Snowfun

In an amateur/hobbyist context I think the balance between the fun/convenience of using a camera and the quality of the "product" is an oft neglected debate. Arguably, for some, the "hobby" is at its best when it is fun to do it - in that sense the result isn't even that important. 
I don't enjoy the process with either the A7S or the rx1004 irrespective of the decent output. BM on the other hand is something I find great fun in its sheer simplicity.
Of course, if the bread on the table depends on the output this perspective is irrelevant.

Possibly a bit of a harsh verdict? The Pocket is most definitely still "worth it" if one is looking for high quality 1080 output. I also think that it is an ideal learning tool for those new to grading etc. But I agree - it is a shame that BM have not released a 2.5k 60p version.

Why not just be happy to keep the A7S rather than waste emotional energy "wanting" a sports-journalists still camera? The A7Siii might offer more of what you require for a video upgrade but until then you have a camera you "love" so it's a good place.

Why not just be happy to keep the A7S rather than waste emotional energy "wanting" a sports-journalists still camera? The A7Siii might offer more of what you require for a video upgrade but until then you have a camera you "love" so it's a good place.

@kisaha you are absolutely correct that the OP posted a budget and that some of the advice indicates units in excess of this (mine included). However, there is a point at which it is also useful to hear from others that the planned budget is simply too low to buy an item with sufficient quality/reliability etc. Perhaps the purchasing decision could/should be postponed until the budget is increased? Indeed, perhaps the budget could be increased now in the light of advice received? This would potentially save money longer term. I don't think it would be appreciated if everyone simply posted a list of tripods within the budget with no comment as to their suitability. 

It's a very social medium - people watch it together - and it is easy to share ones "product".
I once carved a wooden rocking horse. Looked rather good. But I could only give it to one person which I felt was an inadequate reward for not inconsiderable effort. 

It's a very social medium - people watch it together - and it is easy to share ones "product".
I once carved a wooden rocking horse. Looked rather good. But I could only give it to one person which I felt was an inadequate reward for not inconsiderable effort. 

It's a very social medium - people watch it together - and it is easy to share ones "product".
I once carved a wooden rocking horse. Looked rather good. But I could only give it to one person which I felt was an inadequate reward for not inconsiderable effort. 

I have the MS-1.
The best thing about it is that its just about heavy enough to really give yourself an effective enough beating around the head to punish yourself for buying such a piece of shit without actually killing yourself.
So, it's very well balanced.
Unlike any camera that I've ever tried putting on it.
 

What I'd like Apple to do is produce an eGPU enclosure. Even a ready filled one if they want to maintain control.
There are new thunderbolt docks with gpu slots around now which are less hacky and considering the daft cost of typical thunderbolt docks they are decent value for money.
If Apple did one that was optimised for fcpx then I'd happily hand over my readies to them. It would be a bit of an old school offline/online edit paradigm but being able to do the edit on my macbook and then plug the eGPU in for the final render would suit me down to the ground. As would plugging it into my old macbook air and breathing some new utility out of that for the same purpose. 
But the other back to the old days thing that interests me is this Liquid Sky project branching off from gaming into video applications. In a nutshell Liquid Sky is cloud computing with crazy spec gpu computers. If it's good enough to satisfy gamers performance wise then it looks promising for our applications. For someone old enough to have written code on teletype that was then executed on the regional university mainframe at night so all the local colleges could share it's performance then remote rendering is definitely a nostalgic concept I could get behind! 
And it's that democratising aspect of it that's the intruiging point really of Liquid Sky for me in that it let's us access extensive and expensive back end power through whatever device we have to hand or can afford (playing top end games from cheap tablets while on the go is a major part of its pitch)
Sometimes we might not have access to the grunt we need for financial reasons but also for practical ones. I'm currently on a train and cutting together some stuff in imovie on the ipad for example. It has a two step convoluted way to get its projects into fcpx for finishing ut I'd love to be able to hit a button and be able to hand it off remotely and have it returned rendered to me. Doing the edit on the ipad is the most efficient thing for me to be doing the edit right now but the device lacks the horsepower to truly be an end to end solution but a cloud element would solve that.
Its that sort of stuff that Apple needs to do to keep everyone onside and offer a tightly integrated approach to recognising that we all not only have different needs but we all have different needs of those different needs at different times!
Truth be told, we're not ALL rendering all the time and we're all in different time zones so if 100 of us on here threw in £300 each instead of spending it on incremental individual upgrades we could build our own Liquid Sky render monster that we could share time on!!!
 

On my walk to drop off some gear at the rental house, I ran into 5 teenagers filming.
I of course wanted to ask what they were up to, camera, lens etc, and it ended up being a very enlightening experience (15mins of).
They are vloggers and instagramers here in Finland with over 100 000 followers/ subscribers in each medium. 
I, indeed, was the old fart (all 37 of my years on earth) they were humouring but they were super pleasant and made my day.
But to the point, all they had as 'gear' was an olympus, native pancake lens, and a tiny plastic tripod. Their main goal was to walk around the city and produce content.
I metioned I had some stuff like the Zhiyun Crane, like it was impressive... but it turns out that kind of stuff was arbitrary to their interests.
These guys were content machines.
It made me think. Have I been getting it all wrong?
Yes, I script, I storyboard, I know my way around a manual cinema camera and traditional lighting techniques...
But who cares anymore?
These kids are the future and they did not care a toss about dynamic range or bitrates. They wanted everything auto so they could focus on actually enjoying a shoot.
Something to think about...

@kisaha you are absolutely correct that the OP posted a budget and that some of the advice indicates units in excess of this (mine included). However, there is a point at which it is also useful to hear from others that the planned budget is simply too low to buy an item with sufficient quality/reliability etc. Perhaps the purchasing decision could/should be postponed until the budget is increased? Indeed, perhaps the budget could be increased now in the light of advice received? This would potentially save money longer term. I don't think it would be appreciated if everyone simply posted a list of tripods within the budget with no comment as to their suitability. 

@kisaha you are absolutely correct that the OP posted a budget and that some of the advice indicates units in excess of this (mine included). However, there is a point at which it is also useful to hear from others that the planned budget is simply too low to buy an item with sufficient quality/reliability etc. Perhaps the purchasing decision could/should be postponed until the budget is increased? Indeed, perhaps the budget could be increased now in the light of advice received? This would potentially save money longer term. I don't think it would be appreciated if everyone simply posted a list of tripods within the budget with no comment as to their suitability. 

@kisaha you are absolutely correct that the OP posted a budget and that some of the advice indicates units in excess of this (mine included). However, there is a point at which it is also useful to hear from others that the planned budget is simply too low to buy an item with sufficient quality/reliability etc. Perhaps the purchasing decision could/should be postponed until the budget is increased? Indeed, perhaps the budget could be increased now in the light of advice received? This would potentially save money longer term. I don't think it would be appreciated if everyone simply posted a list of tripods within the budget with no comment as to their suitability. 

It really is a case of spend as much as you can afford. I went through several cheap tripods and heads (including Manfrotto) before buying a Miller   Air (not expensive by tripod standards but certainly not "cheap").  It's a super piece of gear. 

When you buy and sell used camera gear  you need to be careful. A lot of stolen stuff floats around and markets like eBay makes it easy for them to disappear. That’s why a service like Stolen Camera Finder is a godsend.
http://www.stolencamerafinder.com/
I recently bought a Leica T. A lovely camera. For street shooting I would say its the best camera I’ve ever used. Totally in love!
But this is not about the camera.
The price was fine, the seller had a long history, everything seemed legit. He even provided the serial number.When I got it home I tested it out and everything was fine. The day after I had to leave for a tripp and I naturally brought the camera. It was not until I got home that I remembered that I should just do a routine check of the number on Stolen Camera Finder.
Why I didn’t do this beforehand, like I usually do is beyond me…
Stolen Camera Finder works by crawling the internet and sites like Flickr, registering EXIF Data.
In many cameras the unique serial number of the camera and lens are imbedded in the data. You then simply drag-n-drop an image on the site or enter the number manually. If the crawler gets a match its BINGO!
You can:
Find a stolen camera Report a found camera Checkout previous owners of camera Track stolen and reposted images So What Happened?
I entered the number manually and… Bingo!
It had been reported stolen in Spain two years ago. So I filed a report of a “Camera Found” and waited for a day or two.
Since I didn’t hear anything I contacted Matt, who runs the site.
He has now put me in touch with the original owner who lives in Italy and we are working out the details on how it will be returned!
All in all I will probably loose a bit of money since the seller probably wont pay up and/or used a fake name etc. But I will certainly gain a bit on my “Feel Good Account”.
And at the end of the day, I would love it if the same thing happened to me if anything ever got stolen.
A bit of a sunshine story imo
(now back to searching for a new Leica T, like its slogan says, "Easy to use, Hard to forget".)

Might just be me being old fashioned and British and what not but is it really appropriate to be in a man's house and speculating about how much he earns?
It's a bit vulgar as well to be honest.
 

That's the thing though. Guys like Bannon ARE engineering an invasion. The current administration wants a Christian vs Muslim war and they see it as divine destiny to win it.
It's going to be your armed forces, men and women, who die in this, in far greater numbers than those who have been killed by "terrorist" wannabes, which are actually incidents of crime and murder, rather than acts of war and terrorism as the media and government portray it as.
For example what happened in Berlin recently, was extremely tragic but the act of ONE SINGLE petty criminal murderer. Just because they have certain beliefs doesn't make them an army.
No it doesn't make you white supremacists.
It does make you a fearful paranoid bunch, unable to take responsibility for why people hate you.
When these terrorist nutcases speak about defeating Christians, they're not talking about Canada and Sweden.
Trump is making you a target.
I can understand the US culture of gun ownership, it comes from protecting isolated farms and houses from a hostile lawless wild-west society.
Those days are over if only you'd let go Tom!
Fox News constantly spins this propaganda about Europe.
There are not a million refugees on my street in Berlin or piling into bars in Manchester.
It just didn't happen that way.
99% of the people who came over just politely blend in and just want to get on with their lives and bring up their children, then return to their homes once the fighting stops and the country of origin is ready to rebuild.
Some will settle but that again is nothing new to Europe or the UK. The UK in particular has been a melting pot of nationalities for centuries. It gave us our best food, our best music, our best doctors and scientists. If only we could replace our lazy fat British chavs with refugees who actually have a work ethic, the economy would be even better.
Merkel made a mistake by not controlling or keeping track of who came in but that's the price you pay for true freedom. Under Trump you're not actually free, you're not actually safe, sadly it's just an illusion. Trump and Bannon talk-up their Christian values all the time. Merkel did it as a good Christian deed and she did save millions of lives... I don't see Fox News praising her Christian values, or the fact she's an ex-quantum physicist whereas Trump has issues spelling the word 'tap' correctly.
Yes, a few of the refugees who came in abused the situation and took advantage. A few more happened to do that and at the same time harbour mental illness. A few crimes occurred, as they do every day with people born here and raised here. Every single crime has been blown up in the media and put under the spotlight, because it's a foreign perpetrator. The media is heavily biased and has an agenda to get more clicks and sell more newspapers. That's how propaganda works. Look it up.
It's fine to reject the globalist agenda
You'll be left behind though
Because it's a global world now, with the internet, out sourcing, mass production, consumerism and hugely beneficial trade links...
You may not like it but you can't buck the trend of world history just by stomping your feet like a child and voting for Trump.
It's not going to be rolled back long term over the next 200 years and next will come A.I., robots, and a whole other world order you can't do anything about...
Leave a good legacy for yourself and your family and work hard. Alternatively, be remembered as that sad guy who got caught up in the short-lived wave of hysteria and supported a joke-president who is an even smaller footnote in the history books.
Oh the irony.
You have a 20th century European-style tyrant as your president and I assume you voted for him.
So if anyone hasn't learnt from that it's you.
LOL. This is Info-wars level batshit crazy.
The global economy has pulled millions of people our of poverty and put food on their tables. Sony have camera factories in Thailand.
Those factory jobs are NOT coming back to the rustbelt in the US.
Manchester in the UK did not get the factory jobs back either.
We adapted and went with a services based economy which is why there's now the BBC's second HQ there and a ton of film production studios.
Who wants the miserable factory jobs back any way?
We do have one thing in common - we both dislike political correctness.
I'd like you even more if you were sane.

I suspect the US authorities might save more american lives by instituting a sensible level of gun control domestically - since 3,180 Americans have died in gun crime incidents so far this year while, er, none have died as a result of foreign terrorism. But what do I know - the only thing we open carry in Hove is our bags of hot, steaming chips (fries) from the chippy!

What do you currently use? Surely that is a key factor in this?

Have a look at Bloom's take on AF...
http://philipbloom.net/blog/autofocus1/

A film that a) I'm eager to show family and friends and b) is appreciated by the aforesaid family and friends.
I suspect it would be very different if this is how I put bread on the table however. 

I have a steadicam solo. There are times my footage looks to have been taken from a yacht. I find the secret is not to plan the shot too much. If I do then I invariably struggle to get it right. But if I "go with the flow" then I get some decent useable footage. I realise that this approach wouldn't necessarily work in a scripted context but for making fun films it's an ideal technique. I find that with practice it's possible to read what it's about to do next. If it starts to rotate then go with it - react dynamically to what it does. It often works and, for an amateur like me, it's much better than trying to make it do something.

Blackmagic Pocket? Gives you the opportunity to play with the basics at a reasonable price and still get stunningly good results.
Put the raw files into Resolve... then decide you're better off with Prores 422 in Final Cut for the reasons stated above...

Apologies for what might be a question derived from ignorance but what settings and/or software do you use to get the slomo? It's beautiful footage.