Juank

Yes I have the Beastgrip DOF adapter, but... controversial opinion alert... Mirrorless cameras are a far better tool for interchangeable lenses. They have the grip, the physical controls, the EVF and the ergonomics and weight balance, where a smartphone just feels shit when there's a big weight on the front. For me, the Beastgrip was interesting to play with for a few shots, but nothing more.
I just didn't see the point when I could just pick up an X-Pro3 instead.
As a standalone camera the 14 Ultra has an upper-hand over mirrorless camera creatively though which is why I bought it... in that it's capable of firing off so many different shot styles on the spot, in a few seconds, with ease and speed... which I absolutely love and to do the same with interchangeable lenses would take forever and the shots would be gone or the light would be different.
Not to mention the stealth factor for street photography too.
I think the beauty of these smartphones is they are..... smartphones. Always with you, and no need to reach into a bag of lenses every time you see a shot worth taking.

Have an 11 Ultra since it came out and it does provide wonderful image quality in MotionCam and McPro24Fps.
Three things makes photography a difficult task on it though;
For street photography I need an app that opens fast and captures fast (preferably the native camera app)
1. When you select 5x in the camera app it crops into the main sensor instead of switching to the native zoom sensor. You have to zoom to 10x and then to 5x again to fix it, every time.
2. The audio clips even at low levels and concerts can't be recorded at all for example.
3. The processing is bad on the native app and has a lot of smoothing and way too much contrast. So raw is really the only option.
None of these was fixed for it.
Considering the 15 Ultra and it does seem much better in most respects, but I'm not sure I trust Xiaomi after all this. GCam looks great on it though, if it´s fast enough.
Anybody has any input on how 14/15 Ultra is to use in practice? The images in this thread does look great.

I am thinking full frame sensor is pretty bad for telephoto work at such long focal lengths.
You are carrying much heavier glass and cropping into the sensor, aka not making the most of full frame - so you'd be far better off with a Micro Four Thirds camera for that.
I am confused with your need for a fully articulating selfie screen at 750mm too 🙂
The R5C has worse AF for video.
What about R5 II? Might be worth a look.
I'd be tempted to go original R5 and a different camera for your telephoto shots, with a high-res crop sensor.
 

I considered the same dilemma myself a few months ago and it boiled down to this:
My need for pro-video features = less, I am a purist when it comes to shooting moving images - no peaking, no zebra, no elaborate extras, no clutter on screen, I have very basic audio needs, far more need for a fast operating nimble camera that can switch quickly between the highest possible video specs and nicest possible ergonomics for stills, so for me the EOS R5 was a better deal than R5C, far less money used, it behaves in a more nimble way for smaller scale creative endeavour and filmmaking, with better AF and is a superior stills camera, the overheating aspect is much improved vs the launch, and the hardware was never really limited very much by raw thermals anyway - it was all silly firmware trickery.
So I recently went R5, but the mount just doesn't do it for me.
With the Nikon Z8 I can use many more adapters, many more of my existing lenses, far more comes off my shelf and is happy on the Z8, especially for stills.
So it really boils down to lenses and whether you'd be happy with a normal R5, before considering the Z8 as a step up from that.

I think that is quite a true statement.
Of course it depends on your needs, how invested you are in a system, how many lenses etc and despite my intention (as things stand) to switch to Sony or hopefully Nikon next year, I would be doing this despite Lumix having what I think are the best current cameras for my needs.
But it’s that term ‘needs’/wants that would allow me to sacrifice some outright video spec for the bigger picture which for me, having done my maths, is a body less than I currently using and whopping 4 less lenses.
Less lens swapping…in fact virtually zero lens swapping, cross body alignment with batteries etc and just a lot less faff than the 3 systems I am currently using!
But as to just getting the job done, for my needs, based on purely video spec and real world results, nothing else I would rather be using in 2025.
2026 though… Well that one is up to you Nikon. You know what you have to do which is not drop the ball on the ZR and deliver where your rivals in 2025 have so far fallen short…
Sony with the FX2 and it’s 💩LCD and Lumix with the continuation, albeit updated S5 body style because I’d prefer something ‘FX30ish’ and I say FX30ish because that actually does have a good LCD.
I’ll add to that list Nikon Z6iii for the also boring body style.
Canon 🥱
 

The new Black Mirror episode is a real banger...
...in which Philip Bloom goes all the way to the White House and starts making up the laws of the land, a new Constitution.
Law number 1... ALL media is given a platform based on promotional effectiveness and loyalty to the CAT KINGDOM. Those media not interested in cats, are de-platformed and uninvited from Sony camera launches.
Law number 2... Universities watch out... Cat Zionism is about. Or should that be Meowism. Any pro-pussians and anyone who doesn't worship white fur is deported to a columbian jail.
Law number 3... Lawyers and judges are to be superseded by weekly episodes of the Supreme Apprentice, where 6 cats around a table ultimately get to settle all arguments big or small with the flick of a tail.
Law number 4... Japanese cameras are banned, all cameras must have pet detection and be made in Texas.
Law Number 5... All China cats and European cats get out. The CAT KINGDOM is only for AMERICAN AND BRITISH PUSSY.

Fro Knows Photo - NEW SONY FX1 MADE ME SHIT MYSELF
Gerald Undone - SONY FX1 is a bedwetting moment
Philip Bloom - FX1 CURED MY LOVE OF CATS
Jordan Drake - I JIZZED MY PANTS BECAUSE OF SONY
Camera Conspiracies - SONY FX1 ABSOLUTELY CRAP VLOGGING CAMERA
Camera Labs - SONY FX1 has been released and it shoots video
Tony and Chelsea Northrup -

Comparison is the thief of joy when it comes to creative tools.
Most cameras these days are a victim of comparison.
If we all stop comparing the choices, life becomes much more simple.
Buy what you can afford and be happy 🙂
 

I think if I was in the camera reviewing game, I wouldn't either, but therein lies the problem with that scenario, - just how do you retain any kind of personal or perceived integrity if you only ever praise every single piece of kit launched without becoming an utter shill?
Fortunately I don't have to and will never have to because I don't have and never will have an 'influencer' channel!
But back on the FX2, I have watched a couple of reviews now and regardless of their personal opinion, I have made my own mind up and it's "not quite".
I have become used to using 6k 30p open gate as my standard for over a year now. 
I like both the quality of the output and the relatively low size of the log file with Lumix.
The OG gives me a decent option for post production 9:16 crop without having to make an entirely new social media short from scratch.
The S5ii was good for this last year and the S9 is better (despite various shortcomings) for this year.
Is a move to Sony or Nikon still on the cards for next year?
Ideally yes, but purely because it's the only valid option for me and my specific needs and requirements and yes, I have looked at every conceivable option and continue to do so without it becoming an obsession.
FX2 though?
No.
It's failure for me is the LCD & EVF. I haven't used an EVF for years, stills or video, - it's just too slow and clunky a way of working for me.
Add on monitors etc also do not work for me so rear LCD is a critical part of my process.
So I would personally not use or want the EVF of the FX2 and at the same time, that LCD res is just really quite poor, even compared with my S9.
In fact other than build/body (but not glass options), the S9 is just a preferable option for me right now.
ZV-E1 is on my radar but again, suffers from the same LCD woes.
It bypassed me completely but the best Sony option for me right now would probably be the FX30 which has an excellent LCD which utterly shames that of this new FX2.
The FX2 could have been a contender for me if they had simply skipped the EVF protrusion and had a decent LCD instead.
And that right there, was and is the dealbreaker for me.
Next move is over to Nikon. Please don't fuck this up. Make an FX3/30 style body with quality rear LCD, internal Z6iii spec with ability to bake in RED luts and we're probably golden. I can then use all my e Mount glass adapted with full AF and happy days will ensue. And I can then end my career back where it started, - with Neekon.

I have now imported my iPhone footage and put it through the same FLC pipeline as my GH7 footage.  
As you may recall, I shot the "home video" parts of the trip with my iPhone 12 Mini, and part of the goals of the new FLC pipeline is to be able to improve the iPhone footage and match it better with the GH7 footage.
Overall, I am pleasantly surprised with both the images and the user experience.
With my phone in my left-front pocket and GH7 in my right-hand, I could extend the pop-socket out, pull my phone out, shoot with it, then put it back, all with my left hand and not having to even turn off the GH7.  Having the ability to swap from shooting with the GH7 and 14-140mm to an ultra-wide in seconds is great when you want to capture the action in real-time:


It has surprisingly good handling of real-world DR:


It allows for quick and unobtrusive shooting in restaurants and cafes:


which also gives some background defocus which is nice.
...and it is great for shooting in very cramped or crowded situations:


I struggled shooting in the Myongdong night-markets just because the GH7 was so conspicuous and just not well designed for such things, however the iPhone worked quite well for those chaos-and-people-everywhere shots, and was great for shooting situations at point-blank range:



In retrospect I wish I had shot more whimsical footage with it throughout the trip, but that's a note for next time.
In order to see how the FLC is contributing to these images, let's compare some of the above shots to how they would have looked with a simple CST workflow (I did a CST to DWG, matched exposure, then CST to 709-A).
FLC:

709-A:

FLC:

709-A:

FLC:

709-A:

I find that it takes the digititis out of the images quite a bit.
Another thing it does is hide some of the limitations of the iPhone too.  Here's a shot I took from out the train window.  It's obviously a very low-light shot and the iPhone NR was probably set to "armageddon".
709-A:

FLC (with a touch of sharpening):

Anything in post that applies across all your shots will help to unify them, and so having a slight softening applied to all the footage, as well as similar colour treatment, can really help to smooth things around any rough shots.  I created my own powergrade using FLC I called "50mm" because I took the grain and softening settings from the 35mm and 65mm presets and set things to the mid-point between the two, effectively emulating a 50mm film process.  I have more work to do, including working out what settings give what results once the footage has gone through the YT compression, but it's a start.

Went hot-air ballooning and if there was ever a challenge for shooting, this was it.  Extreme low-light and extreme DR from hugely bright light-sources.
They say you can't take bags in the balloon, and it had been really wet weather, so I decided to go small.  I took the GX85, TTartisans 17mm F1.4 for the low-light, Laowa 7.5mm F2 for an ultra-wide, and the 12-35mm F2.8.  I was a bit cheeky and took a sling bag and kept it under my jacket.  The requirement is that nothing is loose in the basket and that you can hold on with both hands for landing, so I figured my bag under my jacket was basically the same as having a big pocket.
It's a crazy early start.  We arrived in the field before first-light and they started setting up in pitch darkness guided only by torches.  I started shooting at F1.7 and needed ISO6400 at first to get any kind of level on anything except their torches.  I shot on the 17mm at F1.7 and gradually reduce the ISO until the balloon was mostly inflated, then swapped to the 7.5mm for a few wide shots, and then swapped to the 12-35mm F2.8 and it was time to get in the balloon and off we went.  
I also shot with my iPhone 12 mini for some quick shots using the ultra-wide when I didn't want to change lenses, and also as we were approaching landing, as I had put the camera away in anticipation.  It was super-foggy and the pilot ended up having to land early and for a while we were going pretty close to the treetops so I'd put my camera away when he told us that he'd be landing at the next opportunity.
Frame grabs..  mix of GX85 and iPhone, put through a quite moderate FLC pipeline.










In retrospect I took the complete wrong equipment and used it in the wrong way (so, it's business as usual!) but the FLC pipeline really took the footage to the next level, and I used just enough strength on the film emulation to get rid of the digital look to the images.
Here's a comparison.
Grade (same as above):

SOOC:

The GX85 has super-whites so despite being SOOC that image is actually slightly clipped in-post and some highlights can be recovered, which the FLC grade has done, but you get the idea.  The SOOC is with the GX85 default profile and has much more of a video look to it, despite being pretty good compared to other similar cameras.
If I was to take the same equipment again, I'd lean into the darkness and just use the 17mm at F2.0 where it cleans up and use the GX85 at something sensible like ISO1600.  This would have the early shots as perhaps being unusable, but it would mean that the torches the crew used wouldn't have been clipped (I clipped them in favour of exposing what they were shining on).
We're going to go again later this year, and for that I plan to take the GH7, 9mm F1.7 and 14-140mm F3.5-5.6.
This will be a much larger setup but if I use a neck strap then I only have to have one lens in a pocket and so I won't need a bag at all.  I just bought the 9mm F1.7 and it's sharp wide-open, so apart from having AF, it is both an ultra-wide as well as a low-light lens.  I can crop in-camera and/or in-post to get a tighter FOV, but you don't normally need long focal-lengths when it's that dark.
The more I use this FLC pipeline the more I like it.  If I'd have shown these images to my 2018 self, I wouldn't have believed me when I said that it was me that made them.  

Raining in Seoul today, so pushed the GH7 + 14-140mm combo to its limits, including the in-camera digital zoom to get to 179mm, equivalent to 358mm on FF!!










Don't judge the lens by these images, apart from having a film emulation applied, I was also shooting through two layers of hotel glass on a range of angles, and the rain and dirt on the outside of the glass wouldn't have helped either.  
My normal thoughts when shooting through dirty glass is to have the fastest lens possible to blur it all into oblivion, but the DOF calculator says that a 50mm F1.2 lens focused at 100m will have 41.6m in focus in front of the focal plane, but the 140mm F5.6 lens also focused at 100m will only have 30.2m in focus in front of the focal plane, so the 140mm will blur the raindrops on the glass more, presumably because of the longer focal length.  Win!
This is the situation I had in mind when buying the 14-140mm lens, although obviously I knew I would use it for other things too.  I must admit that I've been using the long end while out and about much more than I thought I would, so not regretting the purchase at all.

i mean the fairly obvious answer to the question is quality of light. other than the second to last set just generally being too dark and contrasty, you can just tell by the highlights hitting the road and the sharp shadows that you're dealing with very hard light. during sunset, the sun becomes a way softer source, which is why everything suddenly looks way nicer. 
compare your references:
Perfect Days (which is btw set in Tokyo lol): the first still has fairly harsh sunlight, but that creates that fun tree shadow on the toilet. all of the other stills you chose from the movie are during overcast weather where the sun is  naturally diffused and gives you a more low con look. 
The last medium close still from Kill Bill is a great example tbh. Do you think it looks natural? Because to me that super harsh light hitting the background dunes and car certainly doesn't, if the light that's hitting the actor is modified to such a softened and bounced back degree.
the matrix: tiny bits of hard light as edge lights around the character, but everything else is lit super soft, and some intended contrast ratio. same thing with the killer. Super soft first still, the virtual paris background has some harshness but our character is in silhouette in the second, and the last one is mainly soft, but has a hard edge light on the side. 

i like this one, but i dont like how hot the highlights are on the right side. i would either try to power window the exposure down there, or use a diffusion filter for blowing these highlights out and making them feel a bit magical. you can see some great examples of that in wong kar wai's films. 
up the exposure and lower contrast slightly on that second to last set, try to power window whatever's distracting to curate the viewer, and they'll look pretty decent. this is what i can do with about 10 minutes of work by putting your thumbnails in resolve. basic fixes for legibility, but still going for contrast:


 

It's like a wedding where the fella wears a dark suit and the bride, a white frock. In bright sunlight. And insist on doing everything outdoors, early to mid-afternoon. Welcome to my world 😏 😉

Visited Jikjisa Temple yesterday, which was founded in the year 418, and looks straight out of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.  Everywhere you turn there are compositions that make you gasp.








The main challenge with full sun like this is the high contrast scenes, and then grading them so they don't look faded and also don't have half the image almost while or half of it pitch black.
This one has slightly more contrast than I'm happy with, but it gives you a sense of the look things start to drift into.

When I'm grading them for real, I think I'll likely use large power-windows and pull things down or up using those.
As a reference, here's the kind of shot I'm talking about where the contrast ratios are just overwhelming.  The information is all in the files, so I'm capturing it all, I just have to pull it out.

Nah, they will pass, but then these are night shots rather than day so would expect them to be darker 😝
I re-watched The Batman yesterday. Last time was big screen with French subtitles 🥸 but at home on this occasion and that movie I think is a great example of ‘dark’ for reference.

First day out shooting in Seoul.  Here are some images.
These are all frame-grabs, were ETTR, had a look put over them with Resolve FLC plugin, and I adjusted exposure on each (and contrast on the odd one or two) and that's it.  I'm sure I will finesse them once I start editing for real, but this is essentially just looking at my dailies.










Setup is incredibly easy to use thanks to the huge DR, AF is super-snappy, the 14-140mm zoom gives so much flexibility and I'm finding I'm using the long end a lot more than I thought I would.
I'll post some video footage of it later, but I'm also finding that I can hand-hold at 140mm (280mm FF equivalent) and with the OIS + IBIS working together get almost no movement in the frame at all, and with a slight crop in post I'd get locked-off images.  At anything below 80mm or 100mm the frame is locked and won't need any stabilisation in post.  Incredible results.

Yes, that's the one.
K&F Concept 58mm True Color Variable ND2-32 (1-5 Stops) ND Lens Filter, Adjustable Neutral Density Filter with 28 Multi-Layer Coatings for Camera Lens
The key phrases are "True Color" and "ND2-32 (1-5 Stops)".  They sell ones that have a wider range, but aren't as high quality and will have greater colour shifts over the operating range.
Having hard stops is the key to preventing you pushing it too far and getting into the range where the performance is poor (which I think is inevitable of this design, so the hard stops just stop you before you get there).

Thanks..  
To be honest I just find it baffling that everyone is throwing the word "cinematic" around and yet all the colour grades look like they haven't been converted from LOG to 709.  It's one of the easiest changes you can make in post to take your footage from video to cinema, and yet hardly anyone does it.
Pushing as much contrast and saturation as you can was the best film-making advice I ever got.

Just based on the thumbnails, really nice work Kye.

These kind of posts are always my favorite. Thank you for sharing!

Impressive @kye no idea what this forum would be without you, really. Food for thought. You're such an asset and a few people here, if no more or/and elsewhere, miss you when you're absent : )
You've summed up the whole thing : ) it's all about that, no more no less, one of the reasons why people love (and use) anamorphics :- )

When FLCs were introduced in Resolve I had seen some tutorials on how to apply them. I had never actually played with them because I was only working with underwater footage at that time.
Some time ago I took up the subject again and realized that several YouTube videos gave wrong directions on how to apply them and the results are very different.
I am certainly stating a trivia and I apologize in advance.
This should be a correct example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwcItNYhOV4
 

What's interesting about the LogC license is that it was probably mapped for that specific sensor. The vLog could have just been tossed in. Maybe. Either way, cool camera and shots.