BTM_Pix

The only way it won't achieve being indistinguishable from real video in the next few years will be if its actually outright banned. Now that is something that I thought was a complete long shot until this DeepSeek thing reared its head. Now that the usual suspects may not make their expected humungous financial and power gains from AI they might well get the cult leader that they own to try and do exactly that. Get him to threaten it with yuuuge tariffs and/or the invasion of Knotty Ash to plunder its remaining deep mine jam butty resources etc. In terms of what AI means to creators of what will likely be called "legacy content" before too long, this video is a sobering look. Basically, a man does a live stream of completely improvised music using modular synths (the very nature of which mean even he would be hard pushed to completely repeat it) and two years later it gets five copyright strikes from different artists and labels, a lot of which are for allegedly infringing copyright on pieces that they made after he performed and published the stream. In particular, the final one - at the very least - looks to be completely AI generated from the music to the artist to the social media content. Music is a couple of years ahead of video in being "blessed" with AI tools so expect this sort of stuff to be happening in the video world soon where someone makes a video with a prompt that uses elements of your content and similarly flawed automated copyright infringement tools flag your original video from years earlier and demand you give them an 80% revenue share for the privilege of not having your channel getting a strike.

With the recent price drop, the Pocket 4K is now under £1K new and that has pushed used prices below £700 so they are now far more affordable. It shoots ProRes as well as BRAW so theres no need to get involved with Resolve and even if you did want to shoot BRAW there are now direct importers into FCPX. As you are shooting multi-camera for live events etc then the BM range are absolutely hands down better options than any other range for work like that. With the ATEM Mini Pro series starting at under £300 you can do the live camera switching (or even just very efficient multi camera monitoring to a single monitor) and have full remote control of the cameras as well. If you get three used P4K cameras and the ATEM Mini Pro, then its £2.5K for the whole integrated multi camera system and the cameras are obviously more than capable in the cinema role too. Particularly as it is roughly the price of a single X-H2S. Without the live aspect then options such as the X-H2S etc are a good choice of course but as an all round system for fulfilling the different roles that you've listed then the P4K x3 /ATEM Mini Pro is far more suitable in my opinion.

The corruption on the license plate coincidentally features a fragment of the plate of the car that images of may well have been used to train it with. The car is a Porsche factory one that was provided to reviewers so enough images of it from different sources to train it. Could just be a massive coincidence of course ..... I think a new parlour game in the upcoming years when generating this stuff becomes more readily/instantly available will be image makers entering a specific prompt describing one of their own images that they have put online and determining how much has been lifted from their work based on the output that comes back.

Yeah, another too much haste cock up from myself there. Oddly enough, the colour choices for the silicone covers for the S5ii don't extend to red, with the nearest one being a bit of a life vest orange tone. So, even in the world of silicone covers, there is sneaky product differentiation going on. The vinyl wraps are the closest to red for the S5ii and I have to say that I think this one looks a bit more fetching to me anyway.

The voiceover was real. This is the card at the end of the video. Well, there’s the rub. Whatever it was trained on was certainly very real. Looking at this frame, I’m pretty sure if you went through enough of PotatoJet’s YouTube content you’d find the ,shall we say, “inspiration” for it.

They are between £10 and £25 on Aliexpress and eBay but this is one on Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Panasonic-Mirrorless-Silicone-Protective-Protector/dp/B09V7HZ3RW

Indeed it was.

There is always the £25 add on option to transform the S5ii ….

This announcement leaves me about as moist as one of their cakes.

All this needs is an old Ninja 2 to make an interesting DIY CCD ProRes shooting cine camera with a smaller sensor 😉 https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003731513738.html

It’s likely way too niche for them but I’d love to see the Chinese lens manufacturers like 7Artisans etc do some C mount Super 16mm lenses. It would avoid the eBay crapshoot and based on their Super35 prices they could probably produce some good stuff for circa £150 a pop or even less.

Thanks for posting that, it was really interesting.

Locked off shots and not using ISO One Billion to make night time look like broad daylight, what sort of heresy is this ?

I certainly think that Sigma manufacturing all of it’s cameras and lenses in Japan would qualify for them to be in that category. https://www.sigma-global.com/en/about/manufacture/

Well it looks like you can’t keep a good man (and his Lamborghini) down. It is currently going about as well as expected.

And.... Hang on, you are him aren't you ?

I will mainly be spending the festive period on very long walks of self loathing and contemplating the sheer scale of the hubris involved in this statement. In 2025, as part of my ambitious expansion plans, I plan to fail miserably at delivering those five products and an additional two new ones.

Funnily enough, the Nikon rumour mill was churning out that Nikon are making a version of the FTZ in 2025 with a motor for screw drive lenses a couple of days ago. Monster already do such a one for adapting to E mount. https://www.monsteradapter.com/products/la-fe2-nikon-f-mount-lenses-to-sony-e-mount-cameras-adapter-with-af-motor-built-in

The circular shaped piece of concrete ? That the bottom layer of the sponge cake they served me. And is likely to be incompatible with water from anywhere else.

To be fair, maybe they gave me the day old ones after looking out of the window and seeing me having the temerity to do this.

Also, whilst we are at it about Leica, the cakes at the cafe at their museum in Wetzlar are dry.

I’ve been in a few camera shops over the years….ahem. Across all those times in different shops in different cities and different countries, I have only been treated with that sort of contempt twice. Both times were in Leica stores. It was very much like this..

And a parfocal zoom from Arri

I can't keep up with the different camera every day but I'm proud of you for just leaning into the addiction 😉 Have you got some sort of camera advent calendar situation going on with Foto Meyer ?

Indeed. Any notion that the vagaries of Apple II based sampling/sequencing systems of yore is of any interest to the birds is, as they say, "for the birds". Hang on, I may have crossed the streams there. Live scenes as they react to my tales of 1984 technology