Parker

@John Matthews While I'm sure you could just put a bit of gaff tape over the contacts and manually program in the focal length you want for IBIS have the camera treat it like a manual lens and get the high stabilization mode, it probably wouldn't be ideal because then you'd also lose aperture control, AF, and most likely the ability to even focus, as I'm assuming it's an electronic/focus-by-wire lens and would need the contacts active to be able to function. 

I used the new high e-stab on my s5iix on a shoot last week to test it out, pretty dang smooth! Although the crop is quite significant, I was running around getting very gimbal-like footage on the venerable sigma 18-35, but at 18mm, plus the crop in 60p, still quite tight, so I may use this more with the Sigma 14-24. Great new tool in the toolbox of this already amazing camera though. 

Bigger, heavier duty fixtures are probably outside the budget you're willing to spend, but I'll just offer the devil's advocate view to the other posters here, that you can never, ever have too bright of a light. 

I generally use a Nanlux evoke 1200 as my keylight, usually shooting through a 4x4 frame of magic cloth, and I am frequently at 100% power and needing more output, sometimes ganging it with an additional 1200B, 600D, Prolycht 675, whatever I have available. 

Granted, I am usually trying to hold some exposure through windows and the like, and I prefer to light with big, soft, beautiful keys, but still. You'll never regret having more power at your disposal. That will just allow you to bounce more, diffuse more, shoot through more material... always an advantage!

Also worth mentioning, but bigger fixtures are more portable than you might think; until I recently upgraded to a full-size production van, for the past several years I've been able to easily carry a 1200d, Prolycht 675, 4' pavo tubes, in addition to a Nanlite forza 500, aputure 300d, spotlight attachment, 4 or 5 turtle-base c-stands, 4x4 frames and diffusion, various softboxes, not to mention all the accompanying bits and bobs of grip, power, dolly and of course, cameras, lenses, etc.... all within the confines of my beloved '09 Honda Civic. 

Now that I am finally in a bigger vehicle, I've got the Nanlux 2400b on my soon-to-purchase list as well. And I'm sure I'll very frequently still want more power. 

I will say (about to play my bragpipes here) that seeing Oppenheimer in 70mm IMAX at the Chinese Theatre in downtown Hollywood — the largest traditional IMAX screen in the world — was truly mindblowing; the sound mix was beautiful, no problems hearing the dialogue at all. 

I'll have to catch in a regular cinema and see how much worse it is in comparison. Huge improvement over Tenet though, which was so loud it actually hurt my ears, and I couldn't understand the majority of dialogue. Although, let's be honest, even with crystal clear mixing and subtitles, that plot is still completely unintelligible anyway. 

I thought Barbie was pretty bad though. Beautiful production design, solid performances, but a lot of jokes that didn't land at all, and a didactic, preachy mess of a script in my opinion. Fun weekend at the movies all around though, regardless of which one you saw. Definitely felt like "movies were back." Hope it stays that way! 

@Djangoyou can also get a huge pixel-to-pixel crop mode if you're shooting in 1080p, handy in a pinch sometimes if you need some insane zoom.

Also, re: custom modes, the c3 mode let's you have an unlimited number of "virtual custom modes" so you just spin to C3 and then pick from a menu of your saved modes, I'm up to like C12 or something like that on my S1, it becomes very handy to have individual presets saved for different scenarios, I.e. Different ProRes raw or B-Raw output modes, anamorphic ibis and desqueeze settings, high frame rate modes, etc., so that you can switch very fast on a shoot and not be digging through menus. Easy to rename them too, so you're not having to memorize a number, it's nice and clean. 

Panny loves to make their cameras basically infinitely customizable. Long-holding any button on the camera will immediately bring up a full menu of all possible camera option/setting/toggles under the sun that can be used as a shortcut, very handy. Then you can save all of those unique shortcuts to different custom modes as you see fit. 

For the past year or so I have been shooting almost everything in ProRes Raw on my S1, (the normal mode, not the HQ) I think it is somewhere around 2 Gbps, which is pretty insane, but shooting with one of the 2TB Angelbird SSD's to my Ninja V still gives me more than enough room, even over multi-day shoots.

I used to shoot with Red cameras quite a bit, and I did get used to the easy flexibility of the R3D files, so the ProRes Raw was such a huge upgrade for me on the S1. I love being able to dial in ISO and WB in post, and the image just has a thickness and creaminess to it that I just don't see with the internal codecs. Granted it's also generally quite a bit noisier, and completely unsharpened, so it all requires more work in post. 

The only time I don't use ProRes Raw is for interviews — the internal 5.9k hevc does the trick, and is nice and small — or for certain anamorphic shooting where I prefer the 6k, 3:2 open gate recording, for better use with my scopes, a mode that sadly doesn't have external Raw support. I've also been using it a lot lately for social media work, when clients know they want both vertical and 16:9 versions of edits, the extra headroom of the open gate makes the reframing so much easier. 

I back everything up to my Unraid server — it's sitting at 60 TB right now, with six 12-TB HDD's, and 4TB of SSD cache for really fast writing to the server, this is probably the most economic way of storing data. If you're okay with a little tinkering, I highly recommend it. Easy to just buy used PC parts, and Unraid has a ton of community support. I run a 10gbit thunderbolt 3 connection to either my 16" mbp or my M1 mini, and I just edit straight off the server without a problem. 

With Unraid, unlike other storage solutions, it's very easy to just keep adding new drives to the array as necessary, so I'm really not too worried about space. In the long run, I may end I'm just batch-exporting archived project B-roll to hevc or something similar, but I'm not really too concerned about it right now, as I still have oodles of space. 

55 minutes ago, Ty Harper said:

Cool, thanks for this! What are you using as an audio interface?

Nothing fancy; just some Bose companion II satellite speakers and a subwoofer connected via USB-A.

@Ty Harper I have the same set-up that is perfectly capable of editing 6k multicam edits (S1+S5) in Final Cut. RAM usage gets a little tight sometimes with only 16 gigs, if you're bouncing between multiple applications open at the same time, video editor, photoshop, browser with lots of tabs, etc., but overall it has been a pretty reliable machine for me. 

I also have a totally maxed out M1 Max laptop and, at least for the edits I do (which is generally your basic talking-head multicam in a 4k project with b-roll overtop) I don't really notice a huge difference between the $4k laptop and the $800 Mac Mini, so I wouldn't be in a huge rush to go splurge on a Studio unless you really want to. 

I do wish the mini had more thunderbolt IO. I use one port to go to my LG 5k display, and the other port gets used by a 10 gig adapter to my server, so that's kind of limiting, vs the newer apple computers with more IO for connecting fast peripherals, but for the price, it's definitely a good bang-for-buck purchase. 

@Wild Ranger looks awesome man, nice work! Gives me Robert Eggers vibes. 

On 10/15/2021 at 1:14 AM, BenEricson said:

Looks nice, but this shot looks great on any nearly any camera system. You really start to notice the difference when the lighting is more dynamic. There are limits.

The funny thing is, the bigger budget shoots I have been on, getting to use larger, nicer cinema cams, I usually also have a whole team of art design, beautiful set dec, gaffers and grip lighting everything so nicely, photogenic pro talent, hmu artists... By the time I get around to hitting the red button everything already looks incredible. Lighting is dialed, everything pre-planned, I don't really feel like I need the DR and flexibility of the high-end cine gear because it already looks incredible in-camera, and still would with much cheaper gear. 

Contrast that with lower budget, run-and-gun stuff, that's when I'm going to potentially miss white balance or not be lighting as well and having to push the camera harder. 

My point being, it's kind of ironic that on higher end work everything is so dialed in around the camera that raw, extreme DR, amazing color science, etc., is kind of a moot point, and it's on low budget work that I often really wish I could have that level of quality and flexibility to make up for other areas that are lacking. 

I'm as obsessed with the Alexa look as just about anyone. I had a major shoot on Friday, I was toying with renting the Amira, as it is very affordable in my area. I don't have a lot of experience actually using it though, so ultimately, despite having plenty of budget available to rent a big boy camera, I decided to just shoot it on my tried-and-true S1. I didn't even use pro res raw, just regular 5.9k internal hevc. I monitor using the GHAlex LUT on my ninja v, so I can nail the look "in-camera" before I grade. I think it's pretty dang close. This screengrab has zero adjustments or color alterations besides just dropping on the lut. 

If I can get 95% of the way there, and have higher resolution to boot, at the cost of maybe a stop or so of extreme highlight retention in certain situations, I think it really starts to be hard to justify, beyond just impressing clients and feeling super cool and hollywood. 

I shot on the NX1/NX500 as my primary cameras from 2014-2019, before I moved onto an S1/GH5 combo which I'm still happily using currently. I couldn't care less about autofocus (I primarily shoot vintage contax zeiss or anamorphic) so the S1 is an excellent successor to the NX1 for my needs, especially after it's semi-recent updates of 6k internal, pro res raw, output, etc. 

I still love the NX1 and I don't think I'll ever sell it, but while it still has an incredibly detailed image, as amazing as it was back in 2014, no 10-bit modes, no 4k60, no IBIS, no log profile, really strong rolling shutter in 4k, and low light falling off a cliff above 800 ISO all keep it on the shelf for me most of the time these days compared to the S1, which is exceedingly strong in all of those areas. 

8 hours ago, TomTheDP said:

Can't downsample in 4k highspeed unfortunately. I do wonder if simply downsampling will reduce moire. I know I have heard to get a moire free image you need to downsample from a higher resolution, but I am not sure if there is more to it than that. I fondly remember the GH5 being completely moire free. 

Ehh, if you've got it in the image, it's pretty much there to stay. Here's an example I shot yesterday (pardon the dull framing and boring image, I had like 5 min to set this shot up and was running very close to a deadline) 

But this is a 6k image, downscaled to 4k, shot anamorphic, so already quite soft, plus additional filtration (hollywood blackmagic 1/4). But with all that, notice the speaker grill of the computer next to the talent. Moire City. It honestly doesn't bother me very much, i just wanted to point out that basically, if it shows up on camera, short of masking it out and fixing it it in photoshop, etc., it's probably still going to be in the final image. 

Edit: Looks like my framegrab is a bit darker than my in my edit software, it's much more noticeable there than shown here. 

3 hours ago, Lux Shots said:

There is a shit ton of noise in ProRes RAW! I did a shoot in the daytime and I had to run it through Neat Video for a few fucking days because it was for a corporate client that had been spoiled by the S1H noise free image. That was the first, and maybe the last time I use ProRes RAW on corporate work.

It's certainly far noisier than the in-camera codecs, that's for sure. But most of the time I'm lowering the ISO in post quite a bit anyway, and I actually quite like the textured, much more organic feel, at least for certain projects. It feels like there's an added depth and thickness to the images that I'm a fan of. 

9 hours ago, TomTheDP said:

I use emotive colors Alexa lut all the time and it didn't seem to work with Prores RAW.

That's my go-to set-up for b-roll right now, I've been shooting everything ProRes Raw and then using the emotive color lut. It's actually super nice, because instead of using the exposure compensation tools from Sage like I used to do, I can just use the ISO controls instead and control the exposure that way. 

One thing you have to watch out for is that Final Cut automatically adds a LUT onto the pro Res raw footage right out of the gate, which you have to disable in that same settings menu, otherwise you'll be putting a LUT on top of a LUT and get hideous results.

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And for what it's worth, to everyone complaining about the monitors being too bulky, I hate shooting with cages, rails, and bulky rigs too, and for me the ninja v on the hot shoe is totally manageable as a fast, easy run and gun set-up, I don't mind it at all. 

That'd be an awesome update for the S1. I've been shooting lots of Pro Res Raw over the last couple weeks and have been really enjoying it, Braw would be the icing on the cake for resolve users. I bought the S1 right after it came out, and it has been so amazing to see the update support Panny has given it. 

21 minutes ago, PannySVHS said:

Darn, @Parker, you nailed it! Shots are all from the S1 or some from the GH5? S1 or S1H?:) I was close to purchases Sage piece of art. But then figured I will do it for a S1 only job! Last one was FS700 plus 10percent S1 in the mix. Cannot wait to do a S1 only gig, once I got my rigging set!:) cheers

Thanks! It really is worth buying, skin tones just seem to get such a nice, beautiful separation, color-wise, from the rest of the image, and I like the way saturation is handled throughout the exposure range. 

All of the shots I shared were shot on the S1, a mix of internal 10-bit VLOG 4k60, 24, open-gate 6k, and the shots of the dude are all ProRes raw from the ninja v. 

3 hours ago, Sage said:

Really nice Parker. What anamorphics do you use? I'm now working on a software that will integrate all steps (WB, Exp, ABL etc) to vastly simplify the workflow (and make other things possible)

Thanks Sage! What I do to simplify the workflow in FCP is to add the full stack of pre and post LUTs that I need, make sure they're all in the proper order just once, and then I simply save the whole thing as a custom effects preset, so that I can just drop my single "S1 Alexa 24p" effect onto a clip and it's 95% of the way there. Definitely makes it much easier to use, and I've also been able to share this effects preset file with my assistant editors when they're handling my footage, so that I don't even have to try and explain the order or have to make them read your explainer pdf. 

As for the anamorphics, all of the shots I shared above were with the aivascope 1.5x (amber flare version) and contax zeiss taking lenses.

@Sage I'm still absolutely loving this LUT, and it just keeps getting better and better! 

I use it for pretty much every single project I shoot, S1 for A-cam and GH5 for b-cam, but lately, combined with anamorphic and pro res raw, it has felt extra tasty. I just love what it does to greens, especially. These screenshots are some standouts from the past couple weeks. Thanks for all your hard work! I recommend your Alexa LUT to all my lumix-shooting friends 👌🏻

@kyethanks for the feedback! I'm definitely not trying to aim any future content toward beginners, really. There's enough of it out there already. And thanks for the story-based idea, in a future episode I've planned to talk about how I approach an interview with the edit already in mind, what sorts of questions — in my experience — often elicit the best responses, and I would like to do an editing episode as well, as far as how I approach the whittling-down process and find a hopefully clear arc of beginning, middle, and end, I think a lot of that stuff can be a little mysterious for a lot of people.

Also, I watched your little death star video, definitely made me chuckle. 

@UncleBobsPhotographyyeah I was going back and forth about whether or not I should use music, I'm so used to always adding it to client testimonials and marketing spots in my professional work but it feel a little unnecessary for YouTube. Thanks for the feedback! 

@Mark Romero 2 That's a great tip, thank you! Better than what I was trying, leaning an overstuffed pillow in my chair with a focus chart taped to it lol. 

But yes, you nailed the sound issues, and I agree, in hindsight the music is a little much, and my air conditioner was super loud and wouldn't turn off... but I knew if I didn't just sit down and record the thing, right then and there, while my inspiration and motivation were aligned, I probably wouldn't have done it at all. Thanks for the feedback, and for watching! 

@zerocool22 You should definitely share it when you get it going, I'd love to glean some of that wisdom (I mean, who wouldn't!) I've got 10 years to do it! 😬

This light looks like an absolute beast, I'm glad I haven't picked up an Aputure 600D yet! 1.2kW LED, this sucker is BRIGHT.

More info here: http://www.nanlux.com/en/h-col-175.html

 

@zerocool22Good for you, man! What kind of content are you aiming toward?