John Matthews

Yes, this is one aspect we have zero control over.
I had a couple actually cancel me the other day because they decided in the end they wanted a more ‘fashionable look’ to the result; ‘light & airy’.
Will they regret that at some point in the future?
In Weddingland, light & airy replaced dark & moody which replaced vintage which replaced whatever came before that.
But I try to avoid fashions and fads and prefer to consistently stick to a more ‘timeless aesthetic with a nod to nostalgia’…if I had to try and describe it in words.
I am trying to ‘future proof’ the results as much as possible.
I have articles on the subject on my website. Not for photographers/vidiots, but for potential clients who might happen upon said articles and say, “yes, that is us. We value this stuff”.
And those (few) that do, no surprise, always turn out to be the best clients.
Perhaps different in the commercial world but with weddings and portraits, I have always adhered to pleasing myself first and foremost regarding ‘style’ and attract/book folks who specifically want what you do/are on the same page.
I find those clients also tend to be the least likely to follow the latest fashion in clothing or hairstyles etc so the results from their weddings will date far less than that of those trying too hard in that regard and with their choice of photo/video capture.

I read that wedding photos are often the last photos of the grandparents in a family - a wedding photographer commented this and said that in group photos their first priority is the bride/groom and the second are the grandparents.
I'd imagine that she'll get over it and in years to come will find it's a lovely momento.  Give it time 🙂

Sorry if I missed it, but what editing system are you using?  I had 5DtoRGB for the longest time, but gave it up when I left FCP7 all those years ago.
Proxy editing kind of makes 5DtoRGB sort of unnecessary in my post workflow.

Sometimes, not even that.
Met one of my former wedding clients at another wedding last weekend and 3 years after theirs, they have not even watched their wedding film a single time.
So in some cases, we could present just a thumbnail and 10 minutes of blank content… 🤔🤨😂

@John Matthews @EduPortas @MrSMW @Kisaha
This conversation reminds of a couple of pretty important aspects of film-making that are often not discussed as often as they should be, audience and longevity.  I feel these have a fundamental role in considerations of specs and outright image quality.
The audience, in the context of this discussion, seems to be predominantly people who know the people in the film.  I think this is important because trying to make a film that engages and entertains people who don't have a personal connection to the subject is, I think, many many times harder.  For wedding / engagement work, and for the personal work that I do, the intended audience is people who know the subjects in the video, and for that, the outright technical quality isn't so much of a defining factor.
Longevity is the other major factor that I believe is at play here - this content has almost an infinite shelf-life.  Most content becomes less and less relevant the older that it gets, but not this.  
Corporate work is fundamentally different in this sense, and is mostly about looking modern and fresh and new, to which the aesthetic quality of the images (clean, modern, professional, etc) can be vitally important, at least in the clients eyes.
When you're filming a wedding (or other key family events - not sure if you guys do other family related work like mitzvahs, etc) or the "family videos" that I make, you're acting as a historian.  Older rich families have entire departments of people who keep the family archives, and this is the creation of that material.  In a sense the value of this content goes up over time rather than down.  If I had a choice to send videographers back in time to film a key event of my ancestors, earlier would be of more interest than later.
I've tried to maintain a clear distinction in my technical efforts: capture and preservation first, aesthetics second.  
Even when it comes to aesthetics, what is the aesthetic of a wedding or historic family event?  It's nostalgia.  Sure, you absolutely want to try and capture who the people are, with their own styles and character, but even if your client is demanding 12K video because it's the latest and they always have the best, in 50 years time the 2D linear sequence of images will look antiquated regardless of what you do.  I would also suggest that the sharper you make it (as distinct from resolution - they're independent aspects) the more quickly it will age, rather than appearing more modern.
Aesthetics, even when I concentrate on them, push me towards a less 'trendy' look.  The modern look is high-resolution, clean and noise-free, colours so pure they seem electric, and sharpened to the point you could fillet a fish with it.
This is the exact opposite of nostalgia.  The aesthetic of nostalgia, especially of positive events which is what we are trying to achieve with weddings and family content, is the aesthetic of the dream, the warmth of remembering people you loved, especially people who are gone - either because they have grown and aged and who are not who they were or because they have passed.  
The aesthetic of warm remembering is fuzzy, which requires very low sharpening and often diffusion, it is noisy and organic, the colours are of an older time, a time when colours were less 'pure' and more likely to have come from nature somehow rather than single NM LED lights.  It's also lower resolution just because the tech of the past had lower resolution.  
The more I learn about film-making, the more I prioritise content and then colour.  From a practical point of view, in my own work documenting family trips and moments, my priorities are (starting with the outcome):
To create a great final edit that is deeply sensitive to the subject matter (people and places) In order to do this, I must have a great editing experience with footage that is easy to edit and makes me feel inspired in the editing process What inspires me in the editing process is getting great shots of the people, having great colour, and having enough content to allow freedom and options in the edit If you think about those things in reverse order, for me who shoots without permission and without re-dos or direction, it means I have to have a small camera that doesn't get barred by security and doesn't influence the people I'm shooting too much, it means it has to operate well hand-held, and must be a workhorse that is always ready and doesn't get in the way.  Once I have narrowed my options to those that can do that, it means I want the best quality colour I can get from that camera, and it means I should shoot a lot.
I find that most camera talk exists in absence, or without discussing explicitly, the end goal of the entire endeavour.  
Contrary to what people might think, I think that more resolution is actually a good thing, all else being equal.  The problem is that all else isn't equal, and any extra resolution actively hurts the things I value that are more important to the end product than the resolution itself.

Cameras are just 18.6% for Canon (printers are 55.2%).
I think Nikon is the most vulnerable in that group you mentioned.

Canon, Nikon, Leica and Blackmagic are more than just camera companies - they have other business lines. Of those, Canon and Nikon are probably the most exposed to market changes, due to their historically large presence in the consumer market. Leica, Arri, Red, Blackmagic & Hasselblad are niche players in the overall camera market.
I think OMDS has a difficult transition to make into probably a somewhat smaller and more niche player. They do have the audio recorder side of the business as well, but doubtless some of that market has been lost to mobile phones.

That's exactly what's kept me in the M43 eco-system. One of my interests is wildlife photography & video, and the Oly 75-300mm is only around 420g and 120mm long. Combine that with the ex-tele sensor crop capability and IBIS on a Pana G9 and you get the FF equivalent of 1000mm+ lens reach in a combo that fits easily in a modest camera bag or small rucksack (and the oversampled( GH5-level) 1080p on that is so good it's quite close to 4k quality). Take along the 210g Pana 12-60mm lens and that's basically 12mm to 300mm covered in two decent-quality zoom lenses that weigh less than 650g in total.

If you're a DP/Camera op bringing in enough monthly to more than justify the cost of a modern high-end production camera then cool. But it seems the general consensus is that the diminishing returns of camera bodies has most smaller production companies and freelancers own their lower-value base kit (your Komodos, R5c, lumix cams, sony alpha cams etc) and rent the higher end models of the same system for the demanding projects that warrant them.
I invested in Topaz too, and am a believer in the concept of older cameras being good enough. But, how often are you going to add AI upscaling as a viable process to your workflow/pipeline? It helps in a pinch when you want your C-cam Blackmagic Micro to match your big boy units for a couple shots, but upscaling doesn't sound fun to do all the time. Unless you are only upresing the final render, it doesn't sound efficient adding possible hours of overnight upscaling your clips in your home render farm.

I just watched a video where Kraig Adams (who is a professional travel film-maker on YT) sold his A7S3 to swap to using the iPhone 14 as his main travel camera (except for his drone).  He's got 700K+ subs and used to be a professional wedding film-maker, and really knows how to edit footage with music etc.  He's shot with 5D/ML etc so does know what good images look like.
You could say that phones have gotten so close to prosumer cameras that they're replacing proper cameras, but I'd say it a different way - that prosumer cameras have become so shit and everyone has gotten so used to it that you may as well go to a phone because there's so little difference in image quality.
I don't think that there will be a fourth phase.
There are huge parallels here between audio and cameras.
In audio, there were three phases.
At first, everyone used analog because digital didn't exist or was awful.
Then high-end pros used high-end analog and everyone else used mediocre transistors / digital but weren't happy about it (unless they were spec-heads who claimed to be happy because the specs said it must be good).
Now, solid-state and digital has gone up enough, and expectations gone down enough, that everyone except the true high-end uses digital and solid-state electronics.  The parallel doesn't end there either, as not only does the majority think that the 'old stuff' is worse because the specs on paper are worse (which happens if you measure the wrong things) but also people aren't aware of how good the high-end really is.
Aesthetically, the vintage stuff was 'musical' but not 'impressive', and the modern stuff was 'impressive' but only moderately 'musical'.  The super-high end is both and has to be heard to be believed.  To give you a sense of it, I'm talking RRP of $400K and up.  
I think of it as emotion vs brain - which translates directly to cameras - emotions translate to motion and colour science and the right amount of sharpness and brain translates to resolution.
I think that the mediocre spec-driven market will get better and better to the point that everyone will settle.  I don't know what will happen once 8K is ubiquitous, as pushing 12K or 16K seems like it is completely pointless, but having said that, if blind tests show that most can't tell the difference between 4K and 2K then 8K is beyond pointless already.  
But the two things you should never make the mistake of underestimating are: the creativity of marketing departments to come up with new things you should care about, and 2) the gullibility of consumers to adopt these things, even in direct contradiction of their senses.

I watched this some time ago and unfortunately can't find my notes (I did it blind and made notes before I got the answers).  I've done a number of these tests before and normally they compare a number of cameras at a similar quality level and of a similar vintage, and in those cases I rank things mostly in order of ascending price!  This test was different though and tended to correlate with the cost of the camera but also how good the codec was, with the low bit-rate bit-depth codecs not looking as good.
This is great advice but no-one wants to hear it.
We've gone through three phases that I can see:
At first non-Hollywood wanted higher resolution and higher quality digital because digital was inferior to film.  During this phase Hollywood just shot film. Then Hollywood went to high quality 2K (Alexa etc) and the consumer market was justifiably dissatisfied with their low quality 4K cameras with poor codecs and colour science.  The manufacturers were pushing higher resolution to try and sell more TVs and the consumer market bought into the hype, demanding more low-quality pixels rather than understanding that they needed better pixels rather than more of them. Unfortunately, Hollywood has now succumbed to this resolution hype as well (largely kick-started by RED and Netflix purely for business purposes with nothing to do with image quality itself). Normally I'd say "to each their own", but unfortunately it means that those that want to buy a new camera have to pay for all the BS resolution that the gullible market has demanded.  
To get a great looking 2K timeline you have to either:
Use a low-resolution high-quality camera from 2010-2015 with their support issues, crap battery life, poor pre-amps, and lack of modern features Use a modern high-resolution high-quality camera to record ridiculous file sizes like 4K uncompressed RAW, 8K uncompressed RAW and then put those on a 2K timeline, costing you a heap in storage and computation Use a modern high-resolution high-quality camera to send ridiculous resolution images to an external recorder that downsamples to something sensible and then uses a high-quality codec (like 2K compressed RAW, 2K Prores 4444, or maybe ~2.5K Prores) The missing combination here is for the camera to downsample in-camera and to write a high-quality but sensible-resolution file onto the card, but this option is very rare You can post about image quality until you're blue in the face, but people either can't (or don't want to) see past the marketing BS from TV companies that tells them that they need to quadruple the resolution of their camera every 5 years, even though it has almost zero effect on image quality.

Decreased kit, more flexible, more focused, less fatigued, more creative.
4) Purchased 3/4 cameras used and about 1/2 my lenses. There will be a loss of course, but that’s partially against XX000 turnover. I’m expecting a ‘cost to change’ of around 3k and min 3 years use unchanged of the new system.

Yes, very true.
I had the f1.8 trinity of: 17mm, 45mm, 75mm and all were good with the 75mm being excellent, but of very limited use.
As a compact pairing, the 17 & 45 could accomplish most of my photo needs especially being like a full-frame equivalent of a 34 and a 90.
I was very attracted to building a system earlier this year off the f1.7 zoom pairing of the 10-25 and 25-50 which would have given me even more (albeit for some extra bulk) or 20-100mm in a pretty compact package compared with a FF system.
I would have done it had my needs been purely video because for my needs, that would tick every box.
It was just the stills side I could not quite commit to, coming from what would be full-frame 47mp S1R!
The 26mp XH2S and 33mp R7 both in APSC were/are 'kind of' just about acceptable to me and having come from XT3 (and many previous Fujis since the X line was introduced), I could have made a case for.
But the 40mp XH2 sealed the deal really.
Arguably, the bodies and lenses are not much different to many full-frame in terms of size & weight (it's 4/3rds for sure where there is a bigger difference) but enough as an overall package/system to work for me.
Could I have made a 4/3rds system work?
Absolutely and no one would have known any different except for one person. Me.
And that is where/why I drew the line I did...
My clients would 100% not notice any difference if I produced a result 4/3rd based, but part of my own 'creative process' would be lost by doing so and this is far more to me than simply running a business for financial gain.
Where do you draw the line? Some might argue that, "well, why don't you stick with full-frame and not 'downgrade' to APSC?" or, "actually, why not go digital medium format and look at the GFX100s?!"
And I have. I've looked at and made business cases for a GFX100s based system and even the new Hassie X2D, but what it came down to in the end was that 'overall system' and cost and what I could justify.
If I had the money, I would 100% build a stills based system off that new Hassie, but arguably would need a pair and 3 lenses (and I don't have close to the 30k it would require) plus invest in the OM-1 + zoom based system I outlined above for another 8k making a total system cost of pushing 40,000!!
Instead, I'm 'settling' for a Fuji based system of around 10k new cost, less the trade in of all my L Mount which will cover at least 50% of that.
Economics has a large part to play!!

Well there is that John.
The OM-1 with the ‘kit’ 12-40mm f2.8 was hardly cheap at 2800 euros (I think) which is far more than say a Lumix S5 and a Sigma 28-70mm f2.8 which is just one full frame ‘equivalent’.
Sony A7iv also basically the same size.
Ditto XH2S (more expensive) and XH2 (less expensive) and it was the latter that confirmed my own decision making process which was…
I like and ideally want the most compact system I can without sacrificing quality.
I think many will have that same requirement and when the option might be full frame vs 4/3rds, I think 4/3rds is just going to increasingly lose out.
But then I am a business user which I am sure is not the greater portion of the market so maybe see things with a slightly different view…

While I agree that those 1DC files are next level frustrating - it's a night and day experience on something like a Mac Mini M1, which is pretty affordable nowadays. All that to say now more than ever cams like the 1DC and all the RAW ML enabled Canon dslrs are hassle free treasures imo.

Loved loved loved my OM-1.
Loved as in past tense, because I sent it back for refund sadly.
’Sadly’ because although it was superb;
A. I decided to switch direction regarding my future ‘next gen’ camera system from a single Z9 with a pair of OM-1’s to a pair of XH2’s with a single XH2s.
B. It was never going to work as a sole system for me but that was not really an option I was considering anyway, - simply as above, ‘2 Robins to 1 Batman’.
C. Cannot justify it as a personal camera or any other role, financially.
Loved it for it’s chunky compact nature, ergos, build, menus etc, but disliked the flip out side screen (as I do with all cameras, but if I am going to compromise, it will be there) and could not realistically contemplate 4/3rds for my photo needs for the next 3 years (the length of time the next system must work for, unchanged, as a minimum).
I wish them well but they are no longer Olympus and although the market for 4/3rds is not dead, for new users especially, I’m sure it’s dying.

I think that was inevitable really - why use scarce, expensive component supplies to make low-end, low-margin cameras when you can use them for high-end cameras like the OM-1 instead?
Here in the UK, Olympus/OMDS cameras seem to be becoming almost invisible outside of specialist camera stores. The big John Lewis department store chain (which has always had sizeable camera sections in the bigger stores) has recently dropped the brand, despite keeping Canon, Nikon, Fuji, Sony & Panasonic.
It'll be interesting to see how 'down spec'd' the video features are in the upcoming OM-5 compared to the OM-1 - I'd love a smaller/lighter camera with 4k50/4k60 capability...
(...and OMDS please, please do something about your soft 1080p video - it's embarrassing in 2022 - and why is the OM-1 8-bit 4k video softer than the 10-bit version?)

Lack of sharpening gave it a really smooth image and color science was pretty good.
But the codec is something I never want to deal with in my live again. 😭

1DC was immediately noticeable when doing the singular comparison, it looks so organic and much less digital compared to the rest.

It definately can.  FYI I currently only have 1 lens, a Tamron SP 45mm 1.8, being used through the FTZ adapter.  AF works well enough for talking-head purposes, but it can hut a tad bit at times, and the lens will occasionally lock up, warranting a restart of the camera.  I believe it is specific to this lens however; I was able to try some native Nikon F-mount glass through the FTZ; autofocus felt snappy and confident without hunting issues.  Even with the Tamron I trust it for simple talking head footage.

To be truthful I’ve been a bit surprised at the latitude and dynamic range Nikon FLAT offers. Maybe not as much as NLOG, but there is definitely info in the shadows if you dig deep enough. It handles highlights terribly, so it’s best not to overexpose. And the shadows still do have limits, if I have to dig too deep then I hit a threshold where yes there is detail, but it’s undersaturated and some color-noise/mud is introduced. That being said so far I’m impressed with how much I can pull back from the shadows without destroying the image. Then again, lighting conditions were nice on my most recent shoot. I’ll have to do some mid-day stress tests and comparisons, and I’ll let you know what I find. I may start a new thread where I compare NLOG to Nikon Flat. 

I can agree; I use one on a daily basis.  NLOG grades very easily using a Resolve color-managed workflow.  Dynamic range is solid, nice highlight rolloff and you can overexpose the image to make things clean.  I've been playing with the flat profile and it isn't too bad; definately worse than NLOG, but in Resolve I can do a CST to Arri Log C and then back to Rec709, to make the image behave more like LOG.  And I can then raise the exposure while it applies a highlight rolloff, which in turn allows me to dig deeper into the shadows and fully utilize the Nikon FLAT dynamic range.
 
Also with a cheap Ninja Star and the right HDMI settings, you get that 10 bit NLOG image in oversampled 1080p, full-frame with usuable AF.

Nikon Z6 looks very good. Considerably better than the other cameras. And it's FF, as a bonus.
Also, it has competente AF for video. Not Canon or Sony level, but certainly good.

The GH5 has been an iconic camera.. very close to a GH6 too. I think the point of that video is, when exposed and edited properly, you can get great results with any of them. I've purchased some of these old cameras (usually with a lens); then I sell the lens and get the camera for VERY cheap if not FREE or even make money in some cases. I like the challenge of doing great things with low-end gear rather than getting the most expensive gear with the expectation of fantastic results. That's just me, and I don't shoot professionally; so, there's that too.

Agreed, it is an easy indication of talent.