Tim Sewell

Quite. I was there at the time (grew up in Birkenhead and latterly Toxteth) and I saw the results of the historic trashing of Liverpool of which that was just another episode. I was at my Mum's friend's flat by the Rialto when mates of her daughter's rushed in to tell us that people were coming on to the streets after the beating of two local lads in a cop van in the city centre. It was a wild few days; mind you, afterwards you could barely tell the difference up Parliament Street, since it had still looked like a fresh bomb site before the riots - there were still huge flattened stretches left over from WW2 - in 1981! - that told anyone willing to keep their eyes open just how much of a fuck successive governments, mostly Tory, gave about Liverpool and the North. Anyone, *anyone* who thinks the Conservatives will help working people anywhere, let alone in 'the provinces' is either too young to remember or too dumb to understand what's been in front of their faces for decades. It certainly wasn't the fault of the EU that 9 out of 10 of the most deprived areas in the EU are in the UK, yet the very people who helped sustain that 'world-beating' performance are those who were believed when they campaigned to remove the only barriers to them continuing it. Anyway. We're entering a period where a lot of people are going to suffer, while a tiny few will prosper mightily. Maybe those who are still convincing themselves that Brexit and the Conservatives are going to usher in a golden age will, after a few years of that, start to understand that they've been conned. But I'm not holding my breath.

They're going to get what they voted for. Good and hard!

To say that both phenomena stem from similar origins is not to say that British leavers would necessarily have voted for Trump - that would be simplistic. Besides, he's a particular kind of American figure of a type that most British people find intrinsically unappealing. I think it's safe to say, however, that many British Leavers - were they Americans who had grown up in America and were in similar socio-economic situations in the USA as they are here - would be in the category of voters who could be expected to be Trump voters. British Leave voters were more likely to be older, white, less educated, hold more reactionary views and be less economically active than Remain voters. A similar profile to Trump voters in the USA. Anyway, whether or not that's the case - in both countries, people who felt their worries weren't being listened to voted for things that will inevitably make their lives even worse after believing the lies of extremely rich and well-connected politicians who actually couldn't give a flying fuck about them.

That's the thing that would be hilarious if it wasn't so tragic. The anti-elitists' answer to their woes was to elect a 'billionaire' to the US Presidency (who filled his cabinet with other billionaires, who promptly gave themselves a massive tax cut at the expense of programmes designed to help those at the bottom and in the middle), while in the UK they elected the most old-Etonian-heavy cabinet in living memory (while also ditching our most important and valuable international alliance at the behest of a bunch of public schoolboys). Yet apparently it's bad form to characterise Leavers and Tory voters as numbskulls and racists.

Yes. Exactly as EU legislation has to be debated and passed by directly elected MEPs. The Commission can't just dictate legislation and see it passed into law. The overall direction is set by the Council (made up of elected national ministers), the Commission basically works out how to achieve what it's asked for and the resulting proposed legislation is debated and passed (or not) by the parliament. If the legislation requires treaty changes then it has to also be approved by national parliaments, which makes the whole thing somewhat more democratic than what goes on in Westminster. In other cases, legislation proposed independently by the Commission has to be approved by the Council as well as the Parliament. By the way, you've made quite a lot of very definitive statements judging the democratic nature or otherwise of EU structures, I'm surprised that rather than categorically knowing how the UK's structures (that you posit are superior) you are having to fall back on 'presuming'.

The UK Civil Service - analogous to the Commission - has the ability to propose legislation and there is no way to vote them out. This demonstrates the problem - right from the outset - of Brexit discourse. Most of it is rooted in ignorance of how the EU actually works.

One of Brexit's results will almost certainly be Scottish independence (and who can blame them? They were told in 2014 that voting to stay in the UK would protect their EU rights and Single Market membership - both of which have now been removed from them despite their having decisively voted to remain in the EU). The loss of those Scottish seats, combined with our antiquated first-past-the-post electoral system will make it a lot easier for the Conservatives to remain in power for as long as they keep the South East happy. The north, the midlands - well, it's not as if they're not used to being ignored by central government, is it? At least in the EU those regions had access to billions in regeneration funds - you may well say that those funds were the UK's contributions, re-routed by the EU - but just watch to see how much of that cash gets 're-routed' by the Tories. The fact is that all those who voted to 'take back control' are in for a surprise - the control won't be taken back by them, it's being taken back by those who hated the fact that there was a higher level of regulation that meant they couldn't get a worker's right removed here and an environmental regulation there removed by having a quiet word with a chum in a private club. They'll no longer have any barrier to whatever they wish to do in order to further enrich themselves. The mostly non-working people (look it up - one of the highest correlations with a Leave vote was economic inactivity) who voted to leave have bequeathed those of us who still have to work with a couple of decades of declining rights, incomes and environmental protection, while handing the Rees-Moggs of this world yet another mouthful of gold. At the end of the day, you didn't need to know much about the EU to figure out that Brexit would screw everyone but the rich - you only had to look at the collection of crooks, spivs, chancers and nutjobs who were front-and-centre of the Leave campaign. But sure - it's going to herald a new age of localised democracy and levelling up - Michael and Boris said so, so it must be true.

This, I think, is the crux of our problems in the West currently. Seriousness is no longer either a requirement nor a virtue in elected politicians. Especially in the Anglosphere (with a couple of exceptions), we've taken to electing deeply unserious people who, even worse, are completely insulated by wealth from the results of their witless tinkering.

Appreciate what you're saying, but I guess we sure would like to be going into a 3rd lockdown after 25 deaths than after 70K+. There's governmental incompetence and then there's 21st century UK Conservative Party governmental incompetence!

In recording studios they have monitors that try to mimic the way the recording will sound through a clapped-out transistor radio on the kitchen window sill. Maybe we should all have a TV with the default setup to help grade in a way that would give our desired output on such a device.

That's fine - but you're going to need to spend a *lot* more than 2000.

Cracking stuff Panny!

Yup - same here with my VL300. I also have a SL200 for which I bought after-market fans to retrofit. They're still in the packaging.

To be fair, film kinda relies on you nailing exposure and such too.

The problem with film cameras is the rapidly dwindling number of people who know how to repair them and the scarcity of spare parts. I have a lovely, almost mint, Olympus OM-2 SP (for may years my dream camera). Unfortunately it has a power issue that is relatively well-known but very fiddly, more fiddly than I want to attempt, to fix. I've been looking for a year for a company that can do it for me at a reasonable price, but to no avail. I also have a Canon 1V - once their top-of-the-range pro model - that I picked up non-working for £50. It turned out that all it needed was the batter contacts cleaning and it worked perfectly. A great bargain for me, but with the knowledge that if anything else ever goes wrong with it it's unlikely I'll be able to get it repaired. So my point, laboured as it is, is that while there might be a good supply of cameras (although for the desirable ones that comes at some eye-watering prices sometimes) they're mostly one-shot deals as the expertise that supported the market is disappearing as people retire/die.

Tim pool is a cynical hack who'll espouse or promote any batshit idea that he thinks will get him clicks. I used to follow him on Twitter under the heading of 'seeing what other views are' and saw his videos attempting to incite anti-immigrant feeling in Sweden, under the guise of 'news-gathering'. He's a money and attention whore and best ignored. He is in no way a credible journalist.

I was surprised, to put it mildly. I had been hoping for just push AF (the fly-by-wire on the 17-55 is miserable), but I fixed it to the camera - with the button pushed during mounting to activate Advanced Mode) and after an hour or so of fiddling around (the documentation says something about it taking some time to calibrate itself) it just, kind of, *started* doing C-AF. Don't get me wrong, AF in general isn't great on the FS5 (don't know if the Mkii is any better) but it's usable in some circumstances and, with this lens at least, slightly faster than with my one and only native lens. Plus it has the locking EF mount, which is excellent.

Hopefully it will be. I just bought the Metabones Cine Smart adapter, mainly so I can use my EF-S 17-55 2.8 on my FS5 Mk1. To my surprise, it actually performs better than my native 16-70 f4 lens and, once it had finished calibrating, even offers face detect AF. My guess is that if it works on this camera it will work on the FX6, even if Metabones have to issue a firmware update.

I have noticed that my FS5 creates JPEG thumbnails for every clip, but the clips are there as well. Are you using dual cards? Another thing I've noticed is that without my having consciously chosen it, the camera will put my 24p clips on the A card, and my 60p clips on the B card, or vice versa, when I was expecting exactly the same clips on both cards.

Rich man's toy.

Nice B-roll bro'.

EditReady 2 on Mac should do it - slowly. https://www.divergentmedia.com/editready/support

Even more flabbergasted - I mistakenly looked at the price of the S5 to compare. This new one is considerably *more* expensive than the GH5S.

This could have been interesting but: 1. Too expensive. It's around the same price as the GH5S, yet has no screen, no evf, no battery and - presumably - no strap or charger. So WTF, Panasonic - should be cheaper, if anything? 2. The reason we always get for the lack of internal NDs in hybrid cameras is a lack of space. No NDs in this - why?

I picked up a FS5 (with the raw upgrade, which wasn't even mentioned in the ad) for £1200 a few weeks ago - that's cheaper than I got the FS700 for back in 2016.