Tim Sewell

12 hours ago, John Matthews said:

Buying off Ebay is an option too, but you never seem to find good deals anymore (I gave up).

I've had some great bits of luck recently by using search terms that reflect what a person who didn't know what they had would use as a listing title - 'camera light' and so on... then sorting by Ending Soonest.

I've owned many cameras (too many) and i think I've only ever bought 2 from new. Thing is, there are so few moving parts on cameras these days that there's not a huge amount that can go wrong in normal use. That said, unless an eBay or similar deal is just too good to pass up, you are safer doing it through a dealer, as @ac6000cw says.

12 hours ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

Since one of the stated reasons for documenting the journey was accountability, how did your first night of shooting go?

Reasonably well thanks - will write it up soon!

My intention is to document this journey here and I’m doing it for the entirely selfish reason of keeping myself on it!

Script and partial shortlist written. Ready for action tomorrow night when wife is out, so hopefully no interruptions!

Thanks for watching! I've wanted to get into anamorphic right from the get-go for precisely the reasons you mention. One thing I like about this adapter is that the flares are pretty subtle.

Missed critical focus a couple of times as I was working off the camera's screen, but generally quite happy with how the adapter renders etc.

Picked this up second hand at a good price as my introduction to anamorphics. Here's some tests shot last night.

26 minutes ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

The "X" vignette is basically inherent to variable ND filters - those that don't have it just have a hard stop before it becomes visible.

I'd also say that in the real world, having accurate full stop measurements is not that important if you're shooting digital.  You have plenty of tools available to dial in your exposure.  Plus, in the real world, light rarely perfectly aligns to full stops anyway.

On my FS7 I set a ND filter that is reasonably correct then ride the aperture to fine-tune. A stop either way in aperture isn't going to significantly affect one's artistic intent.

1 hour ago, dgbarar said:

Hi Gems:

Skip the variable ND filters as they are basically polarizing filters.  It won't matter how much you pay, they will always end up looking bad.  If your clip is static and using a longer lens then you might be OK.  However, if you are using a wider lens and you pan, then the sky will vary in darkness as you pan--it looks awful.  In fact, you might even see the darkened band of polarized light running across the sky even if you don't pan with a wider lens.

To the fairest,

Eris

Absolutely. They have a place though as not everybody can justify having a bunch of single density NDs and the trade-off (if you're not doing absolutely colour-critical work) is worth it. But definitely one has to be careful when using them to avoid the issues you mention.

K&F Concept are pretty good at a lowish price. For a bit more, SLR Magic certainly used to have some nice ones.

The biggest thing for me, using it, is the realisation that a huge proportion of the features we pay extra for in hybrid cameras are really just workarounds for the problems caused by using a completely inappropriate form factor for shooting video.

2 hours ago, BTM_Pix said:

MPB?

London Camera Exchange. I’m still kinda thinking they accidentally put it up at the wrong price!

The ones on MPB at that price were a lot shabbier.

13 hours ago, IronFilm said:

Good reason to get a cardellini and other such clamps

I had clamps galore but there wasn’t a single thing to clamp to!

13 hours ago, IronFilm said:

Ah, you got a Sony FS7 just as "a hobby camera"? 
Amazing, shows how cheap and affordable this older pro Sony camera is getting. 

140 hours, perfect cosmetic condition with Shape arm, 6 batteries and V mount adapter for GBP695 (all but GBP50 of which I covered with trade in). Pretty much my dream camera!

55 minutes ago, kye said:

I keep thinking that it might be fun to edit music videos, but then I remember that would involve clients and deadlines, and then it doesn't sound like fun anymore!

Heh - yeah, not too sure I want to do it for money TBH.

But your points about the actual shoot make sense. That's why I mentioned that a lesson learned was that I should have got there for the soundcheck and ensured that they ran through the chosen song at least once, with proper lighting (at this venue in particular the lighting was controlled by the sound guy, so would have been possible) in order to get some different angles.

I had intended to set my A6600 up as a static long shot for the same reason, but when I got there I found a room where there was literally nothing I could secure either a tripod or monopod to, so I couldn't, unfortunately.

All good points @kye - and thanks for taking the time to watch. I did, in fact, go for a loose shaky style in the actual shooting as I thought it would suit the style and the song - and I made it even looser with some zooms and pans added in post. This was very much an experiment - I was mainly there to do stills (which in part led to my not having prepped as much as I should have done). Overall I'm satisfied that it's worth me doing some more of these but - as you say - I need to do some deep background on the genre as well!

First finished piece using the FS7, first live band video.

This was a bit of a nightmare, to be honest, but it taught me 4 very valuable lessons for next time:

1. Get to the venue before the soundcheck. Set up and crucially...
2. Get the band to do a run-through of the song you're covering, ideally with the stage lighting as it will be later.
3. Get a second static view that you can just leave rolling.
4. During the gig, start rolling and don't stop until the end.

You can probably guess from the above that my major problem wit this piece was lack of coverage, which is why some of the cutaways don't quite fit.

Having said all that, it was a great experience and the band are happy; so on to the next one!

31 minutes ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

Otherwise, as others have said, I'd guess that Nikon will now roll out compressed raw to a bunch of their bodies and as soon as they can

Will they though? I guess I could see them doing so with a couple of top-end models, but why would they buy a company then dilute one of the major USPs that attract people to that company's products?

7 hours ago, kye said:

Since that 24p argument discussion I've been thinking about frame rates and motion a lot and shot a few tests etc, and eventually got around to thinking about how to view content on the computer properly.  I finally realised that the solution is to set your display to 48Hz (or 120Hz / 240Hz if you can do it) and that will give you proper 24p playback.  

I do all my streaming and YT viewing on my computer via a display that the OS controls, so currently with a 60Hz refresh rate I'm perfectly recreating the 30p (yuk) and 60p videos (double yuk!) but the 24p is jittery.  My current MBP can't do 48Hz but the newest ones from Apple can do 48Hz and 120Hz / 240Hz, so it's on my radar.

I currently edit in Resolve through a UltraStudio 3G box that drives the display directly with whatever the timeline resolution and frame rate is, but that's only for my videos, not for watching anything else unfortunately.

Interesting. The BenQ 4K monitor I generally use (on MBPro M1 Ultra) will give me 24Hz but not 48. Resolve playback at 24 seems smoother, however.

I have an EF to E speedbooster and an EF to E smart adapter. In turn, I have M42 to EF adapters on all my M42 lenses and OM to EF adapters on all my Zuiko lenses and they generally work fine on both. The only issues you might find would generally be with infinity focus due to slight inaccuracies in adapter depth (which can quite often be remedied by shimming with tin-foil!).

A lot of people report issues with Minolta MD/MC adapters and Canon FD adapters, but specialist ones are available.

At the end of the day, it's a case of 'order the kit from somewhere with a good returns policy and see if it works', but the chances are that it will!

14 minutes ago, Ty Harper said:

No technological advancement will ever stop humans from the desire to make art. So what you're saying is 100% true but not really in dispute. This is about the filmmaking economy and who will be able to make a sustainable living off the art of filmmaking.

Quite - but that in turn is dictated by what people want to watch. As I said much earlier, this will become a class signifier. Right now there's a whole lot of cheap, badly-written throwaway tosh that a segment of the population wants (or can afford) to watch. That will continue but with large parts of its creation taken over by AI or AI-aided processes - so yes, some jobs lost etc. But higher end entertainment etc will still be largely human-originated. I don't think anyone is going to pay a Netflix subscription to watch a steady diet of derivative AI-generated content.

I used to do wedding photography. The widespread adoption of smartphones with good-enough cameras ripped out most of the lower end of that market; but mid-market and above weddings? They want real photographers and those photographers generally make a much better living than they ever made on the low end. Things will change, quite a few markets will go, but new ones will emerge and current ones will grow. It's a change, but it's not the end.

And, oh yeah, forgot to say; a talented teenager with a handycam and a few good-looking pals will be able to create art infinitely more compelling than any AI can for far longer than any of us will still live on this planet.

Whatever the dollar cost, the cost in energy is horrifying (see Sam Altman's musings on the need for $7 trillion in energy source developments to cater to AI in wide use). And at the end of the day - for what? There will be some usage in various specialised fields but I don't even buy that this is going to replace stock video. AI can make increasingly realistic simulacrums of the world but it can't make anything artistically compelling because AI can't (and is unlikely to this century) understand art - not even to the extent of 'how do I make this actual real hotel attractive to human customers without adding things that don't exist?'.

I'd also note that the people most vociferously pushing the 'AI will take over the entire creative sector' paradigm are the same people (or types of people) who until very recently were proposing that crypto would replace currency and that NFTs were a really fabulous guaranteed way to make money.

I'd be interested to know what feature or capability Fuji could have included that would have prevented the OP from being beyond disappointed and let down.

Priced quite well also.