hyalinejim

Ghosting! I had one and posted at length here about my frustration with its temporal ghosting, particularly noticeable in C-Log.
Other than that it was pretty cool. I loved the flippy handle and tilt screen. I took it on hols to Bali:
 
 

Would still love to test out the XC10/15 in its 8bit 422 50mbit HD mode. Or a Panasonic HPX 250 with its three sensor imager and 200mbit 10bit. Both cameras offer HD to its resolution maximum. Both are workhorse cameras. The HPX 250 would be my subsitute for the obscurity of a nerds dream that the DVX100 Andromeda would be. 🙂 Another nerd desire would be to fiddle with a full grown camcorder, the vintage Sony AX2000, slim codec, SD cards, true camcorder form factor and 3 sensor colours. You asked, we answered @SRV1981 🙂

I’ve been waiting it out for a Z9 to buy as my forever camera ever since it was launched.
Two things were holding me back, namely there being an actual supply of them and then me being able to go to Japan to buy a used one.
I’ve been in no rush and as I’m going to Tokyo at the beginning of June and there are plenty of used ones available at MapCamera now, the time has actually come to get one.
Which has coincided on me going cool on the idea.
Bear in mind that I haven’t been inside a real camera shop since COVID so I’ve never actually seen a Z9 in real life but yesterday I met someone in Berlin who has one and let me have a go with it.
And well…

If the Z8 does indeed turn out to be a form factor reduced Z9 with a 25-30% price reduction too then I’m probably in.
The Z9 form factor doesn’t bother me in the slightest coming from my heritage of D3/D4/D5 use but maybe it would be nicer to have the option of a Z8 with a battery grip to pick and choose sizes depending on what I’m doing with it.
Ironically, it was the lenses that were leading me to and then away from the Z9.
I have a large collection of high end F mount lenses from my pro days gathering dust so the Z9 with the FTZ was the logical way to bring them into the modern era.
But I then didn’t fancy buying into the native Z lenses for when I want to have something smaller and lighter as I found them a bit expensive and not much 3rd party stuff to write home about made it worse.
So in the end I decided it was time to cut the losses with the F mount and go in with L or even E mount cameras.
However…
The man who let me use his Z9 (you might know him, not an Uber League Swingball player or anything but knows about cameras) had something interesting on it.


You have to look closely but it’s that waffa theeen Megadap E mount to Z AF adapter and it changes a lot for me.
The adapter more or less gives native lens performance of E mount lenses on the Z cameras.
I have a couple of E mount lenses so that is good but more importantly it opens up affordable and interesting 3rd party lenses like the Sigma’s contemporary series or primes and zooms and Tamron’s 35-150 f2/f2.8 which are now effectively available in Z mount using this adapter.
This means that the Z8 can not only be viewed as baby Z9 but also as a baby Alpha 1, particularly for anyone with a decent collection of E mount lenses already.
 

You pipped me to the post by minutes, was just about to mention this! It's illustrated well in the video (skip to 5.55).
Specifically, in human/face detect mode when there is more than one person in the frame there's no ability to stay locked on an individual person. The AF will hop randomly back and forth between people which makes it unusable in that situation. However, someone posted that
"You have to make sure you click on the screen again after you have chosen the person to focus on. The yellow box around the selected person will then change to have 4 crosshairs around the box. That locks in the AF to that person only."
I did not know that!
The other thing he talks about which I agree with is that there is no easy way of tapping on the screen to focus (and then track), like there used to be with the GH5. Multiple clicks are required and it's cumbersome.
A bunch of people have been grumbling about this on FB groups and someone close to Panasonic (Dan Hopkins) has hinted that they are working on a firmware update to address some of these issues.

@MrSMW I picked up a Sigma 18-50 to use in crop mode based on your recommendation and it's great! Vignetting and distortion corrections work. AF is great (quiet as a mouse, I think it's actually totally silent). Build quality is good. Image looks good.
I'm going to use it as a family/holiday lens. Thanks for the tip! I never would have spotted it otherwise, as it's not a popular choice for Panasonic L mount. I think I got the only one in all of Ireland!

It's not nitpicking, he's 100% right.
That suggestion in the comments doesn't work.

I just did a quick test using a photo of people and actually I'm not sure that this works at all. So it looks like Panasonic still has a bit of work to do.

You pipped me to the post by minutes, was just about to mention this! It's illustrated well in the video (skip to 5.55).
Specifically, in human/face detect mode when there is more than one person in the frame there's no ability to stay locked on an individual person. The AF will hop randomly back and forth between people which makes it unusable in that situation. However, someone posted that
"You have to make sure you click on the screen again after you have chosen the person to focus on. The yellow box around the selected person will then change to have 4 crosshairs around the box. That locks in the AF to that person only."
I did not know that!
The other thing he talks about which I agree with is that there is no easy way of tapping on the screen to focus (and then track), like there used to be with the GH5. Multiple clicks are required and it's cumbersome.
A bunch of people have been grumbling about this on FB groups and someone close to Panasonic (Dan Hopkins) has hinted that they are working on a firmware update to address some of these issues.

You pipped me to the post by minutes, was just about to mention this! It's illustrated well in the video (skip to 5.55).
Specifically, in human/face detect mode when there is more than one person in the frame there's no ability to stay locked on an individual person. The AF will hop randomly back and forth between people which makes it unusable in that situation. However, someone posted that
"You have to make sure you click on the screen again after you have chosen the person to focus on. The yellow box around the selected person will then change to have 4 crosshairs around the box. That locks in the AF to that person only."
I did not know that!
The other thing he talks about which I agree with is that there is no easy way of tapping on the screen to focus (and then track), like there used to be with the GH5. Multiple clicks are required and it's cumbersome.
A bunch of people have been grumbling about this on FB groups and someone close to Panasonic (Dan Hopkins) has hinted that they are working on a firmware update to address some of these issues.

Except in recent years they've been brought out and gone downhill. 
("As many will know, Rycote Microphone Windshields — previously a small family-run but world-renowned business on the outskirts of Stroud in the UK Cotswolds — was sold to the Vitec Group Plc back in 2018. The management team stayed on for a few years before leaving in 2021.")
If you dig into it, is kinda crazy just how many of the brands we know and use in the film industry are all owned by Vitec Group (now called Videndum)
Rycote is still a good brand, just don't expect that past history will necessarily predict accurately future performance now. 
2018 was an interesting year, also the same time  Chris Woolf joined Røde:
https://audioxpress.com/news/rycote-lyre-inventor-chris-woolf-joins-rode-microphones-to-work-on-the-development-of-new-shockmounts-and-windshields 
Many of the former people of Rycote have gone off and formed their own new company. 

I bought the Tascam today as a local shop had it in stock. 

This is now my family/holiday setup. You'll have to imagine my belly there, hanging over the belt of my trousers.
I was tempted by alternatives. To go all out on quality with the Sennheiser - too much money! To stay minimal with the internal mic and a little windjammer - the mics on this cam are at the back: too much me! To buy nothing and stick with the stereo Rode - too top heavy!
I found that the foam from my Rode fits snugly on the Tascam and this coupled with an old Rode windjammer does a much better job than the included windscreen.

I bought the Tascam today as a local shop had it in stock. 

This is now my family/holiday setup. You'll have to imagine my belly there, hanging over the belt of my trousers.
I was tempted by alternatives. To go all out on quality with the Sennheiser - too much money! To stay minimal with the internal mic and a little windjammer - the mics on this cam are at the back: too much me! To buy nothing and stick with the stereo Rode - too top heavy!
I found that the foam from my Rode fits snugly on the Tascam and this coupled with an old Rode windjammer does a much better job than the included windscreen.

It really is a decent little mic. I think it'll serve you well, and you can tweak it to make it sound better.

I bought the Tascam today as a local shop had it in stock. 

This is now my family/holiday setup. You'll have to imagine my belly there, hanging over the belt of my trousers.
I was tempted by alternatives. To go all out on quality with the Sennheiser - too much money! To stay minimal with the internal mic and a little windjammer - the mics on this cam are at the back: too much me! To buy nothing and stick with the stereo Rode - too top heavy!
I found that the foam from my Rode fits snugly on the Tascam and this coupled with an old Rode windjammer does a much better job than the included windscreen.

@MrSMW I picked up a Sigma 18-50 to use in crop mode based on your recommendation and it's great! Vignetting and distortion corrections work. AF is great (quiet as a mouse, I think it's actually totally silent). Build quality is good. Image looks good.
I'm going to use it as a family/holiday lens. Thanks for the tip! I never would have spotted it otherwise, as it's not a popular choice for Panasonic L mount. I think I got the only one in all of Ireland!

I'm fed up with Atomos, I wasted a huge amount of time doing tests for them for the stuttering issue in ProRes RAW. They didn't even try to replicate it. I reported the problem at the 8th of February, since then I provided tons of test material. And where are we now? They still think it's my unit, or my SSD or my HDMI cable even when I told them I tested with multiple units, multiple cables and SSDs. Unbelievable.
In the meantime some other guy asked BlackMagic about the same issue (so apparently this is related the the X-H2s), and they sent it to their engineering team right away, they reproduced it and notified Fujifilm about it. HUGE difference between the two supports. Seriously, even Fuji is better than Atomos, because they don't reply at all, so you won't waste your time with them 🙂

I'll just tell them the light is coming from the "business side" 😃

Hey sorry I just noticed this. I still have a few Minolta lenses. I can't use many with my 5D3, but there are a couple that can be easily modified. I believe the one you're referring to from the harbour is the 58mm 1.4. It's a great lens, especially what I paid for it. It's an older model so the coatings aren't as good as some of their MD lenses, but it has a specific look, like most Minolta lenses.
I started shooting some film stills and got a great deal on an old XD11 that had a 35mm 1.8 attached to it. I recently used the lens with the Sigma FP and got some pretty good results. I think the older MC version may be a bit better but the MD versions are so tiny and light that they're hard to not like if you can find one for a good price. Another one I always liked, but don't own anymore was the 28mm f/2. I had the new MD version and it was excellent. I like a lot of the new MD version for their smaller size and more modern coatings.
With that said, I have been building a set of Nikkors so my Minolta obsession has been put on hold. I also don't know how much longer I'll have a camera that can use my MDs.
Here's a shot from the 35mm 1.8 MD on the FP...

Yes - this is an 'exploded' view of it all (the foam is a trimmed-down cheap vocal mic pop shield):

...and it all fitted on the TM-2x:

I've bought a few windmuffs from 'windcutuk' on Ebay over the years- they seem decently well made and work OK, and they do one for the TM-2x - https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/165305982845?hash=item267d011f7d:g:7wIAAOSwks5ghLpY
This is their windmuff on my Tascam DR-05 recorder:

 

To elaborate a bit more on the lighting discussion, I heard about shooting on the shadow side from Wandering DP, who does excellent cinematography breakdowns on YT:
https://www.youtube.com/@wanderingdp/videos
I went through a phase of binging his videos and although I couldn't find a good self-contained example of him talking about it, just look at all the thumbnails on the videos of his channel and you'll see that in most of them you are looking at the shadow side of their face (just look at their nose).
I highly highly recommend his stuff if you haven't seen it - he's obviously a working pro and his videos contain just as much talk about how to light so you can work faster and deal with the sun moving throughout the shoot day as he does talking about how to get things to look nice (they actually go together too rather than competing with each other).

Yes, I see what you mean. That way the light is coming from the direction of the negative space, where the subject is looking to. I like that idea and hadn't really considered it before. I'm going to try to add that into the recipe. This particular day was a bit of a scramble with a bunch of interview subjects lining up for the their five minute piece to camera. Then I'm trying to quickly make decisions on how to vary the background, while keeping the lighting nice and alternating between left and right placement. But I should totally be able, as you suggest, to add this consideration into the mix - that light is coming from the side they're looking towards.
LOL! Did you mean 90 degrees? I could ask her to do a 360 and walk away 😂
Well, I often joke that photography/videography is 90% moving furniture!

Gorgeous 

Whenever I'm doing interviews I check to see what direction the light is going in and therefor what directions the camera might point. Then I find a background I like and frame that up with the camera at the height of the interviewee's head and at around 70-135mm full frame equivalent. Then I place the person within the frame, moving them forward or back, left and right until I get the composition I want. If it's an off-centre framing then I'll get them to angle their hips and shoulders towards the other side of the frame slightly.
And I always try to shoot people standing as I think it looks better - they're less likely to slump or slouch than when sitting. This works well until I get someone who hops and jumps about and gradually crawls closer to the camera.
One thing I've learned is that there's no perfect interview location. But good enough is good enough!
Available light, S5II, EF 70-200 f4.

I think these are really good too, but i think they would look even better if you had the darker side of the face towards the camera. You’re looking for natural contrast in light which is what it’s all about, but if you put the person from still 1 in the same position as the lady from still 2 with the same background and lighting condition as you had before, that would be something i would prefer myself. The same with still 2, if you just put her in the right side of the frame, and rotate her 180 degrees.

...also, this for built in mics.
https://rycote.com/microphone-windshield-shock-mount/micro-windjammers/