicated cameras. That's about a combination of knowledge and culture. Its a shame that these days its Apple, the king of parental "auto everything", that advocates manual control for its iphone cinematic mode. The Apple way of "manual" of course. Soon they change the taste of an entire generation to believe 60fps is artistic! Dedicated camera needs its own narrative to survive, and we're losing the narrative. 

The problem with Japanese camera makers is that they don't know how to make money anymore. You want to attract younger customers, you have to support the platforms that encourage them to use dedicated cameras. That's about a combination of knowledge and culture. Its a shame that these days its Apple, the king of parental "auto everything", that advocates manual control for its iphone cinematic mode. The Apple way of "manual" of course. Soon they change the taste of an entire generation to believe 60fps is artistic! Dedicated camera needs its own narrative to survive, and we're losing the narrative. 

I noticed a significant drop in user engagement in the forums. Maybe the site's real traffic numbers are not as high as we think it is. Of course its still higher than other photography related websites.
Since January they didn't even bother to cover the news of firmware updates. It doesn't take too much effort to write an article that Z5 got a new firmware update that adds eye AF in video!

I noticed a significant drop in user engagement in the forums. Maybe the site's real traffic numbers are not as high as we think it is. Of course its still higher than other photography related websites.
Since January they didn't even bother to cover the news of firmware updates. It doesn't take too much effort to write an article that Z5 got a new firmware update that adds eye AF in video!

Summary of my findings so far:
 

For me, cinematic has a straight forward meaning: a quality of cinematography that I never notice the cameraman. What these people do is exactly opposite of that, the only actor I notice during the video, is the cameraman.

We always underestimate our ability to handle pain of losing someone. Never say "I can't". Time will be your ally in this fight.