mercer

There are actually good answers to the 10x question for each FF mount.
Sigma 20-200mm is an answer for E mount and L mount.
Sony has their own 24-240mm too.
Nikon have a 10x near miss with their 24-200mm and an over the top 14.2x 28-400mm.
Canon has their 24-240mm too and if you don’t mind mimicking trombone playing while zooming then their old 35-350mm EF is a great bargain.
I actually have one of the latter and the range is great. 

 

I thought the title was slightly clickbaity but I’m glad I clicked on this one.
There are a lot of “Arri look on your xyz camera” videos but I think this is a far more interesting take on it.
The question is are you doomed to never match it because it is baked in (not least the IR cut filter) and it can’t be reverse engineered in post?
Can anyone who has bought the Arri license for their supported Panasonic camera chime in with their thoughts?
 

Been using the GH6 with the cheap  7artisans 24mm 1.4. I really like the lens, are there any other 7artisans hidden gems?

It seems to be the case. Pretty amazing what Nikon has accomplished in the past few years.
That is a pretty cool feature, even though my mind cannot grasp how the Techart is accomplishing it. I had a quick look on BH and they only seem to have an EF to Z and a Leica M to Z... do they make an F to Z? The M mount one is kinda interesting because the more I get into shooting film, the more I have become interested in an M6 or earlier model... again completely perverse for my needs considering I usually shoot with an FE or the random Pentax/Canon/Minolta camera, but there's just something unique with a rangefinder.
Speaking of the FE... the FE/FM variants are damn near perfect cameras for stills for the type of stuff I shoot so as I started researching Z mount cameras, I almost forgot about the ZF and I instantly got a little excited about it... even though it lacks a lot of the video requirements I want for a hybrid... but so does the ZR... anyway after a quick search I found this...

Then I searched for a size comparison of the ZF vs. the DF and other than the grip, they were basically the same size... I thought mirrorless was supposed to give us smaller, lighter bodies. I mean my GH6 is only a little smaller than my 5D3...
What a joke in some ways...
Rant over.
The Z8 would be amazing, but I don't know if I could do it. I think I'd rather have a ZR/ZF combo or just a Z6iii. Maybe if I could figure out a way to make some money from this stuff, a Z8 could be in my future... but then that would open a whole new set of possibilities... an R6iii/C50 or C70 combo...
And this is the problem I have been dealing with since I started this hobby. No camera meets all my needs (wants) but it's obscene for me to really have more than one camera. 
Another off topic rant... I've been seeing social media posts from the filmmaker Pete Ohs... I posted about him a long time ago because he made a film a year with a 5D Mark iii with ML Raw and his films were screened at SXSW and Sundance and they all got some type of distribution deal... well he's still making at least a film a year... his films are still being screened at SXSW and Sundance and he still gets distribution deals and he still makes his films using his 5D Mark iii with ML Raw and when asked, his reason is... "that's the camera I own." I immediately feel like an a complete asshole for chasing these other cameras. Of course, he's a tripod guy with very static shots that he shoots in basically one location (or very few) whereas I am trying to shoot more run and gun and stealing locations whenever possible., so I've realized how important IBIS is to my style of shooting and AF on some level... but not as important...
END RANT.
Anyway, I'm still in my early phase of thinking this through. I guess if I was smart, I'd dust off my tripod and shoot with my 5D or FP... or learn how to grade Log footage and use the GH6... but I really want 32 bit float audio and R3D/ProRes files... or nRaw/ProRes files... and IBIS in FF with some halfway decent AF... is that too much to ask?
first world problems...
Do it!!! You're a Nikon guy at heart it seems and you've been taking about it for a while... how nice would it be to have your "forever camera?" 

Being a Canon fan over the years, obviously I drooled over the R5 since it was released, especially after the overheating got sorted out (thanks to the fine folks on eosHD) but it was waaaay over the reality of my life. Since my interest was once removed, I'm a little unsure of the specs but believe that the 4K raw is cropped, not downsampled, right? 8K is complete overkill for what I do... in some ways as I started thinking about this, I've gone back and forth that the 1080p raw on my 5D3 is probably plenty good enough for the short films I don't finish (HA) so 8K is just perverse for me.
Unless I misunderstood your first sentence here... I believe the Nikon ZR does have IBIS? My real concern with the ZR is the 4K R3D crop in 4K. I'm sure I can live with S35 crop for video or maybe the 6K is soooo good that I will get over my analogesque snobbery. But the Komodo suggestion is tempting... another camera I have drooled over.
Z8 is also a dream camera... basically any camera with internal raw and IBIS is a dream camera for me, so the Z6iii fits into that equation as well.
Shit... just checked BH... the Z6iii is on sale brand new for $1999...
Hmm... that complicates things a little.
Not interested in BM products.
Thanks for all of the suggestions, a lot to think about.

Sounds like you should be on the lookout for a used LX100?

I like film and retro filmic looks, but shooting Super-16 (or even Super-8) is still an expensive PITA.
After some testing of my equipment, I've realised that my GX85 has image quality equalling or surpassing a Super-16 film camera (with some categories surpassing a Super-35 film camera) so in my pursuit of a pocketable, portable, fun, simple, and fast setup that looks like film, this project is born.
The criteria is to work out how to get great images from the tiny setup that are enough like film that most people would believe it if you said it was shot on film.  My approach is simply to compare the two and find the biggest differences and then work on bringing them closer together, 80-20 rule and all that.
The first point of comparison is already known, the crop factor is similar (2.2x vs 2.88x) so making sure I don't go too hard into shallow DOF then this should be comparable.
Second consideration is camera movement, shake, and how they'll be used.  S16 film cameras can be hand-held, but they've got some weight so are relatively steady in use.  8mm cameras were designed to be hand-held and are much lighter, so will move more.  The GX85 is far smaller than either, but has IBIS (and OIS with some lenses) so that should make it feel larger, but I'll have to watch out for parallax, which will give away the cameras lack of heft.
Third is the DR.  Film has a huge DR and I wasn't sure how this would go - harsh clipping of highlights and blacks will be a dead giveaway.  Without knowing anything about its rec709 profiles, I shot an exposure test where I took shots one stop apart.  Film negatives have a lot of DR, but print film has far less, with stocks like Kodak 2383 only having about 5-6 stops in the linear range of their exposure (between about 10% luma and 90% luma, before the rolloffs kick in).  Bringing in my test shots and matching the contrast within my standard colour pipeline (based around the Film Look Creator tool in Resolve) I realised the GX85 has enough DR to push its highlights well up into the highlight rolloff curve of the FLC, and same with the shadows, so this is fine too.  DR, check!
Fourth is resolution and texture.  The images should be soft and noisy, but how much?  After reviewing a number of sources, I realise that there are all kinds of factors, such as the speed of the negative, how it was exposed (0...  or -1 and pushed in post, etc), but often the biggest factor in softness was the lenses used, and the biggest factor on the grain is the processing that the streaming service does when you upload it!  In this sense, I have a lot of freedom in these aspects, but I'll have to do further tests on uploading to YT.  I have seen videos that have really nice grain in 4K, so I know it can be done, but my previous tests showed the YT compression really changes things, so I'll have to do more tests.
Then we're into testing with real images and just seeing what we see.
My first test was some random shots in the garden, just to have a starting position.




The feedback I got (including one friend who practically lives to talk about film!) was that it looked good but needed more saturation.  My thoughts were that I exposed too high (I'd forgotten that the LCD is deceiving and the GX85 has a lot of shadow info) and as such the highlights in the first image were clipped in the file and still show in the graded image.
After this test I happened to watch a YouTuber go through their grading process and they said they exposed by putting the image in the middle of the histogram, which made sense to me and I realised this is what I should do with the GX85.
Second test was just a few images while out and about.  It's the GX85 and 14mm F2.5 pancake lens.  I'd previously forgotten this lens is both a 31mm and also a 62mm (with the 2x zoom) and so is much more flexible than I was remembering, so I made sure to include some 2x shots to see how useful that was with this level of image degradation.  I also decided to push the images to get more of the kind of look I'm chasing.





The 2x seems completely fine too, having quality far more than this level of softening will show.




I also re-graded them in B&W, pushing the contrast much further.  I may even want to go harder on these.





Much more work to do, but I'm really liking the process so far.
In these days of digital perfection, the attraction of film is in the colours and the texture.  If you want the colours and not the texture, wanting to keep a much more modern level of sharpness and noise, emulating some of the properties of film is so ubiquitous that I think it's just called "colour grading".  The phrase "film emulation" then is for the texture of film and deliberately wanting the imperfections and aesthetics of it.  You don't have to go hard like I have with Super-16 film + Super-16 lenses levels of softening, but if you did this is easily possible too and FLC has 35mm presets which soften, but do so far more subtly than this.
I'll continue to iterate on the colours and textures, but moving into moving images is probably next, with all the testing of the YT processing and compression that comes with that.
But seriously, imagine telling someone in the 80s that you could fit an interchangeable lens camera capable of shooting feature-film level images in your pocket...
Feedback welcome.

I'm still a weirdo because I just bought a Yashica ML 50mm 1.7 hoping it will give me 80% of the micro contrast Zeiss offers in their 1.7 50 for 80% less but the catch is I want to use it to shoot 1920x818 on my 5D3. So the idea of shooting 8K sounds so alien to me. Of course, I am liking the 5.7K on my GH6... go figure. 

This sort of question comes up often in a photo context on GFX forums and the most correct/accepted answer to it is "it doesn't matter."
And any discussion of that sort of thing is going to quickly devolve into arguments about how bayer sensors work (hint: 4K from a bayer sensor isn't 4K of actual information and is actually closer to 1.5K-3.5K, depending on who you ask).
But the short answer is "that depends on the lens, but some do for sure, some do near the center and not at the edges, and some definitely do not."

Amazing spec really.
Looks like it could be my forever camera….
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Back from a visit to Japan.
We spent most of the time in a small town but went to Tokyo for a weekend, so I shot a lot in Tokyo and used the rest of the time to test a range of lenses I took just for that purpose.
I tested the 12-35mm F2.8 for Night Cinema and it worked great and I loved the images, but as it got darker I kept cranking up the ISO and in the end it just didn't have the levels for the truly dark backstreets.


I also tested the tiny 35mm F1.6 c-mount CCTV lens I got off ebay some time ago.  It produced some really nice images in the right scenarios, but the plane of focus was so incredibly distorted that any scene with stuff off-centre in the frame would look really strange.
It had more level than the 12-35mm but still fell short of my better options.



My themes for the place emerged very quickly....   vending machines, bicycles, and lanterns.  Anyone who has been to Japan will be surprised by this exactly zero percent.
At this point we went to Tokyo and I treated it like a Night Cinema interval event, basically shooting as much as I could.
I shot a whole sequence from the hotel window as the sun set using the Takumar 50mm F1.4 and SB, my go-to setup.




I did a number of walks around the local area with the same setup.  Each time I went out I liked using the setup more, and each time I reviewed the files I liked the images I got from it more as well.  After China I was feeling like it was a bit too vintage / low-fi but I've really warmed to it since.



I found myself a bit at odds with Japanese culture, especially in regards to the fervent dislike of badly-behaved foreigners and the locals dislike for being filmed in public (despite the fact no-one will tell you they don't like it), so I mostly filmed the place and not the people, or at least I didn't tend to film individual people, instead including them small in the frame, or en-mass, or out of focus.
I think that lent itself to the cultural experience as well.  The city, and to many extents the culture, dwarfs the individual, placing the focus on the group.  As a tourist I can only glimpse the culture from afar, so taking the perspective of the outsider in the compositions is very much representative of the experience.





My "big" outing was a walk from Shibuya to Harajuku on our last night there.  As these places are known for youth and fashion and culture (and the counter-culture that fashion normally draws from) I concentrated on the grittier side of these areas.  I also leaned into the layers and the overall chaos of the place, taking advantage of the Takumars ability to focus on a small slice of the chaos, both through the 70mm FOV and also the shallow DOF.




Back in the small town I did more "test" walks with the TTartisans 50mm F1.2 (100mm F2.4 equivalent), the Helios 44M + SB combo (82mm F2.8 equivalent) and Takumar + SB combo for comparison (71mm F2.0).
As the small town was much less dense I found the extra reach of the TTartisans to be useful, and the DOF was shallow enough to be useful at distance, and the image was much cleaner across the frame compared to the Tak.


The Helios 44M was a different beast.  I felt like I was fighting with it basically the whole time and came back from the shoot thinking it was a bust and I'd wasted an outing.  The FOV often seemed wrong, it lacked the aperture to get enough light to the sensor and I was pushing the ISO a lot, the DOF was also deeper and so I found myself having to get closer to objects to get the separation I wanted, which then meant I was too close and the parallax motion from my hand-held movement was really distracting.  The focus on my copy is very stiff and it is a very low gear so to go from distance to closer focus had the ergonomics of opening a jar where something sticky had gotten into the threads.  
Still, I got back from the shoot and lots of the images looked really nice, which I think is to do with the extra diffusion this has.  It was also better behaved on the edges of the frame compared to the Tak too.



One thing that isn't obvious from the frame grabs is the ghosting from the strong light-sources in frame, and because I shoot hand-held and have IBIS active, they move in unnatural ways.  At first I thought they were coming from my vND but if anything they got worse on both the TTartisans and Helios after I took it off.
I think due to this I'll have to lean into the imperfections in the grade and edit and go lo-fi, which is why I've applied a film emulation softening equivalent to 20mm film to the Helios footage.
I also shot a lot with the iPhone 17 while there, normally during the day for non-cinema purposes, but that's a different topic for another time.

It's an interesting update for sure.
While I find the upgrading process to be too much of a PITA to upgrade unless there's a killer feature in the next version I really want to use, there are a few things in there that are interesting from an AI perspective.
The first is the AI Face tools, with AI Face Reshaper & AI Face Age Transformer.  This is interesting because it shows their ability to track and understand faces is vastly improved from the previous generation of Face Refinement tool, which was obviously designed to have very soft masks because their tracking wasn't that great.
I did an excellent course in Beauty Retouching which used Resolve and basically you apply different treatments to each area of the face as each has a different tone/colour/texture and you had to mask each one manually yourself.  The ultimate would be for the AI face tools to detect the face and output a mask for each area of the face, automating the masking/tracking.
The second is the Adjust Focus with AI CineFocus, which simulates a shallower DOF, and is a combination of a blur plugin with their depth map plugin.  When the depth map plugin came out I tried it on some deep DOF shots to see how it did, and the results were worse than the iPhone 'cinematic mode' with the edges being a very obvious blurry transition, and you couldn't apply anything more than a barely perceptible blur before the edges ruined the shot.
The fact this is now an integrated plugin means it's gotten better to the point they're willing to put it forward for this application.  It's probably still a long way from blurring the background but keeping each hair on the subject in-focus, but it shows increased confidence.
I know they are also doing tonnes of little things in the background too.  I went through a phase of posting to the BM forums and suggesting features as I came upon things that annoyed me, and to my amusement I had professional colourists (including from Company3) reply and say they've been suggesting the same improvements to BM for year after year, and I notice that a number of these have gotten fixed in the last few versions.
Still, there are gaps in the things I'd really like.  One is the stabilisation, which can't handle any kind of shot that isn't perfectly rectilinear, and has no support for removing rolling shutter etc.  This is possible, and I went down a deep dive at one point some years ago looking for a solution and there was a product that did it flawlessly, but the product was in the thousands-of-dollars price range so wasn't worth it for me.
The stabilisation also lacks the ability to stabilise the tilt/pan/roll/zoom in different amounts.  If I shoot with the BMMCC and an OIS lens for example, the lens stabilises the tilt/pan quite well but has zero roll stabilisation.  I'd like to stabilise the roll almost to 100% to keep it almost perfectly fixed, while also stabilising the tilt/pan maybe 40% just to smooth off the rough edges.  This isn't possible, except if I build something in Fusion, which apart from forcing me to learn Fusion, also requires I go into the Fusion window to track the shots as well, I can't build a custom OFX and then apply it in the Edit or Colour page.
I don't know why BM didn't just make the stabilisation occur in a node, that way you could just apply it several times however you wanted, but it's a 'special' thing that happens once in the image pipeline, and once only.
My biggest wish for Resolve 22 is lens emulation.  Like the Face and CineFocus tools, the lens emulation ingredients are all there if you combine them yourself manually, but integrating them into one plugin would be pretty sweet!

It's always strange how these folks always end up hating the box they put themselves into when they never had to put themselves in that box to begin with. The only thing stopping people like Gerald from CREATING fulfilling art is themselves. 
Having been a viewer of his since the start, he DID start out being passionate about cameras. But his transition from a guy who clearly loved cameras into a soulless content creator who acted as a promotional arm of the camera manufacturers wasn't something that happened overnight, nor was it something that his viewers didn't voice in the comments. It was a choice that he made, and inevitably it was going to end like this. 
There are so many people who started out around the same time who didn't put themselves into that box. Whether it was young Simon Cade/DSLRGuide or the Film Riot guys, just the first two to come to mind from the OLD days who are still around, they all started out with a similar trajectory but used their YouTube channels as a launch pad into creating art that they wanted. That isn't to say you can't criticize what they ARE creating today, but they are out there creating and, from the looks of things, enjoying it. Their work with cameras didn't just stay within the four walls of an apartment or house, but out in the real world, where they could express and create. 
I genuinely hope that Gerald finds something that he is passionate about and creates stuff that makes him feel good. Everyone deserves to be happy and fulfilled by what they are doing.

Z6 III vs ZR, you said?
Both are full frame, both use the Z mount, both have subject detection AF for 9 subject types, and both offer internal RAW up to 6K/60p.
The Z6 III has a 24.5MP full-frame sensor, and the ZR also uses a 24.5MP full-frame partially stacked sensor with EXPEED 7. From there, though, the split becomes pretty obvious.
The ZR is the one Nikon has shaped as a compact cinema camera. It gives you internal R3D NE, RED colour science, Log3G10 / REDWideGamutRGB, 32-bit float audio through the internal mic and 3.5mm jack, plus a 4.0-inch screen designed more for actual filming without leaning as heavily on external accessories. Nikon is very clearly positioning it as a compact cinema body.
The Z6 III, on the other hand, is much more complete as a stills camera.
It has a 5.76M-dot EVF, burst shooting up to 120fps, Pre-Release Capture, mechanical and electronic shutter options, and up to 8 stops of stabilisation with Focus Point VR. It is simply the more all-round camera of the two.
Physically, the ZR is noticeably smaller and lighter at around 134 x 80.5 x 49mm and 540g body only, or 630g with battery and card, whereas the Z6 III is larger and heavier at roughly 138.5 x 101.5 x 74mm and 670g body only, or 760g with battery and card.
The viewing setup also says a lot about the intent behind each one.
The Z6 III has an electronic viewfinder and a 3.2-inch vari-angle screen.
The ZR goes the other way with a 4.0-inch rear monitor and is not really being sold as an EVF-centered body at all, but as a video monitoring-first tool.
Audio is another area where the ZR is in a different class, because the 32-bit float recording is a major selling point and still quite unusual in this form factor. The Z6 III has serious enough audio for video work, but that is not one of its defining features.
Even the card slots tell the story. The Z6 III uses CFexpress/XQD plus SD UHS-II, while the ZR uses CFexpress/XQD plus microSD. That alone already says a lot about the difference in philosophy between a photographic hybrid and a compact cinema camera.
The Z6 III is still the more rounded hybrid camera, while the ZR looks much more like a compact cinema body built primarily around video use.
On paper they overlap in some important ways, because both sit in the same broad full-frame Z-mount ecosystem and both are clearly meant to appeal to shooters who care about strong video features, but the intent feels different.
The Z6 III is the camera I’d look at first if the job includes serious stills as well as video, because it gives you the EVF, the more conventional hybrid ergonomics, the stronger photographic identity and a much more all-purpose way of working.
The ZR, by contrast, seems aimed at the person who is leaning far more into filmmaking and wants a smaller cinema-oriented body, RED-style workflow influence, more specialised video tools and a more stripped-back approach that is less about being a do-everything camera and more about being a focused moving-image tool. That is really the core of it.
The Z6 III is the safer all-rounder. The ZR is the more interesting specialist.
So if somebody mainly shoots photo and video in equal measure, I’d say Z6 III. If they are really after a compact cinema camera in Nikon form, then the ZR is the one that makes more sense.

Well I came, I saw. I chickened out.
Bought a secondhand ZFc with a kit lens.
Effectively, I confidently walked in to get the 64 Strat in classic white with triple single coil pickups and a whammy bar…and walked out with a banjo.
Went from getting a forever camera to getting a foralittlewhile camera.
I had an FM2 when I was a kid and this drew me in as did the £450 price.
The Z8 will have to wait but…

Your other option is wait and see if Viltrox make their Nexus focus in a Nikon version or if Tilta do one.That would give auto focus to your manual lenses ,so far the focus speeds on the Sony version look pretty decent.The AF-S 85mm f1.8 has a good reputation and I have got some decent footage out of the Cheap Samyang 85mm T1.5 the manual Nikkor 105mm f2.5 is easy to find. 

Luckily photography/videography are my hobby so my decisions don't need to make any sense... so I just bought a new-in-box Nikon ZR & a 40mm f/2, both for 30% off. Same store had a Megadap ETZ21 Pro for half price.
So far having a blast with the camera.. I like the form factor a lot and the screen is just exciting, both the IBIS & AF are easily better than my Fujifilm X-H2s. The H.265 is definitely subpar, but it's still ok for social media use because once it's 1080p on a phone, anything will look good.
You should buy things the way they are now, but I sure am hoping they'll bring a firmware update to bring the H.265 to the same level as in the Z6III.

What are you shooting and what lenses are you contemplating?
I can't recall what your other normal equipment is, but MFT opens up a Pandoras Box whole world of possibilities with adapters etc too (if you don't need AF) so that can be fun too.  I've been shooting street video at night with two combos that work incredibly well..  the first is my 42.5mm F0.95 with the Sirui 1.25x anamorphic adapter on the front, making it an equivalent of 68mm F1.5 and creating beautiful rendering wide open, but the combo is 1.3kg / 46oz so I also got a Takumar 50mm F1.4 on a speed booster, which is equivalent to a 71mm F2.0, which is much more vintage but is tiny and almost a full 1kg lighter.
I'm contemplating a native 35mm F0.95 or F1.4 to replace both and have a less vintage but still lightweight for travel shooting.
I also rock the 14-140mm for day shooting while travelling, and in brighter places the 12-35mm F2.8 is pretty hard to beat.  So many great lenses.  If you don't need crazy DOF then MFT is a great option, even with the larger body sizes.

Good to know, thanks. All of my Nikon lenses are non-ai/ai/ai-s but I did see that the special edition of the 50mm 1.8G is available refurbished from Nikon for $199... so that's kind of interesting. Of course the 40mm f/2 Z is only a little more, so it'd be a little redundant. Either way, it's good to know that option is available. Do you know if the EF adapters for Canon R cameras have the same level of consistency as the Nikon adapter does? Also are there good portrait, AF-S G lenses that are relatively inexpensive but still good lenses... say 85-105mm?

It seems to be the case. Pretty amazing what Nikon has accomplished in the past few years.
That is a pretty cool feature, even though my mind cannot grasp how the Techart is accomplishing it. I had a quick look on BH and they only seem to have an EF to Z and a Leica M to Z... do they make an F to Z? The M mount one is kinda interesting because the more I get into shooting film, the more I have become interested in an M6 or earlier model... again completely perverse for my needs considering I usually shoot with an FE or the random Pentax/Canon/Minolta camera, but there's just something unique with a rangefinder.
Speaking of the FE... the FE/FM variants are damn near perfect cameras for stills for the type of stuff I shoot so as I started researching Z mount cameras, I almost forgot about the ZF and I instantly got a little excited about it... even though it lacks a lot of the video requirements I want for a hybrid... but so does the ZR... anyway after a quick search I found this...

Then I searched for a size comparison of the ZF vs. the DF and other than the grip, they were basically the same size... I thought mirrorless was supposed to give us smaller, lighter bodies. I mean my GH6 is only a little smaller than my 5D3...
What a joke in some ways...
Rant over.
The Z8 would be amazing, but I don't know if I could do it. I think I'd rather have a ZR/ZF combo or just a Z6iii. Maybe if I could figure out a way to make some money from this stuff, a Z8 could be in my future... but then that would open a whole new set of possibilities... an R6iii/C50 or C70 combo...
And this is the problem I have been dealing with since I started this hobby. No camera meets all my needs (wants) but it's obscene for me to really have more than one camera. 
Another off topic rant... I've been seeing social media posts from the filmmaker Pete Ohs... I posted about him a long time ago because he made a film a year with a 5D Mark iii with ML Raw and his films were screened at SXSW and Sundance and they all got some type of distribution deal... well he's still making at least a film a year... his films are still being screened at SXSW and Sundance and he still gets distribution deals and he still makes his films using his 5D Mark iii with ML Raw and when asked, his reason is... "that's the camera I own." I immediately feel like an a complete asshole for chasing these other cameras. Of course, he's a tripod guy with very static shots that he shoots in basically one location (or very few) whereas I am trying to shoot more run and gun and stealing locations whenever possible., so I've realized how important IBIS is to my style of shooting and AF on some level... but not as important...
END RANT.
Anyway, I'm still in my early phase of thinking this through. I guess if I was smart, I'd dust off my tripod and shoot with my 5D or FP... or learn how to grade Log footage and use the GH6... but I really want 32 bit float audio and R3D/ProRes files... or nRaw/ProRes files... and IBIS in FF with some halfway decent AF... is that too much to ask?
first world problems...
Do it!!! You're a Nikon guy at heart it seems and you've been taking about it for a while... how nice would it be to have your "forever camera?" 

Thanks for the reply. It looks like I'll probably go Nikon or Canon, but if I was thinking about this at this point last year, the FX30 and possibly an a7c2 would definitely be in the running. I love the output from the FX30 but the media and the price isn't worth it to me. If the FX30 was $1200 or less, it would be a contender. As far as the BM 6K FF... just not a fan of BM cameras for what I do.

If you do decide to go with Nikon the FTZII adaptor works very well with F mount AF-S lenses and the resulting auto focus speed is very close to z mount.AF-S lenses are easy to get second hand and far cheaper than the new lenses in Z mount .My AF-S 35mm f1.8 was only Aus $200 second hand and to purchase new in Z mount is around Aus $1000.

Yes, Z8 is a temptation. And now ZR... : ) However in my case, the Blackmagic 6K FF and the FX30 are both in a league of their own.

For sub-$2,500, a used EOS R5 ticks a lot of your boxes, I think.  Afraid of overheating and want longer takes?  R5C is right at the top of your price range, but would be doable.  
If you're willing to compromise on IBIS for the Nikon ZR and if you're willing to bypass stills, a used OG Komodo is just in the $2,500 price range.  If you already have some stuff around for rigging up a cinema camera, you'd be able to use it pretty cheaply after that.  If not, you'd probably be in a few hundred bucks more and out f your price range.  The Komodo does have a built-in gyro, though, so it can be stabilized.  Otherwise, the ZR seems to be a fantastic choice.
A used Nikon Z8 would be just out of your price range, but would also be a really solid choice.  A used Z6 III would do you really well too.  Price is about the same as a brand new ZR.
lensrentals.com has a used BMCC 6K for under $2,500 as well.  It's a sensor from 2018, but you can get good results and nowadays, it has surprisingly good autofocus.  No IBIS, though.
 

Hello all, settle in for a long post...
For the past 10 years I have mostly shot with my Canon 5D Mark iii with ML Raw. Other than a couple short stints with some native lenses, the only one I kept was a beat up 28mm 1.8 because it was cheap and I really like the rendering.
I also have a Sigma FP which delivers a fine raw image but I've always found it to be an awkward camera to work with... especially with its horrific battery life and annoying SSD tethered to the camera.
For the past year I've been using a GH6 a lot I bought on the cheap. It has the Arri LogC update, and I've been fairly happy with it except for my normal distaste for crop factors... although I have found the cheap 7artisans 24mm 1.4 lens to be a treat. For the most part, I think the GH6 could be the ultimate low budget filmmaker's camera. The LogC curve/color science mixed with 4K/5.7K ProRes HQ codec truly is remarkable... not to mention the IBIS which is nothing short of miraculous. Even the 1080p, with its small ProRes file sizes looks pretty amazing to me.
Otherwise, I borrowed a friend's Canon R7 for a few weeks and found it to be a pretty amazing little camera. The h.265 files were way better than I thought they'd be. The cLog2 was a treat to grade, the AF was practically perfect and the IBIS was better than I expected.
Since the pandemic, I've gotten into shooting stills a little. I first started with film and loved it. I still shoot some, but they're a little expensive since I don't have the capability to process/scan them myself. I then picked up an Open Box Pentax K10D which I enjoy taking out and getting some random shots with the beautiful CCD sensor, but video is more important to me than stills and I don't want to maintain multiple systems so I am thinking of starting over and investing in a new camera and a lens or two...
So... I was looking for some advice from anyone who has first hand knowledge about a few different systems. My criteria for stills is basically nothing... shoots decent stills. For video, I'm looking for a full frame camera that shoots internal raw video, or ProRes, has decent IBIS and decent AF. I'm a few months away from a purchase, but I'd like to keep it below $2500 for the main camera and then possibly pick up a second, lesser model,  camera in a year or so.
Right now, it seems like Canon or Nikon are the two obvious options, but after reading Andrew's mini review of the FX2, I'd be open to going Sony as well even though there's no internal raw. I have ruled out Panasonic and the L Mount. I have extensively used an S5iiX and have meh feelings about it. I just didn't jive with it.
I'm kinda leaning towards Nikon due to the ZR, but it doesn't seem like the best hybrid camera. But in a lot of ways, it's kinda my dream camera... even though I think 6K is a bit of overkill. I'm also interested in the Z5ii because it seems like it gets me a good bit of my list and gets me into the Z ecosystem for a fairly decent price.
But since I started shooting video with a ZR65, I've always gone back to Canon and have always been relatively happy about it.
And finally, although lenses are important for stills and those times I'd like to track an actor in a short film or something, I'd probably use my vintage lenses more often.
Anyway, I know this is a lot, but any insight you guys might have would be much appreciated.