kaylee

Top Gear and The Grand Tour - two of the biggest TV shows on the planet, use a GH4 / GH5 inside vehicles.

I think this is definitely true and has been for awhile.
It seems with current production methods/ideas, the more electronics and software go into lenses the less serviceable they will be.
I remember with the Samsung NX glass they did the same thing. You could go on Samsung parts website and buy 'Parts' lenses, which were just brown box replacement lenses for a much cheaper price. This was because they rarely or didn't service lenses, they just replaced them.
Now the other side of this is that everything seems to be getting to this point. 
There are pretty nice 2x1 flexible bi-color LED panels like the 3060a that are like ~$150-200 bucks. That's what I'd call cheap enough to be almost disposable, or at least if I'm on a shoot and it goes down I wouldn't be as concerned as I would've been 8-10 years ago with a $2000 Kinoflo Diva or something.
 
 
 

Welcome to the "I discovered that something that 'everyone knows' is completely wrong by simply trying it out myself" club.
If this was a real club then my rank would be 'Grand General Lord - Class 15 - Special' because the number of times I've spent 30 minutes doing a test and found out everyone online is talking out of their asses about something is beyond counting at this point.
We should make t-shirts.

This is a very strange one to me. I've seen online tests as well as examples from shoots I've been on of the Pocket 6k having really great dynamic range. Yet Blackmagic claims it has less dynamic range than the Ursa Mini and the same dynamic range as the Pocket 4k. Cinema 5d measured it at 11.9 stops while measuring the Ursa at 12.6. 

I tested the Pocket 6k against the URSA, both at 800 iso and the Pocket had more highlight and shadow information, by a good amount. If the Ursa has 12.6 stops of dynamic range the Pocket 6k has got to have over 13 maybe 13.5. 

I'll probably post the tests if anyone is interested. 

Canon should counter-troll Sony and push the announcement date after Sony, who moved theirs to after Canon. Imagine an infinite cycle.

Driving home yesterday I saw a woman out walking with a bright orange coat and I realised that the scene before me was pretty much how the camera rendered the wedding shot in Italy - everything very low in saturation except a few spots of radical colour that basically don't look real.  I guess that's how the real world actually looks.
It's not how the world looks in most videos, and it's definitely not how we experience the world.
I've had issues before with trying to get my blacks to sit at the right level.  It seems like the difference between crushed and instagram-retro is less than the thickness of a human hair.  Maybe I need to apply a node that boosts the signal by 10x then go through my whole timeline to equalise everything out and then remove the 10X node again.  
I sometimes do that with saturation, having a node that radically saturates the whole timeline and then I can look at all the thumbnails and see any clips that have an obviously different WB, which I can then fix and remove the node again.
I'm committing every sin in the violinist shot.  Underexposing a mixed-lighting scene with an 8-bit camera in log using a codec with a low bitrate.....  in slow-motion.  This specific shot taught me the value of higher bitrates and 10-bit colour.
Unfortunately, this is what real-life actually looks like, but the problem is that it's not how we perceive the real-world, and due to the technical limitations involved I can't get this shot to even remotely how it looked to me at the time.
Yes, that looks more neutral.
The issue is that this isn't remotely how the scene looked in real life.  
My frustration is that I can completely remove all colour issues by simply reducing the saturation to zero, but the target aesthetic of this piece was that it was a happy occasion and Italy is a colourful place.  The grade above simply doesn't match that aesthetic, being closer to a bleach bypass look for a desolate film rather than a colourful look for a happy rom-com.
For context, this trip to Italy was part of my honeymoon!
Thanks for outlining your process, I'll have to replicate it and have a play.
You think that the S1 shot would have been harder to grade?  That surprises me, considering that my GH5 was a breath of fresh air after trying to grade the XC10 footage for a couple of years.  
My experience of watching colour grading videos online with footage from five-figure cine cameras was that you can raise the levels up and up and up and they just scale up but otherwise look completely fine, rather than pulling things up a bit and being presented with awful hues and terrible artefacts.  The GH5 feels exactly the same way in post as that - it just scales up without any drama.  I can understand the a6500 not doing so well though.
I guess I don't want to force a shot that doesn't exist, but it did exist, the camera just failed to capture it even remotely the way that it was, in reality.
I've found the GH5 to be far more forgiving of difficult lighting.  Mind you, had I used the XC10 4K mode then it might have been a different story due to the higher resolution and bitrate of three times more bits per pixel, or 12 times more bits per frame.
Yeah, very Canon.  I really do make life difficult for myself by shooting in the worst possible conditions!
lol, I immediately thought of vodka, but perhaps you should be adding tequila?
Not too sure what the YT upload was at, but the frames I posted above were 720 to be a bit easier to view in the thread.
Here's the CLog still at the original resolution:

The 1080p is pretty soft, and the 1080p50 even more-so.  I exported the PNG above and a TIFF file and swapping back and forth between them shows very little difference.
For reference, here's another CLog shot from the video, PNG at 4K:

Generally, the darker the image, the more the saturation.  Furthermore, most digital cameras give a lot of saturation in their non-raw files, and Canon cameras additionally boost the reds.
 
Starting with the brightest sample posted, the image below was yielded merely by boosting the gamma/mid-tones, bringing the blacks down to zero, reducing the saturation and backing off the reds (for Canon):

 
 
If one wants to keep it a little darker (and still have it look like daytime), be more gentle in boosting the mid-tones but further reduce the saturation, and keep the blacks at zero and keep the Canon reds reduced as in the image directly above:

 
 
By the way, the fringing/chromatic-aberration doesn't look too bad, and a light touch with a CA/fringe filter should take care of it nicely.

I'm gonna leave tentacle p0rn to my Japanese friends lol

In Resolve on a 8GB VRam gpu with 5.5k raw is no problem on a 4k dci timeline but on a 5.5k timeline sometime I get gpu out of memory so I need to be more carful on the nodes.... 8k timeline could be problematic with 8GB Vram with just basic nodes.
I use above 4k timeline to pull pictures and to save a master if I don’t want to keep the original raws to save storage. So not a big issue for me but worth to mentioning.

Amazon. They pay well. Bezos wants to sell more shoes.

I haven't checked the movie so I won't comment on that. 
I say kudos to that man. Investing 700k in his own project is huge. I would argue that investing 10k or 700k on him is the same but it's not. The principle is the same tough. Believing in yourself and finding ways to do your own thing in, with your own small fortune, is not easy. Even if I dislike the movie, that man has my respect. Because we all know that most of that budget is spent on crew, actors, food, expenses, renting and other needs. Thats not "glamorous". It's passion.

pretty cool!
how much did Amazon pay, thats what I wanna kno 😂

pretty cool!
how much did Amazon pay, thats what I wanna kno 😂

Hi Andrew. Yes the new speaker design is sweet but don’t get carried away by the sound. Those machines are a nightmare for audio editing tasks. There are 2 huge threads on MacRumors and many videos on YT about the intense audio popping that can be noticed inside Logic, FCPX and many other apps.
I am experiencing this issue myself on a 2019 15 inch unit and the only solution is to use an external audio interface (or headphones). Apple is aware of this issue for almost 10 months now and has done nothing to fix it.

Is bad rolling shutter going to be that facepalm  moment for the R5? There’s got to be a serious flaw somewhere. 
Im going to predict in 8K that it’s bad and in 4k it will be acceptable.
Roll on July. 
p.s how’s the XT4 IBIS? Still warpy? 

Well there is a possibility that it could do some damage in the pants region if not calibrated correctly.
But as this will lead to not being able to have kids then the money saved on raising them can be ploughed into buying more lenses etc so its actually a feature rather than a fault for this audience.

Frontline riot photographer...what is that ? Wedding photographer, I know... but Frontline riot photographer.
"...I'm risking my life to cover this story (gunshots, rocks, fire, tear gas, etc.)"
I think it's the etc. that pose a problem here. Anyone with a camera "feel the need to document" the riot. So cool, you don't have to travel to war zone like Syria or Yemen to be in the boots of a photojournalist, just go downtown, to get a shot of adrenaline. The smell of tear gas is so exciting my dear ! Do you think I should take a ND filter, because yesterday I couldn't focus well with the flash grenade. No joke, last time I saw on the news, a lady with a gimbal running with the protesters. Next is what ? slow mo with a Phantom ? 360 VR ?
The same people are taking pictures of homeless, you know...to document poverty. All of that, to feed social media and get followers. Pathetic.
When you introduce yourself saying:
Frontline riot photographer.
"...I'm risking my life to cover this story (gunshots, rocks, fire, tear gas, etc.)"
it's an insult to photojournalist who died, doing their job.

You can just have Resolve generate optimize media..... you pick the in and out on a rough manner, drop it in the media bin and then right click all the clips and hit generate optimized media (the setting of the format are in the timeline setting). Then in edit and color tab you can just turn on and off optimize media.... very easy. This is the way I edit on my 3 years old notebook.

Shutterstock is about to make an unexpected change on June 1st regarding the company’s paying scheme and cut every contributors share almost in half. The company used to pay 30% per license to it’s contributors (which was also a bad deal but at least an acceptable one) and now introduces a new payment structure, where that percentage will vary from 15% to 40% according to the amount of annual licenses that are sold from every individual artist’s portfolio.
Of course you have to sell 25.000 licenses (this is impossible) in one year to reach that 40% and even if you do, every January 1st your level automatically resets to Level 1, so back to 15% until you reach that number again in the end of the year (spoiler: you won’t).
This practically means that the vast majority of contributors will experience a 50% reduction to their income from SS.
I am a SS contributor for 5 years now and only a tiny fraction of my income comes from stock footage but i know many people who have invested on this and they are making a living from selling clips and photos on micro stock sites.
I guess this is a legal move on paper and it’s definitely covered by one of those filthy pdf agreements. But given this hard period we are all crossing, those unethical moves made by greedy CEOs in order to transfer the loss on the back of content creators have at least to be judged and condemned by our creative community.

I've had way too many projects I've certainly wanted to "Alen Smithee," but they were just corporate videos, no production credits involved.

So many times I wish I were a photographer instead
You can get a beautiful shot with a camera that looks the same whether moving or still...
But movement always has to justify itself.
If the frame floats or moves with IBIS, shot dead. Mood gone. It's such a fine art. Camera movement is such a fussy thing. It's like colour - There's no point it being there unless the movement is beautiful or has meaning. Otherwise, may as well be still - or black and white.
With a photo you can just make a pretty shot and it's job done. It's about timing, framing. With video you have to sustain all that's nice and has meaning for 10x longer. Sometimes 1000x longer.
With photos there's the one-man nature of it... with video, you have to rely on others a lot more - actors, writers, and so on. And that's before you've even started the shoot
Sometimes I hate video.
And think I'd be better off with a Fuji GFX 50R, just enjoying myself.
Just one man and his camera.
With video, you often have to lug around rigs, tripods and monitors.
To anybody who sustains their filmmaking over the years at a high level I salute you. It must be incredibly stressful!

The one in resolve is  close enough that I'm not going to use ND's for shots on my Z6 anymore.

Also for VFX work results are far better when you pull a key off a high shutter speed and then add the motion blur in post. Makes cleaning up hair work far easier.

Resolve offers something like this. It's quite good, actually.
Did you give it a whirl?

 

Instructions unclear. Bought two more cameras using stimulus cheque.

To spare the expense of buying one, I think you could use a single GH2 if you wanted a video challenge with it.
Start with someone who doesn't mind being parted with it for a while, they make a film over two days with it and then they post it on to the next person who does the same over two days and then sends it on etc until it gets back to the original owner.
Even for people who don't own any MFT lenses there are plenty of adapters on eBay for under £10 so its not going to break the bank to take part.
As forum members are spread out all over the world, it would be quite an interesting project even if the subject was just "one day where I live".
If no one fancies parting with their own GH2, it wouldn't exactly be difficult to throw £10 each into the PayPal account of someone trusted to group buy one off eBay.
I know of a cheap one for sale in Cairo.