Tim Sewell

So I've just sold most of my other gear and bought a C100 mk2 to use for my personal project pleasure (I may do some band vids as well - having a meeting with my sound engineer mate next week). The question is this - I have a Glidecam knock off at the moment that has a great top end, but silly little screw-on weights at the bottom. I was thinking of getting something new anyway but that's now a necessity as it won't really be usable with this camera. I don't want to invest Glidecam money and there are sooo many knock-offs on Amazon in my price range (up to 200GBP) that I'm wary of just sticking a pin in the screen to choose one. Does anyone have any good experiences to report on systems in this price range with a Cinema Eos camera to guide me please?

It sounds as though you should check out some tutorials on achieving dynamic balance, which will generally involve adjusting the sled weights non-symmetrically..

ICYMI I have my XC10 up for sale:

I worked the darkroom for a photography business for a couple of years. I hated the fumes, but I loved the work - there's something magical about beavering away in red/no light, sloshing plastic and paper around in chemicals and seeing magic appear. God I miss Cibachromes.

Uploading a large ProRes master to Vimeo also helps to reduce motion compression artefacts.

Dynamic range, motion cadence.

Won't look as organic - how could it?

You will lose motion blur by shooting at a higher frame rate. Shooting at 24p gives a shutter speed of 1/48 (if you're using the 180 rule, which I assume you are), which gives the level of motion blur we subliminally associate with cinema. If you shoot, say at 60p, you'd be using a higher shutter speed by necessity, so the motion blur would be affected.

Sorry but I can't agree with this - if you mean 'save' in the sense of preserving their current/historic size and market penetration. The fact is that there is certainly no technology available today that would let the vast majority of, say compact P&S camera users, produce watchable video. To produce anything of that nature still - and will for some time - needs practise and acquired skill. That majority of consumers neither want nor need to take the time and make the effort to build those skills. Given the steady improvement in smartphone cameras, which very much allows consumer-level users to produce stills that look fine without skill or knowledge, I can't actually see anything that is going to save the photo camera makers butts in their current forms. FWIW my prediction is that within a couple of decades we'll either have less than half the current number of manufacturers, or a similar number, but less than half their current sizes/values. Without the cash engine of a large consumer camera market we'll also see a relative rise in prices of the kind of cameras we want as fewer sales have to support the same level of R&D and tooling.

I've long read The Guardian online as my primary news source and they have sunk an absolute fortune into their web/app presence and have never had a paywall. As a consequence, of course, they're deep in the doo-doo financially as web ads don't pay the bills like print ads in the physical paper used to. I remember those days - successful sales guys on national papers' jobs were more about picking the advertiser who would demand the least discount rather than actually having to go out and sell to clients - everyone got respectably rich (well, a lot of them didn't, actually, as they spent it all on drink, drugs and hookers at the weekend and came back hungry for more cash on a Monday - but that's another story for when I see you all in the pub!). Not any more. The Guardian have resorted to hawking 'memberships' at £49 a year to those who wish to pay - you get access to some dedicated content and they send you a nice bag. I've bought one because I have a need for good professional content - I'd be happy to do the same here if @Andrew Reid were to offer something similar.

Unfortunately, with all the other calls on my time, some months I don't get a chance to take any stills, let alone play around with them. And I would never dream of insulting my digestive canal with anything sold by Starbucks.

I used to work in the world of obscure international trade shows and magazines, first as an ad/space salesman, later on the operational side. The magazines - with enticing titles like 'World Plastics and Rubber Technology', 'Railway Interiors' and 'Automotive Testing International' were 100% advertiser-led. They had editorial staff, who called themselves journalists - but in reality they were employed to put the words of the advertisers and the exhibitors into a form that looked like journalism but was, in fact, thinly disguised advertorial. There was absolutely no way in the world that any of those magazines would have criticised any advertiser, exhibitor, or potential client of the future - the companies in those industries could have caused the immolation of a small country and the only news about them in our mags would have been about their latest widget. This became especially pernicious once the publishers all jumped on the (far more lucrative) expo business as potential exhibitors would be offered puff pieces in the magazines as an incentive to book stand space. That, I'm afraid, is the end game in non-news journalism once it becomes advertiser led. In fact, it even happens in pure news as well - witness the ongoing reluctance, for instance, of the Daily Telegraph to publish articles critical of China in the light of its regular, highly profitable, supplements sponsored by that country. Personally I stopped taking much notice of DPR once Amazon bought it as, having the experience outlined above, I couldn't see how a website owned by one of the largest camera retailers could maintain integrity in the long term. Whether or not they actually have started to water down adverse opinions of cameras or their manufacturers, the fact is that I can no longer be sure that they don't. And that's the pity of it. I don't make my living with cameras any more - it's a fun hobby, but an incredibly expensive one (well it isn't actually - I've got friends who are into cars and motorbikes who will happily spend tens of thousands of pounds on their passions and no-one really bats an eyelid - I spend £3K on a camera and people think I'm insane) so I need to know that the sources of information I use to guide my purchases are going to give me the bad news as well as the good. I no longer bother with any of the 'magazine' style sites at all - I research potential purchases here and on DVX User and get opinions, in the round, that I can trust.

The logical answer would be to employ the LUT you'll be applying in post, and failing that simply a Rec709 LUT. I know that Deakins, for instance, uses his own specially designed look LUT for monitoring to give him a good approximation of how the final images will look.

So here's a thing - I can't justify an Adobe CC subscription just for Photoshop (I use FCPX and/or Resolve for video) as I wouldn't use it enough, but thought there was no other software that would allow me to utilise my large-ish LUTs collection for stills. Just discovered that Affinity Photo (https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/photo/) - that's not too shabby as an editor - allows just this - for just GBP29.99! Very happy and looking forward to a lot of processing over Christmas.

Whatever hosting option you choose, if you're looking to keep your costs so low, you'll have to embed your videos rather than host them yourself - $20/year doesn't buy a whole load of bandwidth (and you should avoid hosts who tell you that it will).

I got a set of Ianiro redheads (the original redheads!) for under £150 on ebay - 3 lights, stands, scrims etc. Got a 300W Arri fresnel plus stand for around £30. Nearly a full Lowell kit - Omni, Tilta and the other one whose name escapes me, in separate ebay deals for a total of around £100. A bunch of good stands for £20. A boom and stand for a tenner. You can definitely put together a lighting package for little money if you're prepared to take it slowly and look out for deals. The only instruments I've bought full price have been a few different LEDs - there doesn't seem to be the same kind of bargain-rich secondhand market in them yet. Plus, I should mention, Lee gels are, for what they are, really cheap! I should add, @Dustin, that I don't know where you're based, but the UK used cinema lighting market is like a tiny gnat compared to the big buffalo of the US one.

Personally I like to set ISO/SA(180)/f5.6/8 and ride the ND using a combination of zebras and waveform (@Stanley - the SLR Magic one is ace!). When I'm using my Shogun Flame I'm almost confident enough to do it by eyeball - I said almost. Dunno who made you thread boss, Jon, but you seem to have issues that might be better off kept private.

Will upgrading your car earn you any extra money in the short or mid-term? The camera will, even if it takes a while.

Sorry for the delay - here's that 'filmic' FS700 stuff. http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/archive/index.php/t-325537.html A couple that I thought were stand-out were - not even done with a recorder, just OOC AVCHD. And: Which is raw with an Odyssey.

No doubt everyone's aware of this, but Cooke Optics' YouTube channel is yet another department of the free film school: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-Ya9gBlwOhRwtloTn1hvbA

The Atomos (Shogun series) will go to 30p 4K Sony raw to ProRes. CDNG to the same framerate & resolution is supposed to arrive via firmware update. I'm not aware of any monitor-less recorder other than the ridiculously expensive Sony one that can achieve the same with this camera. I certainly regard the FS700's image (via the Atomos) as having a cinematic feel to it more reminiscent of the cinema cameras you mention. I viewed quite a few videos before buying it that made me feel this way and later, when I'm on my own laptop, I'll post a link to a handy listing of them. It has to be said, however, that the F3 has more of a reputation as the 'poor man's Alexa'.

+1 for the FS700 - and if you don't need high frame rates in 10 bit or raw you can go Atomos for the recorder and save a fair bit. I was certainly able to get this combination earlier this year (s/h FS700) at roughly £3700 including a couple of SSDs and a few spare batteries. An even cheaper camera option that ticks quite a few boxes would be the Sony F3 with the relevant upgrades.

Filmstro (https://www.filmstro.com/) take a different approach. They have 'themes' - loads of them - that you can match to your footage and then alter things like momentum, power, volume, depth etc. You pay $9.99 - $49.99 (depending on the kind of usage) a month for unlimited use and tracks. They seem to add lots of new music every month too. It's all instrumental, as far as I can see, and I think 1080p support is upcoming (but you can get around that by arranging the track, then exporting just the music track and adding it in your NLE). It's not for everyone, but I imagine for personal project use, corporates, weddings etc it could be ideal.

The Amaran isn't at all powerful. You could do worse than look at Lume Cubes. They are tiny, have good battery life, waterproof up to 100 feet and have 10 brightness settings. You can't change the colour temperature, but they're easy enough to gel. Plus you can control a bunch of em from your smartphone. https://www.lumecube.com/

Probably could use a bit more work - especially the score - but I quite like the 'thrillery' feel. Cinema EOS standard, HD, colour and contrast balanced then FilmConvert-ed to Fuji Velvia. Soundtrack done in Filmstro.